"Stargate"
Latest Reflections from the Guild
(I saw this movie when it first came out and enjoyed it but I'll have to wait for things to slow down around here before I do a plot summary! Murray Leeder sent me some nits for the movie so we'll start the file with his reflections.)
There is one nits that I remember from watching the movie. Scientists discover a giant ring that has twenty some odd symbols on it. In order to open the stargate, they must select seven symbols in the correct order. When our young hero first arrives, the head honchos say that they have the first six but are unable to find the seventh. Of course, our young hero figures it out and off they go.
Question: When don't they just try all the possible combinations? If they can test one a day, it would only take about three weeks! Instead, they pull in this guy and expose him to what must be a super-secret project. Hmmmm.
Reflections from the Guild
[Note from Phil: I have not verified these but they sounded good to me!]
Murray J.D. Leeder: Just how much of that mineral is there on the planet? Got to be a lot of it... the mines have been open for thousands of years, with all of the natives working in that profession alone!
Why exactly does the chief guy in the village understand the symbol that Spader traces in the dirt? The only writing on the planet is those tablets, and he doesn't seem to know about them.
Ra must be incredibly stupid not to give the miners some power equipment!
Oh, by the way, it seems that, on this planet, marriage is the punishment for writing. Think about it: Spader scratches out the symbol in the dirt, the chief stamps it out, Spader is hauled off... and the next think he knows he's married. Seems to me that the two things are directly related.
The same problem with the explosion of Praxis applies to the nearly identical effect when Ra's pyramid-ship blows up: it should have fanned out in all directions.
It sure doesn't seem that a ship shaped like an empty pyramid would be particularly aerodynamic, does it?
I can almost hear the Hollywood execs defending the convention of the bomb with the digital readout. "But it's so cinematic!"
In his review of Stargate, Roger Ebert wrote: "Stargate is like a film school exercise. Assignment: conceive of the weirdest plot you can think of, and reduce it as quickly as possible to action movie cliches." That's dead on.
Lee Lorenz of Fenton, MI: When they sent the probe through, Just how did they track it across the universe???? Not by the stars... the probe was inside the structure. Not by radio (we're talking hundreds of thousands of light years here).
Secondly, they use a TWO DIMENSIONAL board when tracking the probe. Good thing they new the plane of intersection between Earth and the planet on the far side of the universe!!!
Alexander Shearer of Berkeley, CA: Something that I've heard lots of people say - wouldn't you like to have Mr. Egyptologist's linguistic abilities? In a very, very short amount of time he picks up a language that has been diverging from the ancient Egyptian he knows how to /read/ for about two millennia. Ask, say, a Cantonese speaker to learn Mandarin in a day and see what kind of results you get.
A side note: I liked the idea behind this movie, and I've often said it would have made an excellent 6-hour film (rather than the brief 2-hour action/adventure film it was). People look at you strangely when you say things like that.
Craig Cicero: The major problem I had with the movie was.... The 'Gate was only one way! If you're goin to build a space-warping "Stargate," why make it only one way? Maybe I missed this part of the plot. I probably sound bitter, because I didn't like the movie a whole lot. Yeah, the SFX were cool, but I guess I'm just not interested in Egyptology to really care.
Vas Gavriel & Jenny Greig of New Zealand: Stargate is one of our favourite movies in spite of its varoius nits although I wonder what would have happened if some egyptians had done a movie that portrayed Christ as the devil (Ra would certainly sue the creators if he had not been totaled.) We'll get a list of nits off to you soon>
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Copyright 1996 by Phil Farrand. All Rights Reserved.