Stargate
Short description
A stone ring covered in hieroglyphs is unearthed in Egypt in 1928, and for decades its purpose remains a mystery. The American military eventually brings in Dr. Daniel Jackson, an Egyptologist whose unconventional ideas about the origins of the pyramids have made him an outsider in his field. He succeeds in reading the inscription and identifies the ring as a gateway to another world. A military team under Colonel Jonathan O'Neil accompanies him through it, arriving on a distant planet whose desert landscape, inhabitants and customs resemble ancient Egypt, where people labour under the rule of the god Ra.
Roland Emmerich directed and co-wrote the film with Dean Devlin, who also produced alongside Joel B. Michaels. It was Emmerich's third feature as director, following Universal Soldier and preceding Independence Day, and it is the film that established the partnership behind several of his later science fiction productions. James Spader plays Jackson and Kurt Russell plays O'Neil, with Jaye Davidson as Ra, Viveca Lindfors as Catherine, Alexis Cruz as Skaara and Mili Avital as Sha'uri. The production involved 41 credited cast members and 202 credited crew.
Made for a budget of 55 million US dollars, the film took 197 million dollars worldwide, a strong return that helped confirm Emmerich as a director of large-scale genre pictures. Audiences have received it favourably, with a rating of 7 out of 10 on IMDb from about 218,000 votes and the same score on TMDB from a much smaller number of votes. The critics' rating stands at 5.4 out of 10 from 49 reviews, noticeably below those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The idea for the film was conceived by the director back in 1979 while Roland Emmerich was in school.
- After the film was released, a student from the Egyptology department at Johns Hopkins University accused Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin of plagiarism, as he had proposed a similar story to them ten years earlier. The university vouched for its student because he was known for theories that were later used in the film. The incident was settled out of court.
- Mannequins were used in many crowd scenes. They were cheaper than live extras.
- Kurt Russell wore a Breitling Sirius watch in the film.
- The film was originally conceived as the first part of a trilogy, but Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided to shoot a television series first.
- Actor Jay Davidson refused to remove the rings from his nipples, which caused considerable problems for the costume designer and the cinematographer.
- In the shots in the desert, the film crew and fragments of the filming equipment can be seen reflected in the characters' sunglasses.
- The film's preview screenings were disastrous, with only just over thirty percent of viewers enjoying it. But as a result of some changes suggested by executive producer Mario Kassar, the storylines became clearer, and the film became incredibly popular.
- After the preview screenings, viewers said that Ra didn't look 'alien enough,' and a glow was added to his eyes during post-production. This detail was later used in the series 'Stargate SG-1' (1997-2007).
- Jay Davidson disliked the attention he received after working on Neil Jordan's thriller 'The Crying Game' (1992) so much that he didn't want to play Ra in Roland Emmerich's science fiction action film 'Stargate' (1994). But he didn't want to simply refuse the role, so he decided to demand a fee of $1 million for filming, believing the request would be rejected and the matter would resolve itself. To the actor's surprise, his condition was accepted, and he was forced to film with Emmerich.
- The creatures that looked like horses on another planet were actually horses in special costumes. Dogs were also used in the filming.
- After reading the script for the first time, Kurt Russell found it terrible and refused to participate in the project. The film's producers continued to make increasingly tempting offers to the actor until he finally agreed. Later, screenwriter Dean Devlin learned that Russell had mistakenly been sent the very first draft of the script (which even Devlin considered terrible), not the latest version at the time.
- The film "Stargate" was the first in the world to have an official website. The idea of creating the site was proposed by one of the scriptwriters, Dean Devlin.
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