Stargate Extended Edition Blu-Ray

I haven't seen this movie in a long time.  It's hard to believe it's coming up on being 20 years old, but when I think about it, the last time I saw it, it was during a weekend where we had free HBO or Showtime or something for the week and it was one of the newer movies being featured.  So  yeah, been a while.  However, I do like Sci-Fi and I found the Extended Cut Blu Ray for a whopping five bucks at Target and couldn't resist.

Being so long, I didn't remember the particulars of the movie very well, so it was almost like seeing it for the first time.  It's a movie that takes the idea that the Egyptians weren't worshipping gods after all, but a race of space aliens that were using them as slave labor.  Eventually, the humans became too strong and the aliens, led by Ra, took off; but not before leaving an artifact to be found thousands of years later.  That would be the Stargate, of course.  Which opens a portal through space to distant galaxies.  After recruiting a young floppy haired James Spader to help them unravel the mystery of the Stargate, a team is led by Kurt Russell (at his square jawed, high and tight haircut early 90s toughest) through the Gate to find out what's on the other side.  What they find is a race not unlike the early Egyptians, being used by Ra and his forces as slave labor once again.
 

I love the idea behind this movie.  The execution of that idea is good, but I think could have been a lot better.  As it is, it's an entertaining piece of sci-fi with a decent archeological mystery and action that moves along nicely and hits all the notes it's required to.  It just seems as though they didn't reach the potential that the set-up of the movie promised.  The story is of the classic mold of a group of soldiers teaming up with a primitive race to fend off their technologically superior evil overlords set in a sci-fi mold.  For the time period, the special effects are very good and I actually think they hold up pretty well.  I actually didn't think there was as much FX as you would expect in a movie like this, which isn't really a bad thing. 

In a movie like this, there are leaps of logic that must be made to make the story work and it's a credit to the movie that I took those leaps without much grumbling.  The one thing the movie asked me to do, though, that I simply could not was to take French Stewart seriously as a hard nosed soldier.  Couldn't do it.  Sorry.  Hearing tough guy snarky dialog coming from the Squinty Eyed One was just one leap too many.  Also, Hollywood once again doesn't disappoint with it's obvious love affair with the name Jack.  In this movie, we have Russell's character named Jack and Spader's last name Jackson.  Subtle, Hollywood, subtle.

Tough Military Guy Who Takes Crap From Nobody

Those quibbles aside, it really is an entertaining movie with Spader doing good with the role type that would be taken over by Jeff Goldblum in Emmerich/Devlin's "Independence Day", and I really liked Kurt Russell as Jack O'Neil.  You wanted to like him, because Kurt Russell is just so darn awesome, but he was a character with flaws and layers and maybe he didn't have the best of intentions, but Kurt was good at giving you windows of the sympathetic side of O'Neil.  As with others, I can't speak highly enough of David Arnold's score.  I miss big scores in movies with recognizable themes.  This might be one of the best movie scores ever, if only for the main theme.  I loved it.  Basically, what we're dealing with here is just a fun action/sci-fi flick that asks you to go along for the ride and have a good time with it, and I enjoyed it for that.  It's just a shame that I felt it could have been so much more. 

The blu-ray side of things, though... that's another story.  I got it cheap, so I can't complain too much.  The movie just doesn't pop like other blu-ray releases do.  I can't compare it to the DVD release, as I never saw it, so I don't know how much of an upgrade it is, but the picture just doesn't blow me away.  The menu is kind of awkward.  When I go to, say, scene select, the disc does this weird pause thing that briefly takes you back to the main menu screen as it resets the background music before sending you back to the screen select menu.  Weird.  Also, I didn't realize until after I was done that you had to have subtitles on to see the subtitles when the aliens were talking.  I went through the movie thinking that was maybe just a stylistic choice by the filmmakers, yet still felt like I was missing some plot.  Now I know why.

Still, for the price I paid for it, I don't regret the purchase.  It's a bit of a questionable blu-ray, but it's a fun enough movie that its worth owning.  I say 3 stars with the shoddy blu-ray issues, 3.5 stars for the flick.