Stargate is a 1994 film directed by Roland Emmerich and stars Kurt Russell, James Spader, and Jaye Davidson. The film is distributed by Metro Goldwyn Mayer and produced by Canal+ and Carolco, being labeled as a Sci-Fi Action flick. I've always had this film in mind for movies I wanted to watch, but now since I've seen it, I will document my observations just for you. Stargate tells the story of an ancient teleportation device found in Egypt in 1928 finally being activated in the present day (of 1994). Daniel Jackson (James Spader) and a team of soldiers led by Colonel O'Neil (Kurt Russell) are the first to go into the portal. On the other side, they find themselves in a similar but otherworldly version of Egypt. There, slaves worship their master Ra (Jaye Davidson), who is the God of the Sun.The characters in Stargate are Roland Emmerich stereotypes that all started with this film. You got the nerdy guy (James Spader) who figures out how to start or stop the major event in the plot. There is also the hardened military "badass" (Kurt Russell) that should have some charisma, but this film doesn't . Because Russell in any other movie has likability. Here, he has none. This film disappointed me on plenty of levels. I really like a Egyptian/Desert setting remixed into Science Fiction like such as Dune. The film somewhat explores well. But as an action movie, it's loud, anti- climactic, and lacks to give me any emotions except annoyance and anger. It fails as good action shlock but almost delivers on the setting. And no, I'm not going to watch 10 seasons of SG 1 just so I can see the concept be executed better since it should work as a movie. Stargate just reeks of wasted potential.Stargate as I saw it is an amalgamation for the short lived "Gulf War" and "Desert Storm Ops" of the 1990's. We see imagery of soldiers in the desert being worshipped as gods. The film ends with the Slaves without a master to worship since the American soldiers practically invaded their homeworld. The lesson I got from the film is that big, loud, dumb, and anti-climactic films will do great in the Summer blockbuster range.As I watched Stargate, I realized that it was not for a more critical audience, such as those who read film like we do. But audiences of the lowest common denominators would like it the same way they will like a Michael Bay Transformers film. But those audiences are what give films today the most money. And that to me, is a problem i've had with cinema for a while, seeing as smaller avant-garde films go seemingly unnoticed by a huge audience.Overall, I give Stargate a

The plot at first seemed extremely promising but then again it falls on its face with the typical Hollywood cliché and made ancient egyptians look like a bunch of idiots and have come up with an alternate version that some aliens build pyramids etc and these advanced aliens got owned by few 4 or 5 military men with guns! Complete waste of time, Pyramids follow the Sri Chakra pattern and angles from ancient India, it is most likely Indians travelled to Egypt and imparted a culture that egyptians used and built them but it is definitely not aliens..What a cliché! Bad and disappointed

The character John Diehl plays Lt. Kawalsky is wearing the wrong rank insignia. He is supposed to be a Lt. but he is wearing the rank insignia(silver oak leaves) of a Lt. Colonel. I'm really surprised that nobody ever caught this, they must not have had a military adviser for this film. You would never address an officer by subordinate rank like addressing a Lt. Colonel as Lt. It is common military customs and courtesy to address an officer by the superior rank like addressing a Lt. Colonel as Colonel. You would never address a Lt. Colonel as Lt. so it is an obvious gaff that no one picked up on the mismatch between insignia and the rank of the character.

It's interesting to come to Stargate about 22 years after it first came out without having seen it before; I didn't have the nostalgia for it that people I know have or had (my wife at one point in her very young life called it her favorite film), and it also comes after seeing everything else that Roland Emmerich (with occasional collaborator Dean Devlin) put out since. The impression that I get from it is that it's clear why it got so many sequels and spin-offs and TV series and books and so on. The premise - and in fact the first half hour of the movie - is terrific and stimulating for a science fiction fan: what if you could get a gateway to other worlds? What would you go to to find? The set-up gives us James Spader as a nerdy scientist (a less overbearing version of what was presented with Matthew Broderick in Godzilla years later) who is plucked from semi-obscurity/mockery as someone who believes the pyramids may not have been made by the figures history has taught us. He's selected to look at some hieroglyphics and... something else - there's a series of stars that makes up a constellation that maps out how we're at an origin point to go into other dimensions. And as it turns out the very device is in the possession of some, uh, government types I suppose, and with the leadership of military man Kurt Russell a team is dispatched to check out what is beyond the Stargate.I was on board with this idea, if only on the basis of 'hey, what can we explore and use as data and so on'. What the characters find is... a lot of clichés and hokum, a desert world that is equal parts Return of the Jedi Endor and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with Egyptian 'natives' and then other assorted Star Wars and other "homages" (or plain rip-offs) from other movies, not least of which Lawrence of Arabia and Indiana Jones and so on. This may be all on me though, since this is me as an adult coming to this and having years of knowledge of cinema history... on the other hand, large chunks of this movie are dumb. There's no other way to phrase it except moments show characters and situations with stupid things, though they're still "stupid-movie" things, if that makes sense.So there's some wasted opportunity for something, I won't say 'unique' as far be it from me to expect that from Emmerich, but less expected and hokey. But the story moves at a great pace, despite its wacked and dopey moving parts, and Spader and Russell ground it as two characters you can care about in a sea of people who are walking-talking tropes and types (oh, there's also the element of Aliens with it being a military group dispatched to check out this alien land and the violence they come up against), and things like culture-clash and language/communication barriers and villains with amazing Egyptian masks and sets and all sorts of things.Stargate has parts that work really well in a sea of things that flat-out don't. It may be perspective considering what else Emmerich would do with himself in the intervening years of Hollywood, but there's at least a, shall one say, 'restraint' with what he puts out here, at least when it comes to cheesy Hollywood sci-fi. I won't say it's very good, but it's also not terrible either.