is the stargate movie any good

[Admiral2]

Any sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic to the less advanced.

That's a saying that's often abused. There is, in fact, a fundamental difference between technology and magic, in that the former is constrained by the fundamental laws of physics. Not to mention that we're talking about biology here, not technology.

How do you know we're not talking about technology? Ra's sarcophagus raised Jackson from the dead and fixed his fatally wounded girlfriend. How do you know it wasn't also capable of merging two humanoid beings so that one's consciousness can supplant the other's?

You don't, because it was never addressed in the movie and the series retconned Ra's race into a bunch of eels so we can have dramatic shots of slippery green phalluses jumping into people's mouths to take them over.

Anyway, yes, certainly, some fiction is more fanciful than others, but that's my point -- that while the Stargate movie was essentially a work of fantasy (as is Doctor Who, of course), the Stargate TV franchise often managed to be one of the more scientifically literate SF shows around. Some of its ideas were quite fanciful, but on the whole it generally tried to take the silly ideas from the movie and rework them into something more scientifically plausible. Sometimes it managed to do excellent hard SF, notably in the episode "Tangent." Given how rare it is for any SF on television or film to be remotely scientifically literate, that's a noteworthy accomplishment and helps make the TV franchise stand out from the pack in a way the movie totally failed to do.

I guess that depends on what ideas you define as silly. We disagree on which. Not a shock. As much as I loved SG-1, it has always fallen short of the quality of the movie in my eyes.

And just in general, the TV franchise's worldbuilding and conceptual development was far, far richer than what the movie managed.

Bull. All they really did was pick new mythologies to turn into aliens, which is just the movie in multiple.

I mean, come on, Devlin and Emmerich came up with this idea with limitless potential, a wormhole allowing instant travel to anywhere in the galaxy,

Universe...

and the best they could come up with was a hackneyed ancient-astronaut story and a replica of ancient Egypt?

And all the producers of the show did was tack on more ancient cultures using the same ancient astronaut trope! They even had a race frigging called THE ANCIENTS!

What a profound failure of imagination.

One without which the TV guys would have had nothing rework.

The movie is a tremendous letdown.

To you. I thought it was great. I enjoy it every time I see it.

What impresses me so much about the TV franchise is how they managed to take such a shallow foundation and build such a rich and imaginative universe upon it. I daresay it's the only SFTV universe that can compare with Star Trek for sheer scope, richness, and coherence. In some ways it's even more coherent than ST managed to be, since it remained mostly under the same creators' control throughout its tenure. (Although unlike ST, its short-lived animated incarnation is unambiguously non-canonical.)

The series is better than Star Trek. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it.

Doctor Who's universe certainly has scope and richness, but coherence has never been one of its features.

Yet, it has been on for decades, and its fans generally don't give a shit if it makes any kind of rational sense.

 

[DonIago]

Which is, I suppose, a bit ironic as SG-1 itself has a pilot episode (two versions, in fact).

The later, revised DVD version of "Children of the Gods" is better overall, although the original pilot edit (which was made for Showtime) has a full-frontal female nude scene. Whether its removal counts as an improvement depends on one's personal tastes and preferences.

I'll admit I'm a bit titillated by the nude scene (sorry, I had to), though as a gay man it doesn't actually do anything for me; it's just so radically different from anything else that occurs in the entire franchise.

There are aspects of the revised pilot that I enjoy, but especially for anyone planning to get into the series there's an omission that -really- bugs me because it creates continuity problems with later episodes.

Also, I kind of miss the original ship stuff...granted we never saw it again and what we see instead fits in better with the series, but I still thought it was nifty, if a bit of a head-scratcher.

 

[Christopher]

There are aspects of the revised pilot that I enjoy, but especially for anyone planning to get into the series there's an omission that -really- bugs me because it creates continuity problems with later episodes.

What's the omission?

 

[DonIago]

There are aspects of the revised pilot that I enjoy, but especially for anyone planning to get into the series there's an omission that -really- bugs me because it creates continuity problems with later episodes.

What's the omission?

Spoiler: What's missing.

Kowalski being taken as a host. Both the shot of the symbiote entering him and the original closing shot of the pilot are gone.

 

[Relayer1]

The movie looks fantastic but really isn't - it's hugely mundane. The TV spinoff wasn't a lot to write home about either, but gradually built and built into a worthwhile franchise. I enjoyed Atlantis too, even if it was a 2nd class retread, and Universe was great - sadly it didn't run anywhere near long enough...

 

[Christopher]

There are aspects of the revised pilot that I enjoy, but especially for anyone planning to get into the series there's an omission that -really- bugs me because it creates continuity problems with later episodes.

What's the omission?

Spoiler: What's missing.

Kowalski being taken as a host. Both the shot of the symbiote entering him and the original closing shot of the pilot are gone.

Oh, that. I think it was omitted because Brad Wright's priority in the re-edit was what made it work best as a standalone movie, so that cliffhanger for the next episode proved unnecessary. Still, I don't think it creates a contradiction; it just omits showing us something. If anything, it makes the revelation in episode 2 more of a surprise. (Although episode 2 probably opens with a recap that includes that scene.)

 

[DonIago]

What's the omission?

Spoiler: What's missing.

Kowalski being taken as a host. Both the shot of the symbiote entering him and the original closing shot of the pilot are gone.

Oh, that. I think it was omitted because Brad Wright's priority in the re-edit was what made it work best as a standalone movie, so that cliffhanger for the next episode proved unnecessary. Still, I don't think it creates a contradiction; it just omits showing us something. If anything, it makes the revelation in episode 2 more of a surprise. (Although episode 2 probably opens with a recap that includes that scene.)

I agree with your belief regarding the underlying motivation, but I still think it was an unfortunate choice for anyone who'd like to watch the series after seeing it and doesn't know what they're missing.

While I agree it would make what happens in the following episode more of a surprise, IMO it would escalate it to the level of a "WTF? Why weren't there any hints of that in the previous episode?" type of surprise. Or, in Trek, parlance, a surprise on the level of Seven/Chakotay.

 

[stj]

The set designs in the movie are better.

The score is better (not saying Joel Goldsmith is in any way bad.)

The fact that people don't all speak English is enormously better.

The Von Daenikenite crap is still in the series. What doesn't quite kill a two hour movie of course would have destroyed a ten year TV series if taken seriously, so the series' turn toward comedy was a godsend.

The people revolting (and saving the soldiers) is still a notable exception to the dismissal of ordinary people, especially foreign ones.

 

[MacLeod]

Any sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic to the less advanced.

That's a saying that's often abused. There is, in fact, a fundamental difference between technology and magic, in that the former is constrained by the fundamental laws of physics. Not to mention that we're talking about biology here, not technology.

How do you know we're not talking about technology? Ra's sarcophagus raised Jackson from the dead and fixed his fatally wounded girlfriend. How do you know it wasn't also capable of merging two humanoid beings so that one's consciousness can supplant the other's?

You don't, because it was never addressed in the movie and the series retconned Ra's race into a bunch of eels so we can have dramatic shots of slippery green phalluses jumping into people's mouths to take them over.



I guess that depends on what ideas you define as silly. We disagree on which. Not a shock. As much as I loved SG-1, it has always fallen short of the quality of the movie in my eyes.



Bull. All they really did was pick new mythologies to turn into aliens, which is just the movie in multiple.



Universe...



And all the producers of the show did was tack on more ancient cultures using the same ancient astronaut trope! They even had a race frigging called THE ANCIENTS!



One without which the TV guys would have had nothing rework.



To you. I thought it was great. I enjoy it every time I see it.

What impresses me so much about the TV franchise is how they managed to take such a shallow foundation and build such a rich and imaginative universe upon it. I daresay it's the only SFTV universe that can compare with Star Trek for sheer scope, richness, and coherence. In some ways it's even more coherent than ST managed to be, since it remained mostly under the same creators' control throughout its tenure. (Although unlike ST, its short-lived animated incarnation is unambiguously non-canonical.)

The series is better than Star Trek. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it.

Doctor Who's universe certainly has scope and richness, but coherence has never been one of its features.

Yet, it has been on for decades, and its fans generally don't give a shit if it makes any kind of rational sense.

But in the case of DW, it's a time travel show. And as the 2005- run of the show has said on several occasions "Time Can be re-written"

 

[Christopher]

The point is, there's a whole gamut of fiction styles from sheer fantasy to scientifically literate hard SF, but almost everything in film and television tends more toward the fantasy side of the spectrum, so when we get something like the Stargate TV franchise where the producers actually made an effort to learn and incorporate valid science at least some of the time, that's a refreshing exception to the norm. There's room for more fanciful shows, sure, but there's room for more science-savvy ones too, yet hardly anyone is willing to make the effort to do those, so it's impressive when someone does.

 

[The Wormhole]

Honestly, I always viewed SG-1 as more of a military drama than sci-fi, or at least that's how it seemed especially in the seasons 5-8 period. And before anyone jumps up and down with "but there were spaceships and aliens" I mean military drama in much the same vein that BSG was one.

 

[DonIago]

I think a reasonable argument could be made that Stargate's tone/focus changed over time.

 

[Christopher]

Honestly, I always viewed SG-1 as more of a military drama than sci-fi, or at least that's how it seemed especially in the seasons 5-8 period. And before anyone jumps up and down with "but there were spaceships and aliens" I mean military drama in much the same vein that BSG was one.

Science fiction is a very, very broad category, encompassing an enormous range of storytelling styles. There's a whole, rather large subgenre of military SF in prose, from Heinlein's Starship Troopers to Haldeman's The Forever War to David Weber's Honor Harrington series and quite a bit more; so there's certainly no reason why being a military drama should make SG-1 any less of an SF show.

 

[DWF]

It's a flawed movie to be sure but, there's some real character in O'Neil and Daniel and it ends on an upbeat note. In the end it's an accepted popcorn movie.

 

[DonIago]

I don't know what the standard definition of popcorn movie is, but for my money it doesn't have enough mindless action to qualify. I suppose that may or may not constitute a compliment.

 

[MacLeod]

Well this one definition I found for a Popcorn flick

A motion picture without serious dramatichttp://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dramatic content, a weighty message, or intellectualhttp://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/intellectual depth, which serves simply as enjoyable entertainment

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/popcorn_movie