Rent Stargate (1994)

Silly, Overlong SciFi Action Film - Stargate review by GI

There is no doubt the idea behind this was ambitious and perhaps appeared interesting on the page but the end result is a lacklustre affair with awful dialogue, a story that makes little sense and overall it's not very exciting for an action science fiction film made to look epic. It is certainly overlong and the first hour becomes very tiresome and is not much improved in the final segments. The story is that an ancient Egyptian artefact discovered on an archaeological dig in 1928 (early scenes of it's discovery are all pointless) turns out to be a portal allowing travel across the Universe and it's now in the hands of the American military....of course it is! Young but genius Egyptologist Daniel (James Spader) is hired to interpret the symbols that get the device working so that a team of gung ho marines led by Kurt Russell's Colonel O'Neill can go see what's on the other side. It turns out it's basically ancient Egypt on another planet ruled by a nasty alien masquerading as Jaye Davidson. It's all totally daft and a bit boring and Kurt Russell sports the worst military haircut ever seen in any film and that's saying something. The ancient tribes people soon learn to use modern sub machine guns though so there's a bit of shooting. In short it hasn't aged well and is probably best consigned to those films that were a good idea but utterly failed.