Stargate (1994) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Once the Stargate is opened, the past is exposed!

Stargate, not to be confused with the 1981 arcade game of the same name, makes an attempt to be a sprawling sci-fi epic, linking historical Egypt with space aliens and alternate worlds. It succeeds as a fun adventure ride that captures elements of Lawrence of Arabia and Raiders of the Lost Ark while fusing in a cutting edge sci-fi plot.

First Impressions

In the trailer, some archeologists unearth a giant ring in the Egyptian desert. A group of scientists examine the device, discovering it’s a stargate to another world. That’s when the military comes in to take over the project. The action on the other side appears to include creatures that look like Egyptian deities with powerful weapons. There’s lots of running and chasing with explosions in the background as James Spader and Kurt Russell try to get back home through…the Stargate.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In North Africa, 8000 BC, a pyramid shaped UFO abducts a young boy who is unafraid of the strange lights landing outside his village. In 1928, outside Giza, Egypt, Archeologist Prof. Langford (Erik Holland) and his team unearth a series of odd cover stones, plus a giant ring shaped device. In the present day, Catherine Langford (Viveca Lindfors), the professor’s adult daughter, offers Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader) an invitation to help with translating some hieroglyphics. As he has nowhere else to go, or a current job, he accepts the position. Elsewhere, two Air Force offers inform a suicidal Colonel Jack O’Neil (Kurt Russell) that he has been reactivated for duty.

At a secret military installation in Creek Mountain, Colorado, Daniel is introduced to Barbara Shore (Rae Allen) and Gary Meyers (Richard Kind), two Ph.D’s that have been attempting to crank Langford’s mysterious code. Daniel immediately corrects their translation, which indicates that sun god Ra is “sealed and buried for all time” in “his stargate.” After two weeks Daniel breaks the next mystery, which is a series of abstract symbols around the strange ring discovered in 1928. He realizes that these pictograms represent constellations, and when placed in a specific order, they form an address of sorts. Six symbols to provide an x, y, and z axis coordinate, and a seventh symbol indicating the point of origin; a Stargate to another world.

At this point, O’Neil arrives, along with Lt. Kawalsky (John Diehl), and resumes control of the project on orders from General W.O. West (Leon Rippy). They program the seven symbols on the cartouche by rotating the outer ring, which causes the Stargate to open. A probe is sent through first, but quickly is cut off. So, O’Neil decides to lead a seven man team, with Daniel coming along to help translate and “program” the coordinates from the other side. O’Neil, Kawalsky, Ferretti (French Stewart), Freeman (Christopher John Fields), Brown (Derek Webster), Porro (Steve Giannelli), and Reilly (Jack Moore), along with Daniel step into the aqueous surface of the Stargate and are transported across the galaxy to another planet.

They discover a desert world with its own pyramid, and a race of humanoids that resemble ancient Egyptians working in a mine. The slaves, led by Kasuf (Erick Avari), see Daniel’s necklace of an Egyptian eye (given to him by Catherine), and mistake the Earthmen as emissaries of the God Ra. Daniel is presented with Shu’ari (Mili Avital), now apparently his wife, and begins to learn how to communicate with these people. They speak a version of ancient Egyptian, which Daniel is able to link to symbols, including the symbol for Earth, a Pyramid shape with a single circle above it. During a sandstorm, Ra (Jaye Davidson) returns to the planet in his pyramidal starship and kills Porro and Reilly.

It turns out that the alien known as Ra once visited Earth and in order to prolong his life he took over the form of a young boy. Using his advanced technology, he created a Stargate between Earth and the desert planet (called Abydos in subsequent media), forcing humans through as slave labor to mine crystals for his technology. The humans on Earth revolted, burying the Stargate and leaving a warning. O’Neil has brought a nuclear warhead with him to destroy the gate from the far side after his team returns to Earth. Unfortunately Ra discovers this and threatens to send it back through the Stargate with his crystals, which will magnify the explosion a hundred times. A young slave named Skaara (Alexis Cruz) follows O’Neil around, fascinated by his weapons and technology.

Daniel is killed, but resurrected by Ra, to warn the slaves that he is still their all powerful God. The scientist struggles to locate a seventh symbol indicating the planet of origin to reopen the Stargate. As Shu’ari, Kasuf, and Skaara lead an open rebellion against Ra and his guards, Daniel finds the missing symbol: a pyramid with three circles above it, representing this planet. O’Neil, who was planning on sacrificing himself to set off the bomb originally, helps the slaves revolt. As Ra departs having left the bomb to be sent thorugh the Stargate, O’Neil uses a matter transporter to send it back to Ra’s ship, destroying it and the alien instead. The remaining Air Force members, O’Neil, Kawalsky and Ferretti return to Earth, while Daniel stays behind with Shu’air and her tribe in order to learn more from them.

“It’s not ‘Door to Heaven,’ it’s…Stargate.” – Dr. Daniel Jackson

History in the Making

Stargate was director Roland Emmerich’s follow up to his previous sci-fi movie Universal Soldier. It also marked his second outing with co-writer Dean Devlin, and the second film in their 90s trilogy, which would be completed with the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. Stargate is a modern attempt to create an epic science-fiction film that weaves alien technology with ancient cultures. It continues a string of militaristic sci-fi projects that imagine the United States armed forces as being irresponsible stewards of various pieces of advanced technology, while still portraying members of those groups as reasonable human beings. The film also represented a first for actor James Spader, a return to genre for Kurt Russell, and a movie that launched a highly successful television franchise.

While many viewers might contest the epicness of the film, there’s no denying the roots that Stargate comes from. The film takes its cues from late 50s and early 60s epic motion pictures like Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia; films that use the grand scale of the motion picture image to tell sprawling tales of the human spirit set against amazing natural landscapes. These epics are also usually linked with large casts featuring “thousands of extras.” Stargate might not quite go that far, but its third act battle, with the slave revolt on the temple certainly creates an exciting spectacle. It also pulls from adventuring archeologist films from the 80s such as the Indiana Jones and Allan Quatermain films, which would eventually merge with the Egyptian elements of Stargate in the 1999 action/adventure/horror film, The Mummy. The film also elicits elements from the Star Wars trilogy, linking mythology and ancient cultures with futuristic alien technology (both “a long time ago” and “far, far away”). The contrast between the laser staffs and flying scarab ships with the crumbling, sandy design of the pyramids and the rustic nature of the slave village creates a new type of look and feel to something that might appear initially as antiquated or passé.

Genre-fication

Stargate creates an entirely new sort of sub-genre for sci-fi. Let’s call it ancient culture as future culture. While there might have been sci-fi stories or comics with similar elements, there really had been no sci-fi films like this. The film tackles the various speculative theories from the 70s about ancient astronauts and reimagines them within the motif of Egyptian Gods. Perhaps the most famous of these pseudo-scientific treatises was Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, originally published in 1968. This work, which inspired television series like In Search Of… and comic books like The Eternals, postulated that the Egyptian, Mayan, and Incan cultures were incapable of creating their pyramidal structure without assistance from aliens, referred to as ancient astronauts. Taken in a modern belief that without advanced machinery, primitive cultures would have been unable to construct giant stone statues (as on Easter Island) or other truly huge undertakings somehow belittles the accomplishments made by these cultures. It makes them seem as somehow modern society is better and more advanced, and thus superior to these pre-industrialized groups. Other films would utilize elements of this world building like The Fifth Element, Avatar and John Carter, even without actually copying Stargate. They utilized some similar societies or ideas (or even cinematography) while creating their own stories and franchises.

On the flip side, Stargate also features amazingly advanced technology that was around thousands of years ago and is so far ahead of anything available in the 1990s or today. The idea of a stargate, or wormhole, had been part of sci-fi films for quite a while, but Stargate seemed to bring the idea to a wider audience. The Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey had a stargate of sorts, if that’s how you choose to interpret it, with Dave Bowman zipping through the universe. In fact, Stargate‘s special effects of the portal are reminiscent of those earlier 2001 scenes, as the stars form streaks with the audience getting a POV of the characters trip. The film also has a little twinkle of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the lighting in the Stargate chamber, as they glitter and twinkle with the proposition of meeting an alien race. Stargate‘s depiction of this hyperspace-like travel would influence not only the future of the franchise, but other series like Babylon 5 and Farscape. The film also makes use of other types of ubiquitous sci-fi props, like the staff’s employed by Anubis and Horus (which double as laser guns), the scarab fighters (reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica‘s Cylon Raiders), and the transportation device, which is more of a single point-to-point beaming system than Star Trek‘s transporter. The film makes these relatively common sci-fi tropes interesting by intertwining them with Egyptian mythology, thus redefining them for new audiences.

This was also the first film that helped popularize the ideas of alternate-history. Many sci-fi films have taken moments from the present and hypothesized a possible future. But Stargate imagines a world where the reign of the Egyptian kings, Gods in the place, never ended and the society has stagnated as it was thousands of years ago. While this is what may have happened in our timeline if things were different, it also illustrates the theory of parallel worlds or a multiverse, where any different possible outcomes to history are possible. The most famous of these stories, and a book that was eventually adapted into a television series, is The Man in the High Castle. It, like a multitude of other alt-history stories, imagines Nazi Germany succeeding in World War II, and America becoming a fascist state. Television shows like Sliders (1995-2000) popularized a multiverse of parallel worlds, in which characters travel through a portal-like device, very similar to the Stargate, showing the influence of this film is much broader than it may initially appear.

Societal Commentary

While the majority of Stargate is a fun action adventure story, it does have a slightly deeper element to it. This is the tragedy of O’Neil and the grief he carries throughout the film. When his character is first introduced at home, he is sitting in a young boy’s room actively contemplating suicide by his pistol. As the son is never seen, it creates a moment of some tension that his boy has died in some tragic way. As the two airmen depart his house, one tells the other that O’Neill’s son died after accidentally shooting himself. O’Neil is then reactivated and chooses to carryout his duty as a suicide mission. His plan was to stay behind with a bomb, destroying the Stargate from the other side. As an aside, stop and think for a moment that if an airman requesting O’Neil report for duty knows what happened, so too does General West. The military is basically giving permission to the Colonel to kill himself in his grieving, but also accomplish a task for them. Not an extremely favorable portrayal of “upper management” in a time of personal crisis. Anyway, this sets the stage for O’Neil and Skaara’s moments later and shows that even back in 1994, people understood that guns and children don’t mix.

The younger slave boy is fascinated with O’Neil and his technology. One scene has Skaara entering the Colonel’s tent as he is smoking. O’Neil lets the boy see his lighter, even allowing him to keep it, before letting him try a cigarette. The younger character, never having smoked, coughs forcefully after a small puff, but the moment seems to bond the two (and is the film’s brief PSA on not smoking–see also the note in my Universal Soldier essay). It’s also lighthearted, which is the first time O’Neil smiles in the film. This is quickly followed by Skaara looking over O’Neil’s rifle, which changes the demeanor of the Colonel, and the scene, as he barks at the boy to put it down. Obviously he’s having flashbacks to his loss. But this does not deter Skaara from befriending O’Neil, and with the other youth, forming a small brigade of “soldiers.” O’Neil tries to downplay their salutes of respect (even if they’re only mimicking the soldiers to start) and their involvement, but Skaara’s reverence of O’Neil as a father figure goes both ways. In the end, O’Neil is healed enough, at least from the bone-wracking grief of losing his son, that he decides to return to Earth. While much of this relationship is superficial, at least to the plot of the film, it does provide the best character arc within the film.

Obviously the bigger theme in the film is about the slavery of these humans, trapped on an alien planet for a thousand years. Ra’s success at subjecting these individuals to these conditions for that amount of time is impressive. But there have surely been other attempted uprisings that he must have quashed in previous generations. Perhaps this species, as a pre-industrialized society, never had the proper tools to complete a bid for freedom. And with Ra checking in every so often to gather the minerals they mined, he would be able to use his power and fear (actually superior technology) to keep the slaves in line. Ra also forbids the use of written language, which is just another tool used by those in power to keep the poor uneducated and thus subservient. As with epic stories like Ben-Hur, the outsiders provide the additional impetus towards freedom. Daniel and O’Neil connect with the society and let them know that what Ra is doing is wrong, and the need to stand up for themselves. The humans from Earth speak truth to power, recognizing societal injustice is the same regardless of the planet they’re on.

The Science in The Fiction

Stargate may have popularized the idea of a direct space lane to another planet, but Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced the concept the previous year when it premiered. Its wormhole, artificially created, was a passage to the distant Gamma Quadrant, allowing for many new adventures. The idea of a wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, was postulated as early as 1916 as a shortcut through space-time. It works as depicted in the film, as sort of an express lane between two points separated by an extreme distance. The idea of a galactic coordinate system is a clever idea using six-points to indicate the destination coordinates, with the seventh as the planet of origin. The one question that this raises in the film is that the symbols that Daniel decodes relate to constellations, but as seen from Earth. One might imagine that looking at what humans call the constellation of Orion, would look much different on a planet at the other side of the galaxy, and as such would not necessarily be the same codex. Stargate, the film, does take a very Earth-centric look at the science and functionality of the Stargate system. However, the film as a whole does a good job depicting one possible way that this theoretical structure might function, taking it from an abstract concept accessible only to scientists and making it something that can easily be understood by a layman.

The Final Frontier

As mentioned earlier, Stargate was a return to science-fiction for Kurt Russell, having most famously appeared in Escape from New York and The Thing, but also a handful of pseudo sci-fi films from Disney as Dexter Riley. His decade since the John Carpenter horror remake of The Thing from Another World was spent becoming an action star, but would lead him to return as Snake Plissken in Escape from L.A. two years later. For James Spader, this was his first science-fiction film, having spent most of his time in dramas, such as Pretty in Pink, Less Than Zero, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He plays the nerdy linguist quite well in contrast to Russell’s stern authoritarian Colonel, even if–as he admits–he was only in it for the paycheck. The film also introduced film audiences to ​​Djimon Hounsou, who played the main Horus guard. The Benin actor had a few small roles prior to Stargate, before famously becoming the lead in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 period-drama, Amistad.

Roland Emmerich has stated that he had a planned trilogy of films about the Stargate, but they never materialized. Instead, the film paved the way for one of the most successful TV franchises of the 1990s and beyond with the shows Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe, and Stargate Infinity (which was an animated series). The three live action shows ran for an incredible total of 17 seasons between 1997 and 2011, and featured an extrapolation of the characters, themes, and story ideas created in the film. Richard Dean Anderson (MacGuyver) played Jack O’Neill (spelled with two “L”s) while Michael Shanks took over the role of Daniel Jackson. The series also introduced Captain Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) who was under O’Neill and the alien Teal’c (Christopher Judge) who assisted the main characters and served as a connection to the Goa’uld, the alien race of which Ra was a member.

Stargate was a relatively successful film at its release. It was successful enough that it allowed Emmerich and Devlin to make their next film, and most ambitious military sci-fi film of all, Independence Day (to be covered later this year). But Stargate‘s legacy lies primarily in the franchise it created on television and with other similar films. It popularized the term Stargate, which was a much more efficient method of travel (in terms of plot) than was the use of warp drive or hyperspace. For fans of Egypt and its mythology, it offered a lot of great moments for these God-characters that had gone unheralded, as movies usually chose to venerate Greek or Roman deities instead. And it is fun to see Kurt Russell in an antagonistic role, but not one where he truly plays a villain. His compassion and heart still shine through in this adventure to the other side of the universe.

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