p e n g u i n d e v i l

While I’m not a particular fan of the phrase “guilty pleasure”, as I tend to like what I like enough to have no negative feelings about it, I would say that the closest liking I have that I would consider a guilty pleasure would be this movie, Stargate. It has all of that bad stuff: annoying corniness, romance, silly macho stuff, bad science and feel good scenes. And I couldn’t really have much interest in the starring cast: Kurt Russell, Jaye Davidson and James Spader (most of their characters are rather unnotable, anyway)… But there is a framework that I find worthwhile. As an old fan of Science Fiction movies, I find Stargate’s rendition of future science to be refreshingly different then that which is seen in most movies; the technology is generally represented as something totally different then what one expects to see in one of these movies. Stargate (which here is quite unnecessarily an “extended cut”) starts off with an unneeded scene that gives away probably more than they should bother with, but then we come to the present era. An archaeologist in the time of the great Egyptian pillaging of the 1920’s comes across a mysterious and fascinating set of cover stones while digging around in the desert. He’s with his daughter who pockets a neat gold medallion with the eye of Ra on it. We then jump forward to the present when his daughter has brought together some scientists under the aegis of the Air Force, and they are locked away in an underground bunker trying to decipher the full meanings of the stones… And what was found under them.

James Spader is a linguistic scientist who is down on his luck due to the excessive radicalness of his theories (he believes that the Egyptians did not build the pyramids) who is drafted to join the team as they seem to have stalled. Of course, his idiosyncratic brilliance leads him to uncover the missing piece of the puzzle, and as one has probably guessed, this enables them to activate the Stargate. Which is a gate to a planet orbiting a far away star. There they find out why someone had this gate created and we are treated to an interesting twist on world history.

Spader goes along with the team (led by Russell as a soldier with a deathwish), to see what’s on the other side of the gate. This is the hardest part of the movie, as the science of the Air Force is so implausible (I’m sorry, you can’t follow a beacon as it rapidly travels millions of light years or receive data transmissions across those distances, especially in real-time), and then if you forgive its implausibility, they easily could have solved the puzzle, knowing what they seem to know, without seeking more help. But once you get past that scene, the movie gets pretty fun. The whole historical revisionist angle to it is a lot of fun, and blended with the odd, rather timeless seeming, advanced technology that they encounter, makes it fairly easy to get to the suspension of disbelief that is so nice for these movies to inspire.

So yes, six and a half dozen, it is an intriguing Science Fiction film, with some clever and original technology, a interesting historical angle, nice specials effects and a fun story concept… But sometimes the combination of corniness, melodrama and dry seriousness is a bit distracting. The interactions that they have with this other world’s inhabitants can be pretty silly, including a hokey routine with a 5th Avenue bar and lots of miming.