Watched: Stargate
- This film pissed me off, because it committed the cardinal sin of sci-fi: it was so fucking boring.
- It’s interesting that a lot of the attacks on this film at the time of its release came from the fact that it heavily uses visual effects. Interesting how times change. “Tron Legacy was garbage because of all the CGI”, etc. (Tron Legacy was garbage, but that isn’t why.)
- That said, there were some good parts. James Spader’s face, for one. Damn. Shame he had to age.
- Here’s the chief issue I had with it: it established a perfectly exciting premise, and then ran it into the ground with (literal) gunfire and screaming. Apart from a clever way to dispose of a bomb, this was borderline racist tripe that started out with the wonder of the new and ended with a bunch of people I no longer cared about basically yelling “America, fuck yeah” over the snores of… oh, that’s it - me.
- There’s also a really shitty technical issue with this film: on the early transfers (which this was), you were faced with two options: subtitles for every single line in the film, or none at all. Given that this is a film with heavy exposition in a dialect of Ancient Egyptian that does not exist, it’s basically a massive clusterfuck. At first, I thought that they’d excluded it for the purposes of keeping things suitably alien, until a five-minute scene between Spader’s character and the ancient sun-teen Ra that was clearly getting some important plot points across.
- Yeah. Don’t watch this. Or maybe watch the first two thirds, then switch to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It won’t make sense, but that’s hardly worse than what you were already going to get.