STARGATE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A haggard adventure tale given a
modern sci-fi explanation, building up to entirely too
much special effects. What could have been a great
adventure film turns into a much less exciting action
story. The film has a nice look and a few interesting
ideas, but the script could have used more work.
Rating: +1 (-4 to +4)
Back in the last century and the early parts of this one there were still many unexplored regions on earth. A kind of fantasy flourished then that has since nearly died out. This was the "lost race" story, in which in some unexplored place, some last outpost of the ancient civilization still thrives unaware that they are an anachronism. It may be Egyptian or Roman, or perhaps it still has the civilization of the ancient Incas or Atlantis, and is being discovered by modern explorers. The greatest practitioner of these stories was H. Rider Haggard, author of SHE. But other names that come to mind are Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, and Ian Cameron, who wrote THE LOST ONES (a.k.a THE ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD) as late as 1961. But in the 1990s the real estate that could host such a lost civilization is now almost non-existent and so is the genre. Roland Emerich, who last directed the terrible UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, has resurrected the lost race story with a bit of sci-fi (as opposed to science fiction) hand- waving. Instead of a potsherd pointing the way to a civilization somewhere beyond the Mountains of the Moon in Africa, it is a twenty- foot ring that provides a gateway across the known universe. The ring was a passageway for aliens at the time Ancient Egypt was building pyramids. When they were done with it the Egyptians just sort of packed it away much like the U.S. Government did with the Ark of the Covenant.
As our story opens, it is 1928 and the Stargate is found by one bunch of understandably very confused archaeologists. Sixty-six years later government archaeologists are still trying to figure out what to do with this mysterious object (so they can move on to the Ark of the Covenant, I suppose). Invited to join the team is Dr. Daniel Jackson (played by James Spader), a renegade Egyptologist who wants to prove that Egyptians could not have built the Great Pyramid. He is laughed at as Great Men of Truth have always been laughed at, going back to the Frederic March DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. His chance to prove his theories comes from Catherine (Viveca Lindfors--and it is great to see her still acting), a government scientist working on decoding the 1928 artifact. Meanwhile, the project has been given over to the military and is now headed by Col. Jack O'Neal (Kurt Russell). Jackson decodes the last pieces of the puzzle and that is all that is needed to activate a passageway. On the other side is a lot of desert and a lost civilization of Egyptians, slaves to the living god Ra (played by Jaye Davidson of THE CRYING GAME).
STARGATE is yet another beautiful but rather empty film. Production designer Holger Gross and art director Peter Murton have gone a long way to recreate the grandeur of Ancient Egypt. The brassy score by David Arnold is exciting. But the adventure itself is on a juvenile level and certainly not of the caliber of an H. Rider Haggard adventure. Some of what we see seems very poorly thought out. A shaggy desert animal (actually a Clydesdale horse in a fake fur coat) seems altogether unsuited for the desert climate. There is a ludicrous product placement with a chocolate-covered candy bar. Who would want to eat a candy bar that can take riding around in somebody's pocket for hours in a hot desert and still shows no sign of melting? And one wonders if some desert slave who has never seen chocolate--or candy at all--would be so anxious to put in his mouth something that looks so much like a bar of excrement. The recreation of a desert civilization in some ways is very detailed and almost overcomes the atmosphere- breaking sci-fi opening while giving some of the feel of an H. Rider Haggard story. Unfortunately, things build to a special effects extravaganza of a battle and it is just what this film did not need. The innocent feel of the old-fashioned adventures is lost when spears turn out to be missile launchers.
Some of the ideas of this film are really specious. The idea that the Egyptians had to be introduced to the concept of the pyramid at the time of the Great Pyramid does not account for the fact that there were older pyramids in Egypt. The pyramid was invented by Im-ho-tep somewhere around 2650 B.C. in the Third Dynasty. He stacked mastabas of diminishing size for the King Zoser. That step pyramid still stands at Saqqara. Im-ho-tep was one of history's great geniuses, incidentally, a physician and a statesman as well as an architect. The Great Pyramid of Khufu was built at Giza in the Fourth Dynasty, probably more than a hundred years later and many hundreds of years after the mastabas were invented. While pinning down dates is in large part a matter of guesswork, there were pyramids at least a hundred years before Khufu's Great Pyramid and perhaps considerably more.
And as for this idea that it takes six points to pinpoint a location in space, that's another load of duck tires. How many points does it take to determine a location in space? You need only one. Now if you are talking instead about coordinates, it takes three. But then you need three real numbers. Sectors on a wheel won't give you enough. The geometry made no sense.
Somewhere deep inside this techno-SHE is a good adventure film. The problem is that they are not sure if they really want to be a high-tech science fiction film or a more traditional lost civilization film. I would vote for the latter. I rate it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
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