Stargate (1994)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

I was just out of high school when this movie first came out. I don’t remember hearing much about it, but I hadn’t really been to the theaters for a while. Years later, I would catch parts of it (usually the end) on Encore or The Sci-Fi Channel. It wasn’t really until the fifth season of the TV show, Stargate: SG-1, that I really got into it. I knew the basic premise of the movie, so the show wasn’t that hard to follow.

Stargate starts out in Giza, Egypt, in 1928. An archaeologist arrives on a dig site to see this amazing discovery. There’s a big ring with all of these symbols and no one has ever seen anything like it. As far as anyone knows, it’s the only one in existence. 60+ years later, Dr. Daniel Jackson is giving a lecture about ancient Egypt. He has all of these wacky ideas about alien influence. What few people there are walk out and Jackson has no idea why. As he’s leaving the building, he’s approached by a woman who wants him to work on a secret government project. He accepts, seeing as how he has little else to do. He’s being asked in to help decode the Stargate, which is now sitting under a mountain.

Then there’s Colonel Jack O’Neill, played by Kurt Russell. He’s getting over the loss of his son, who accidentally shot himself with the Colonel’s gun. He’s called in to oversee the military aspect of the Stargate program. O’Neill and Jackson don’t hit it off at first. O’Neill is a military officer having to deal with the loss of his son; Jackson is a brainy researcher who isn’t really even accepted in his own field.

Dr. Jackson finally gets the gate working and a probe is sent through. They discover a similar Stargate on the other side, along with a device for controlling it. The Stargate is a means of transporting people across space. The connection doesn’t stay open for very long, so there isn’t much information to go on insofar as the other planet is concerned. The deciding factor is Dr. Jackson’s belief that he could get a team back. He, Colonel O’Neill, and several others go through the gate to the other planet and are told to assess the situation and report back. The trouble is that Dr. Jackson can’t get the team back. He had made the assumption that there would be instructions waiting for him on the other side.

To Dr. Jackson’s amazement, they find pyramids similar to the ones on Earth, which supports Dr. Jackson’s theories. The downside is that if they can’t get back, he won’t be able to tell anyone about it. Things start to look good when they find people living on the planet. Things take a serious turn for the worse, though, when Ra shows up. (For those that don’t know much about Egyptian mythology, Ra is the Egyptian sun god.) Ra is played by Jaye Davidson, who you may remember from The Crying Game. Dr. Jackson discovers that Ra is actually ‘possessing’ a host. Ra has simply taken on the persona of a god and has everyone on the planet worshiping him. Things get much worse when Ra discovers that O’Neill brought a bomb with him; Ra decides to modify the bomb and send it back to Earth. The race is on.

Of Jackson and O’Neill, I felt that Jackson was better developed in the movie. O’Neill came across as a military zombie. He’s made a career in the military and doesn’t seem to plan on making it back. Jackson, on the other hand, tends to be more optimistic. He thinks that there’s a chance of getting home and wants to work towards that end. There is a great deal of naivete in Dr. Jackson, which he’s able to overcome to an extent.

The special effects are going to seem dated . There were times when the effects looked patchy or inconsistent. Some of the lower-budget effects came across pretty well. The movie is driven more by trying to make a coherent story than a vehicle for the special effects. The thing that the story had going for it was its overall simplicity. Get the gate working, go through it, and then get back in one piece. The technical explanations of the gate and what Ra is didn’t really appear until the series began on Showtime.

I got the Ultimate Edition, which has both the director’s cut and the theatrical cut. The difference is that the director’s cut has a few additional minutes of footage. I don’t know that you’d even notice most of it. The real benefit is the other special features. You get the theatrical trailer, audio commentary and some behind-the-scenes stuff, which I found interesting.

Those that have seen the series are going to find some discrepancies. The gate program is housed in Creek Mountain in the movie, but in Cheyenne Mountain in the series. In the movie, Abydos (the planet that the team goes to) is in another galaxy whereas the series has it in our own galaxy.

Despite the inconsistencies and special effects, I’m going to recommend this movie. If you’re looking for a great movie, this is it.


IMDb page

 

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

Note:  This review is reposted from Epinions.

Some questions are hard to answer. What is reality? What is life? Why are we here? When a company creates a virtual reality, people have to start asking these questions. They create a rendition of the 1930s that’s a little off in terms of the colors, but otherwise seems real. There are seemingly real people who sleep in seemingly real beds and eat seemingly real food. A user can connect and take the identities of one of the characters.

Hannon Fuller, the man who created the system, figures out something incredibly disturbing. It’s so disturbing that he has to leave a note for Douglas Hall, one of his employees, in the system. The problem is that Hall is suspected of Fuller’s death. There’s a period of a couple of hours that he can’t remember, which puts doubt in his mind.

So, he goes into the system to find the note. Thing is that the guy he gave it to isn’t telling. He also finds out that Fuller had a daughter and that the daughter is here to shut down the project, as per Fuller’s wishes. Thing is that no one knew that Fuller had a daughter or that he wanted to shut down the project. After all the hard work that they put into it, why shut it down?

There are a lot of implications for a machine like that. There are some positives, like using it for training. Tweak the physics a little and you give police a chance to train in situations without risking death. You could also have virtual vacations if you perfected it. You would also have your own virtual playground, which could be a good or bad thing, depending on the user. (Imagine a virtual-reality Grand Theft Auto or interactive adult films.)

It does bring up the question of ‘being’ someone else. In the movie, the people generally assume the identities of people that look like them. However, you could put someone in the body of someone different. Someone could find out what it’s like to be bound to a wheelchair or what it’s like to be a minority. Those questions aren’t really dealt with in the movie. It's primarily a murder mystery. Did Hall really do it? If not, who did? You even get a twist midway through the movie.

Reality isn’t always what it seems. It’s also not all that it’s cracked up to be. The characters in the program go about their lives not knowing that they’re in a simulation. However, when one finds out, they begin to question what reality is. I have to give the movie credit for taking something that other books and movies have done and exploring it a little more. The movie gets four stars.

IMDb page

Journey to the Center of Time

Note:  This review is one of my reviews that were originally posted on Epinions.

I think I figured out why I write movie reviews. There are some movies that are classics. People will watch these because of the impact that they’ve had on society or because they’re great movies. Most people will know which ones these are unless they‘ve been living under a rock. I may review these movies if I watch simply to voice my opinion.

There are some movies that are so bad that I have to wonder why they were ever made. Some are bad, but can still be watched if only to laugh at them. (Mystery Science Theater 3000 aired almost 200 episodes based on this premise.) There are a few movies so bad that I feel compelled to warn people not to watch them. They are only a waste of time and money. They’re barely even worth renting on NetFlix. Journey to the Center of Time is one of these movies.

In case you’re wondering, there are two reasons I finished watching the movie. One was that it was one of those bad-accident movies that I couldn’t stop watching. The other was that so that I could write an accurate review. I had to see exactly how bad it was.

For those that have never come across the movie, it’s set in 1968. (The movie was released in 1967, so I have to assume that it’s supposed to be the not-to-distant future.) Scientists are on the verge of being able to see 24 hours into the past. If this works, they will eventually be able to look far into the past or the future. The problem is that, like all interesting projects, they’re in danger of losing their funding. Stanton is the name of the man initially responsible for funding them. He recently died, leaving his money to his son. Stanton, Jr., is making the rounds to decide which projects get the axe.

Stanton wants to see everything. He even goes into the area where the experiments are held. It isn’t long before Stanton and the team of scientists are sent 5,000 years into the future. Once there, they’re greeted by advanced aliens who reminded me of clowns. The time travelers are given a warning that humanity hasn’t changed much. In fact, we’re on the verge of destroying ourselves. The aliens want to send a warning back to 1968 so that humanity might better itself. This, of course, is assuming that the group can get back at all.

They do go back, but too far. They end up going back to 1,000,000 B.C., where they see a dinosaur that looks a lot like a lizard made to look big through forced perspective. For some reason, everyone decides to go out and explore the area, starting with Stanton. From there, it only gets stranger. This is one of those movies that I won’t spoil the ending only because I didn’t understand it at all.

I think this movie was done on a severely limited budget. (If I recall, the time travelers were about 64,000,000 years too late for dinosaurs. They couldn‘t even afford fact checkers?) Not only was the script really bad, but the sets looked like they were set up in an abandoned warehouse. This isn’t even a case of outdated technology. Have you ever seen the Star Trek episode Specter of the Gun? I think this movie may have had the same set designer.

The version that I got from Netflix had no real extras to speak of. There was a trivia game that relied on knowledge of other movies. That was the only thing I bothered to look at other than the movie. Do not buy this movie for yourself or as a gift. If you must, rent it, but I think you’ll find it to still be a waste of 82 minutes. I never watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 that much while it was on. I have to wonder if they ever came across this movie. It would have been perfect for them. I mean, leave it to scientists desperate for money to go 5,000 years into the future and not look up lottery results.