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THE SPACE TUNNEL: Lewis Carroll’s Alice slipped through a rabbit’s hole, down to Wonderland, but in contemporary sci-fi, such portals have been displaced by a wormhole through which travelers can defy the space-time continuum. Carlos Lauchu, as the Egyptian-like Anubis, guards the stargate. Courtesy: Canal+/Centropolis/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
CREDITS
Studio Canal+/Centropolis Film Productions/Carolco Pictures/MGM; Roland Emmerich, dir.; Emmerich, Dean Devlin, scr.; Devlin, Oliver Eberle, Ute Emmerich, Mario Kassar, Joel B. Michaels, pro.; David Arnold, mus.; Karl Walter Lindenlaub, cin.; Derek Brechin, Michael J. Duthie, ed.; Holger Gross, prod. design; Frank Bollinger, Peter Murton, art dir.; Joseph A. Porro, costumes; David P. Barton, Jake Garber, special makeup effects; Dave C. Avillo, Paul Barnes, creature art department; Jeff Kleiser, additional creative design; 121 min. (release print), 128 min. (extended version), 130 min. (director’s cut); Color; 2.35:1.
Kurt Russell (Col. Jonathan O’Neil); James Spader (Dr. Daniel Jackson); Alexis Cruz (Skaara); Viveca Lindfors (Catherine Langford); Mili Avital (Sha’uri); Jaye Davidson (Ra); John Diehl (Lt. Kawalsky); Leon Rippy (Gen. W. O. West); Carlos Lauchu (Anubis); Djimon Hounsou (Horus); Erick Avari (Kasuf).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
I created you; now, I will destroy you.
RA TO VISITORS FROM EARTH
BACKGROUND
Stargate (re)introduced the public to a theory that had been discussed at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. Though the term “wormhole” would not be coined until 1957 by American physicist John Archibald Wheeler, the idea of a wormhole, possibly a remnant of the Big Bang, had been conceived by German mathematician Hermann Weyl in the early 1920s. If such a space portal might indeed exist, a person could presumably make a quantum leap, transporting from one corner of the cosmos to another in a split second and avoiding the limitations inherent in the space-time continuum. Also known as the Einstein-Rosen bridge, such a possibility had been included in the writings of such “serious” science-fiction authors as Isaac Asimov.
Though the term “wormhole” had not been used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the third act of Kubrick’s film approximated such a journey in a then-appropriate 1960s psychedelic style. That classic’s first act, in which a monolithic needle descends during prehistorical times, visualized theories that were simultaneously proposed by Erich von Däniken (1935–), grandfather of what today is referred to as “ancient astronaut theory,” in Chariots of the Gods? (1968). Everything from rock formations at Stonehenge to the pyramids in ancient Egypt might be better understood if one is willing to accept that past extraterrestrial visitors purposefully altered our evolution on planet Earth.
THE PLOT
In 1928, a child, Cathy, is present at a Giza dig in Egypt when her archaeologist father unearths a gigantic ring, dating back to the Fourth Dynasty. Sixty-five years later, the elderly Catherine listens in on a controversial lecture delivered by a young linguistics expert, Daniel Jackson. Dr. Jackson tries without success to convince fellow academics that early societies had to have been influenced by extraterrestrials, re-directing life on Earth for their own purposes. Shortly, Daniel joins a team working in secret at a restricted U.S. Air Force base. He has been recruited to help them decipher encoded images on “the ring,” that portal through space. By stepping inside its confines, Daniel and a military unit, led by Colonel O’Neil, will bypass all preconceived limitations as to space travel and emerge momentarily in a distant world.
THE FILM
Roland Emmerich (1955–) shot most of the outdoor sequences—both those set on Earth and in the alternative realm—in Arizona, not far from where Spielberg grew up. Part of the appeal of Stargate derives from Emmerich’s ability to convey a full Spielbergian sense of wonderment at the mysteries of the universe as perceived by that rare adult who has held on to “primal sympathy.” The poet William Wordsworth used that term to express the vision of childlike acceptance of what most adults have lost the ability to acknowledge in the process of becoming “mature” and jaded. Close Encounters had also used the setting of the American Southwest for a sense of a stark, spiritualized beauty that even the greatest of scientific minds cannot explain away. So as to achieve just such a vision of a golden world, Emmerich arranged his shooting schedule so that key sequences were filmed just before sunset, when the desert takes on an appealingly eerie—and quietly profound—aura.
Initially, there were two scripts: in his version, Dean Devlin hoped to play out one of his favorite films, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), on a faraway planet; Emmerich’s script focused on an ancient spacecraft located beneath the Great Pyramid, similar to Five Million Years to Earth (1967). The unique appeal that would come to be represented by the simple term “stargate” (leading to an impressive franchise) emerged when they realized that by combining the two concepts, the writers could satisfyingly flesh out one another’s stories.
The striking appearance of the stargate, without which the film could not work as it does, was designed and then built by Jeff Kleiser, his work augmented by a team of more than forty artists and craftsmen.
THEME
Like so much sci-fi, this work attempts to re-explain the concept of God—or, in the case of ancient civilizations, gods—in the scientific terminology that began to develop during the late nineteenth century and has since then challenged earlier beliefs. Here the essential conceit is that those bizarre images we see in relics, in which bodies of men are topped with the heads of beasts, are not artistic or religious conceptions imaginatively designed to symbolically express ideas, but rather realistic depictions of creatures who descended from the stars. A “god,” in this reconfiguration, is any being that possesses more knowledge and is further advanced than those who are overwhelmed by the seemingly invincible invaders. Ultimately, a god is not something that does or does not exist but is instead the manner in which a living creature is perceived by inferiors. When sci-fi is used as the conduit for such ideology, an additional theme is invoked: secular scientific vocabulary and religious or mythological language are two unique forms of communicating precisely the same ideas about meaning and mystery in the universe.
TRIVIA
Always open about his homosexuality, filmmaker Emmerich continually searches for some means by which he can add gender identification to any current project. Here, this is manifested in the casting of Jaye Davidson, best known for playing a transgender character in The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992).
Alexis Cruz and Erick Avari revived their roles as Skaara and Kasuf for the TV series Stargate SG-1 (1997–2007).
Egyptology student Omar Zuhdi had, ten years earlier, submitted a suspiciously similar script to Emmerich, which was rejected. Zuhdi sued and received an out-of-court settlement.