Thanks for the heads-up. I rented this today and I enjoyed it. Low budget and a little bit crusty, but chock-full of nostalgia.
Casting announced for Stargate Origins
- Thread starter Romulan_spy
- Start date
The Stargate franchise is owned by MGM, not Disney or Fox, so it's not going to be on Disney+, HBOMax, or any of the other studio specific services, unless MGM starts up their own. So that would leave Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Prime. Is AppleTV including any acquired content? If so that would be another possibility.
Not that I know of. I'm kind of surprised, looking through the lists of stuff they own on Wikipedia, they own a lot of big movies and shows.
I'll definitely check it out when I get a chance.
That's pretty much what I'm expecting (and hoping for). I just wish it was on DVD. I have a friend with money problems and I try to keep her stocked with books and DVDs that she needs, and she loves Stargate.
Pardon the bump -- I just discovered that the movie edit of Stargate Origins (titled Stargate Origins: Catherine) is available on the Hoopla digital library, streaming free with a participating library card, so I've finally seen it. It was a lot more fun than I expected. I wouldn't say it's a story that urgently needed to be told, especially since the way they rationalized why these events were unknown in the series makes the whole thing feel kind of incidental, aside from a bit of continuity porn giving explanations for things we didn't need explained. Still, it was entertaining and had interesting character work. And it did mesh better than I expected with series continuity. The angle about Nazis and alien tyrants making an alliance reminded me of the rarely-seen Filmation Flash Gordon animated movie from 1979, in which Ming the Merciless was plotting to provide weapons to Hitler.
I'm not sure I care for the revelation that
Also, why did they change the Goa'uld's eyes? They used to have eyes that were normal-looking except when they flashed with light, but now they have yellow contact lenses, which was weird.
The drawback to watching on Hoopla, by the way, is that the image quality was mediocre and the aspect ratio was wrong, with the Stargate looking like a vertical oval rather than a circle. Still, it wasn't too bad a distortion; as long as the Stargate itself wasn't onscreen, I was mostly able to ignore it. This is the first movie I've watched on Hoopla, so I don't know if this is a typical problem.
I'm not sure I care for the revelation that
the entire Stargate program was the result of Aset's post-hypnotic suggestion to Catherine. It kind of takes away the humans' agency.
The drawback to watching on Hoopla, by the way, is that the image quality was mediocre and the aspect ratio was wrong, with the Stargate looking like a vertical oval rather than a circle. Still, it wasn't too bad a distortion; as long as the Stargate itself wasn't onscreen, I was mostly able to ignore it. This is the first movie I've watched on Hoopla, so I don't know if this is a typical problem.
Over in the nostalgia thread, I mentioned that I watched Origins myself for the first time a few days ago. My short reaction was that it was an intensely odd little film.
On the whole, it felt like a fanfilm from an alternate universe where fanfilms have different common lapses and achievements in quality; the acting and production quality were pro-grade (in terms of cinematography, costuming, and scale of the sets, with the exception of the Stargate itself, which looked pretty cheap, especially compared to the French fan one I heard they wanted to borrow), but the writing and, oddly, the visual effects were much, much worse than I'd expect. The climax was downright laughable; cutout clips from the movie of Ra's ship and the tied-up Stargate bouncing along the screen. Another dishonorable mention for them attempting to recreate the shot of Daniel stepping through the gate from the 'gates perspective from the movie (a simple trick done by having a camera in a water tank filming James Spader dipping his face through the surface, except in the movie, they tied back his hair so it didn't give away that he was facing down, and actually filmed him pulling his head back and played it in reverse, so they could wave away any bubbles, and the Origins tank was full of schmutz floating around! And they held on it for, like, fifteen seconds across two angles! Don't give them a chance to see the seams!
As for the writing, I though Catherine's spunky-girl lead stuff was way overdone and made her seem more like an asshole than a strong, independent person, like a bad parody of the '30s woman-in-a-man's-world character. For example, the scene where the cross-dressing Nazi (also, comic relief dumb cross-dressing Nazi, not a fan of that for so many reasons) has her captured, she acts like she's going to seduce him to get him to let her go or drop his guard, and then when he plays along, she calls him a pig and gives up. I don't get it. Kasuf becoming head of the village because someone just go home and tell everyone he was in charge confused me, I'd just been assuming his father was the chief and that's how he got that plum temple-floor-washing gig. And it seems wildly convenient that the Nazi found an old document with a Stargate address on it that just happened to be that Stargate address, never mind the he somehow already knew the 'gate needed to be charged and how to dial it.
Ra recruiting his top-two body guards from a couple of random skinny guys he found in the desert, also not very sensible (were they supposed to be the main Horus and Jackal guards from the movie? Because neither of them looked like a young Djimon Hounsou or... the latin guy... but it was such a big deal, and they'd talked about how naquada slows aging earlier...), and really just seemed like they were able to borrow the Horus and Jackal helmets, but they only had them for, like, an hour, and it'd be their ass if they got so much as a scratch on them.
I did think things got better once the Nazi was fully wheeling-and-dealing with Aset, and Catherine's party made it to the tents outside of town. I'm really not sure how I feel about the bad guy being killed because the female underling he kept perving on was a loyal, true-believe Nazi, I can't quite parse what the film is trying to say about integrity and morals with that choice. I liked the Christmas baubles hanging from fishing line in the temple, until I realized they were supposed to be baubles hanging from fishing line in the reality of the movie, and not floating space-alien doo-dads.
On the whole, it felt like a fanfilm from an alternate universe where fanfilms have different common lapses and achievements in quality; the acting and production quality were pro-grade (in terms of cinematography, costuming, and scale of the sets, with the exception of the Stargate itself, which looked pretty cheap, especially compared to the French fan one I heard they wanted to borrow), but the writing and, oddly, the visual effects were much, much worse than I'd expect. The climax was downright laughable; cutout clips from the movie of Ra's ship and the tied-up Stargate bouncing along the screen. Another dishonorable mention for them attempting to recreate the shot of Daniel stepping through the gate from the 'gates perspective from the movie (a simple trick done by having a camera in a water tank filming James Spader dipping his face through the surface, except in the movie, they tied back his hair so it didn't give away that he was facing down, and actually filmed him pulling his head back and played it in reverse, so they could wave away any bubbles, and the Origins tank was full of schmutz floating around! And they held on it for, like, fifteen seconds across two angles! Don't give them a chance to see the seams!
As for the writing, I though Catherine's spunky-girl lead stuff was way overdone and made her seem more like an asshole than a strong, independent person, like a bad parody of the '30s woman-in-a-man's-world character. For example, the scene where the cross-dressing Nazi (also, comic relief dumb cross-dressing Nazi, not a fan of that for so many reasons) has her captured, she acts like she's going to seduce him to get him to let her go or drop his guard, and then when he plays along, she calls him a pig and gives up. I don't get it. Kasuf becoming head of the village because someone just go home and tell everyone he was in charge confused me, I'd just been assuming his father was the chief and that's how he got that plum temple-floor-washing gig. And it seems wildly convenient that the Nazi found an old document with a Stargate address on it that just happened to be that Stargate address, never mind the he somehow already knew the 'gate needed to be charged and how to dial it.
Ra recruiting his top-two body guards from a couple of random skinny guys he found in the desert, also not very sensible (were they supposed to be the main Horus and Jackal guards from the movie? Because neither of them looked like a young Djimon Hounsou or... the latin guy... but it was such a big deal, and they'd talked about how naquada slows aging earlier...), and really just seemed like they were able to borrow the Horus and Jackal helmets, but they only had them for, like, an hour, and it'd be their ass if they got so much as a scratch on them.
I did think things got better once the Nazi was fully wheeling-and-dealing with Aset, and Catherine's party made it to the tents outside of town. I'm really not sure how I feel about the bad guy being killed because the female underling he kept perving on was a loyal, true-believe Nazi, I can't quite parse what the film is trying to say about integrity and morals with that choice. I liked the Christmas baubles hanging from fishing line in the temple, until I realized they were supposed to be baubles hanging from fishing line in the reality of the movie, and not floating space-alien doo-dads.
Funny -- I thought the acting was middle-of-the-road at best (though Catherine was fairly good), the writing was fine, and the FX were neither good nor bad enough to be notable.
Wow, you totally misread that scene. Catherine was not trying to seduce him. That would've been completely out of character. She asked him if there was anything she could do to convince him to let her go -- e.g. bribe him, reason with him, appeal to his decency, whatever you'd expect a male character to offer in that situation. He was the one who reacted to it as a sexual opportunity, which was never on the table for her.
Why wouldn't it be? Indeed, it had to be the same address. According to Origins, Aset conditioned Catherine to devote her career to preparing a team to return to Abydos and defeat Ra. So naturally the destination of her later Stargate program would have been Abydos. It's not a coincidence at all -- it's literally built into the story that both trips had to be to the same destination.
Presumably that was in the ancient texts referenced in his journal. Most likely he confiscated them for the Reich so they weren't available for Langford to discover later on. Maybe they fell into Soviet hands after the war and helped lay the foundations for their Stargate program.
That was a weird and excessively dark ending, and way too "kill your gays" as well. But I don't see any reason to assume those armors were unique, given that Jaffa serpent guard armors were mass-produced.
I read on the wiki that Ra was battling the Asgard at this time, so it seems likely that these guys were killed in that war and replaced by Hounsou and the other guy.
I don't think it was saying anything about integrity or morals. Bad guys turning on each other and killing each other off is a common trope in fiction, and it isn't meant to say that some of them are good, just that their selfish, violent ways make it hard for them to unite since they end up betraying each other and taking vengeance and so forth. Eva met her own end almost immediately after she finished off Brucke, so she got her narrative comeuppance for her complicity in Nazism.
Anyway, I like it when characters are able to have sympathetic human motivations and still be very much on the evil side. Characters should not just be one-dimensional puppets in a polemical or political statement. They should have human dimension and complexity and believe they're doing right even when they're horrifically wrong. Different people followed the Nazis for different reasons. Many were misled by their propaganda and wrongly believed Hitler's promises of a utopian future for the German people. That's what Eva represented, the misguided fools who believed the dictator gave a damn about their lives and dreams and thus sold their souls to him. She behaved in a way consistent with that personal motivation rather than some more abstract political or ideological statement, and that's how characters should be written. I thought the characters here were well-done, with individuality and nuance, even the villains. Even Aset had a degree of ambiguity that was surprising in a Goa'uld.
Some sort of incense burners, I imagine.
Catherine doesn't have anything to do with why proto-SG-1 went to Abydos, though, aside from, perhaps, reviving the project in the '90s; they went there because that was the address inscribed on the coverstones that were on top of the Stargate. I have my own thoughts about why that happened, in the reality of the series where the Stargate goes to innumerable planets and doesn't just connect Earth and Abydos (and that Abydos has a matching coverstone with Earth's address when they never buried their Stargate), and I don't have a problem with the idea that there are other Stargate addresses on various artifacts around the world from when the Goa'uld (or Ancients) were using it regularly, but I don't see why the (apparently) second-easiest to find address on Earth also went to Abydos, a fairly insignificant planet in the grand scheme of things.
The coverstones, sure; maybe they were carved at Ra's instruction and were a sort of how-to; if Abydos was his major mine, it'd be where he needed the most slaves, so it's where he'd send people most often, and since the stones were right there, the revolutionaries used it to cover the 'gate when they buried it (after carving a special "Up yours, Ra" message into it) but I don't see why any of the other Goa'uld or their patsies outside of Giza would care about that particular planet.
Who says they do? The question is whether it's likely that more than one surviving artifact would contain the address to Abydos, and it seems obvious to me that they would, since Ra ruled Egypt for a really long time before the rebellion and there was frequent travel and cultural cross-pollination between Earth and Abydos. So there must have been many documents in Ra's kingdom that contained the address, so it's not at all surprising that more than one survived to be found. I don't know why you'd assume that Brucke got his information from a separate Goa'uld source. There are many Egyptian relics in the world. And Brucke's sources led him directly to the Stargate in Egypt, so it stands to reason that they came from Egypt.
After all, we know from historical documents
that Hitler was hunting ancient artifacts of power in Northern Africa in the 1930s. It stands to reason that the Langfords weren't the only ones digging up Goa'uld relics.
The Nazis had the Giza DHD (which is probably why they were on the lookout for those symbols in the first place), so it doesn't seem like a stretch to me that they could find Langford and the Stargate once they cared to look, especially since Langford was still in Egypt and didn't seem to be keeping his artifact secret in any way. And it's not so much that the coverstones would necessarily be the only place where the Abydos address was written down, as that there are so many other addresses that are just as likely, if not moreso, to have been recorded. Ra owned other planets, probably some nicer ones. All the System Lords would've had their own holdings, too.
However, I just watched the scene again; Brucke says he found the Egyptian papyrus with the drawing of the Stargate and the copy of the history from the Abydos catacombs in the movie in Thailand, but never actually gives a source for the address in his notebook, and there's no address on the papyrus, so it's entirely possible he got the Abydos address from the coverstones, either directly by stalking Langford and going through his things before confronting him, or from photographs or descriptions from Langford's German friend who Brucke said had been murdered by the Nazis in Germany. That's also frustrating, because it puts even more weight on the assertion that Daniel Jackson need some special expertise or insight to recognize the heavily stylized seventh symbol on the coverstone.
It was kind of a stretch no one figured out what they did right in "Torment of Tantalus" to turn the Stargate on when they were fiddling with it in the '40s (and it was also a much better episode, so it earns enough goodwill to cover for it), but the idea that some random Nazi occultist figured out everything Daniel did based on secondhand information and no particular understand of ancient Egypt feels like a bigger ask to me, which is probably why I imagined the movie indicated he found an address straightforwardly written down and ready to use, rather than not explaining how he got it at all.
Even as a kid I knew that having someone open the gate before Jackson was a stupid plot
Well, it's one of the movie's most idiotic plot points that they needed Daniel to tell them which symbol was the seventh one when they already had the first six. I mean, there are only 39 of them! It wouldn't have taken that long to try each glyph until one worked!
Don't think so. There was a co-production deal between Sony and MGM on the James Bond movies, but that seems to have expired, based on there not being any Sony logo in the trailers for No Time to Die.
According to Wikipedia MGM is owned by MGM Holding Company, so I guess it's more or less it's own independent company.
In science you have to get your findings verified by a second independent party, before they are legitimatized.
In the movie, minutes after Daniel figured it out, they had computers and props and maps that could measure the progress in gate travel measuring in light years, on site and hooked up to the Stargate.
Of course, you're right, and this is just a shitty movie that is cutting corners.
But considering they were ready to go, with a lot of specialized hardware and software to use the gate, it's likely that Catherine knew how it worked before Daniel showed up, they just didn't want to use the gate until they had their "science" verified by a second independent party, even if Catherine ORDERED the Security guard out side Dr Jackson's room to read his horoscopes in a loop for 3 weeks until Daniel noticed.
They never told Daniel that he was a patsy, becuase he's just precious.
Same for getting back. The PoO symbol for Abydos is almost identical to the earth one it couldnt have been that hard to figure out
Possibly the only thing in the movie that's smarter than the series version is the recognition that Abydos would have different constellations in its sky, and thus had different gate symbols. The series' decision to standardize the gate glyphs made narrative and logistical sense, but not astronomical sense. (The way I rationalize it is that the glyphs were an Ancient alphabet first and the traditional constellations were invented to conform to their shapes, rather than the other way around.)
I'm about two-thirds sure the series actually used the wrong origin symbol for Abydos. You never get a good look at all the symbols on the Abydos Stargate (and I've been looking, if there are any behind-the-scenes diagrams available, I've never found them), but the Abydos symbol used in the series looks a lot more like the version of the Earth symbol seen on the coverstones, while you can get a glimpse of a glyph of two stacked pyramids on the Abydos 'gate, which is a closer match to what Skarra and Daniel draw in the movie. (All this Stargate talk has me wanting to take another wack at my old 3D model of it, so I've been trying to collate all the reference material I've found since last time, and Googling to see if what kind of new stuff has come up).
I wish they'd committed to the idea they had for "Lost City," where each symbol had a single-syllable name, allowing you to pronounce any stargate address as a short phrase. They didn't seem to stick with it, even when they used similar-sounding names for Ancient planets, they didn't seem to fit structurally. They also didn't stick with the "P3X-whatever" name scheme's original purpose, which seemed to be each letter and number standing for a gate symbol (they kept visiting "P3X" planets early-on because they were looking for Apophis's secret homeworld, and they only knew the first three symbols). Though that scheme did leave them two short (38 address glyphs, but only 36 letters and numerals in english), unless they threw in a couple of oddballs. Maybe greek letters.
Funnily enough, in the movie's novelization, they specified that the reason Jackson was the first person to realize (most of) the symbols were constellations was because they were based on the constellations of ten thousand years ago, so they weren't quite recognizable, and Daniel had to go back into ancient Egyptian astronomy to compensate for stellar drift (and that idea probably made it to the art department; some of the glyphs are only vaguely similar to the constellation they stand for, and as far as I can tell, the production design for the movie was very in-depth as far as research goes). Of course, with the series establishing that the Stargates are tens of millions of years old, and not just several thousand, even that explanation is out, unless you go with a cockamamie theory like "the inner ring is slightly fluid, and it constantly reconfigures itself over the course of millennia to always match the current star patterns." Though, now that I write it out loud...
I once had the idea that there was some kind of Ancient space station in the middle of interstellar space near Earth that was the galactic prime meridian, and that was technically the perspective from which all Stargate addresses were calculated and not Earth itself, and maybe even that Ra had stolen his 'gate from there (explaining the times were saw the Giza Stargate's origin symbol being used as a generic origin symbol, like the Atlantis database). Never figured out a story hook to go with it, though, so no fan-fic for me.