Stargate (Movie)

Up first in my rewatch journey though Stargate is, of course, the original film, directed by Roland Emmerich and written by him alongside Dean Devlin. When it comes to the overall Stargate canon, the film…does and doesn’t exist. When it came to establishing Stargate as a TV series, a lot of changes were made to make the series work more as a weekly show instead of a one-off film. This includes recasting the main characters of Jack O’Niel (and adding an extra L) and Daniel Jackson.

In the film, Jack O’Niel is extremely serious and depressed. We first see him about to end his own life, due to the guilt he feels over his son’s death (who accidentally shot himself with a gun). He remains like this throughout most of the film, but warms up later on. He’s still not the wisecracking Richard Dean Anderson, but he’s only just started the process of healing and it’s not too unbelievable that he becomes more joyful in the following year after deciding he wanted to live.

Michael Shanks and James Spader have a lot more in common, so they feel a lot more like the same character, with the TV show Jackson feeling a bit more confident, which makes sense. I did spot a few familiar faces. The researcher that Jackson humiliates later plays Lucius Lavin in Stargate Atlantis – the worst character in the franchise, and Skaara and Kasuf later return with the same actors. 

One thing I like about the Stargate film is the very slow build up, we get the tease of the actual gate as it’s discovered in Egypt in 1928, before going to the point of view of Daniel Jackson, a disgraced Egyptologist, as he gets recruited by the US Air Force to translate a tablet while being kept in the dark as he solves the puzzle (by noticing that the symbols look like constellations, which seems a bit silly that nobody else figured it out). After a successful test with Jackson’s theory, it’s off to step though the Stargate to a brand new world on the other side of the universe, a few galaxies away.

While this sounds impressive in the film, it was one of the things the show decided to change, retconning the planet Abydos to be one of the closest ones, saying that it’s the only destination that worked until they sorted out the stellar drift problem. It’s implied that there are extremely few Stargates in the universe. Still, this makes much more sense for the film as a standalone film.

On the new planet, the pacing is still nice and slow as they deal with being stranded there (as the gate has different symbols, another thing altered in the show) until a civilization of humans speaking a dialect of ancient Egypt is discovered. Lots of hilarity ensues as the two groups try to talk and understand each other, with lots of miming and yelling and confusion, including Jackson not realising that he was getting married.

As they discover how Ra has kept these people enslaved, they start to warm up to them and want to help them overthrow their god. Ra’s forces include people in Egyptian style armour and staff energy weapons – presumably he preferred using humans for this role rather than Jaffa, as they weren’t introduced to the show. After winning over the slaves and inspiring themselves to stand up for themselves, they manage to defeat Ra (blowing up his ship with a nuke intended to blow up the Stargate) and the film ends with O’Niel heading through the Stargate, with Jackson remaining behind with his wife.

It’s a really enjoyable film, and I really like that it doesn’t rush into everything. It’s a nice introduction into Stargate, but if you’re watching it for the purpose of the show, you do have to keep in mind that quite a few details change between this and the show. 

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