Stargate
The founding film
Dir. Roland Emmerich
It all starts here. The discovery of a huge ancient ring opens a passage to a desert world, Abydos, where a people is enslaved by a being posing as a god. The film lays the foundations of a universe the series would go on to expand for decades.
Where to watch (France)
In 1928, a team of archaeologists unearths a huge stone ring covered in unknown symbols in Egypt. Decades later, the maverick Egyptologist Daniel Jackson, mocked by his peers, finally cracks the artifact's secret: a Stargate capable of opening a passage to another world. A military team led by Colonel Jack O'Neil, a man broken by the death of his son, steps through the ring and lands on Abydos, a desert planet where a human people has been enslaved for millennia by Ra, a being posing as the sun god. Between the inhabitants' uprising, an atomic bomb hidden in the luggage and the clash of two civilizations, the visitors will have to overthrow a false god if they hope to make it home.
Why it matters to the mythology
The cornerstone of the whole saga: the Stargate, the false gods from the stars, Abydos and its enslaved people. Everything the series would develop over twenty years is born in these two hours.
The review
Watching the 1994 film again today is a strange and endearing experience. You can feel the DNA of everything that followed, the ring lighting up, the first trip through, Abydos and its scorching sun, but in a package that has little to do with the series. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin deliver a big '90s spectacle, serious, almost solemn, without an ounce of the humor that would later become SG-1's signature. Kurt Russell plays a cold, suicidal O'Neil, a world away from TV's wisecracking Jack, and James Spader a brilliant, lost Daniel Jackson who, for his part, would barely change at all. The film's real stroke of genius is Jaye Davidson as Ra: androgynous, cruel, unsettling, a false god as venomous as any the saga would ever produce. Visually, the reveal of the Stargate and the trip through the wormhole remain founding images that still give you chills. The film suffers from a sometimes plodding pace and thin characterization, and let's admit it, the series outdid their parent on almost every level. But without these two hours, none of it would exist. We forgive it everything, the way you forgive a first love: it opened the gate.
Written by Sebastian
Founder and editor-in-chief of Stargate Initiative
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