The movie has a brisk pace; it's the footwork that's terrible. The beginning begins with dusty Arab laborers and German-accented scientists working on an archeological dig in the desert; the place looks like they went and found the sets from Raiders of the Lost Ark and just started filming. Then Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader) and Col Jack O'Neil (Kurt Russell) are rustled up to form a handpicked team sent on a Mission Impossible: explore what lies beyond a mysterious ten-thousand year old window to another world known as the Stargate. Mysterious, of course, only to those who never saw a single Star Trek episode, particularly City on the Edge of Forever. The trekkers go through a sort of 'ultimate fantasy trip' (see 2001: A Space Odyssey), and end up on the set of The Ten Commandments. Here, enslaved Israelites-- sorry, aliens-- toil at backbreaking and pointless tasks known only to the scriptwriters of the movie. They are lorded over by a powerful alien being named Ra who, after watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers decided to possess the body of a young boy (Jaye Davidson). Wearing a costume previously donned by Ming the Merciless, he comes down from the sky to visit his subjects in the manner of the Mother Ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Meanwhile, Jackson and O'Neil (were their names picked out of a phone book?) have not been idle; inspired by the example of Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia they enlist the aid of the local labor force and stage a revolt in the desert. The final confrontation involves some teleportation gore borrowed from The Fly and a stubborn nuclear device left over from Dr. Strangelove; unlike the bombs in Strangelove, the climax is a dud.
Borrowing from other movies is an old practice, the results are not always contemptible. But the writers of this Cuisinart flick haven't learned the lessons of mixing and matching. They outdo themselves cramming so many ideas they forgot to give the audience a coherent, believable story; worse, the references are distracting, because you remember those other films and how much fun you had watching them. Then you realize how little fun you're having now and do the very thing that spells death for a picture's hold on its audience: you start poking holes in the plot. Who made those footprints that led Jackson to the cameleopard thing, that desert beast? Why does Ra have to come from outer space to visit his subjects, and where does he go when he leaves, Planet Hollywood? Ra's ship looks like it could house thousands, where's the rest of his gang? If Ra is so powerful, why does he have the most incompetent guards in the universe, so when O'Neil attacks, the only ones able to protect Ra are the little kids? Who are those kids, and why do they hang around (Does Ra possess really awesome Nintendo games?)? Why do two space fighters with superpowerful blasters take so long to defeat a dirty little band of kids hiding behind a cart?
One other question: Russel and Spader are smart actors; why are they in a silly little flick like this? Spader has the most fun, being a nerdy scientist who overnight deciphers heiroglyphics on the Stargate that experts have spent two years trying to crack. He makes his apparent genius believable by being so casual about it; it surprises him when others don't come to the same conclusions he had made hours before. He cuts through all the difficulties about alien culture and protocol by offering the natives a 5th Avenue candy bar; he learns the natives' language by falling for one of their prettier vestal virgins and conducting late-night study sessions. Kurt Russell has the straight-man role, and a dead son on his conscience; despite all the excess baggage, he manages to stay loose and gives a relaxed, confident performance as leader of the crack Stargate unit. He gets to charm the native children, and brood over the nuclear device that he has to set off in case their mission goes wrong. Jaye Davidson, the astonishing young performer in The Crying Game is given the thankless role of standing around and smoldering, acting several IQ points dumber than he really is. Fortunately, he smolders well, and gives his alien a graceful step and an eerie androgynous beauty (too bad they gave him a synthesizer-mangled voice that sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger gargling gravel).
The sets recall everything from the MGM hotel in Las Vegas to Blade Runner; the costumes look like Battlestar Galactica meets Cleopatra with a side trip through The Greatest Story Ever Told. The film's use of pyramids should give crackpots who believe in pyramid power some much-needed popularity, if not credibility.
As for the special effects, I have this to say: when the Stargate turns on, you hear a mighty roar, and the Gate's silvered surface boils outward, then sinks in a whirling funnel. Mighty impressive till you realize that the Stargate looks and sounds like a horizontal toilet bowl that has just been flushed.
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