Film: Stargate (1994)

[Anthony G Williams]

It's been a long time since I saw this film and, as I recalled enjoying it, I thought I'd give it a second viewing. I should perhaps add at this point that I have never seen any of the various TV spin-offs such as Stargate SG-1 so I can't make comparisons (in fact I didn't realise there had been so many spin-offs until I looked up "stargate" in Wikipedia).

First, a plot summary (with some spoilers). The film starts in 1928 with a baffling archaeological discovery in Egypt; a huge ring several metres across made of some unknown mineral and carved with a variety of strange symbols. Cut to the present day when the US military has got hold of the ring and is trying to work out what it is for. Cue the recruitment of a geeky academic Daniel Jackson (James Spaader) whose radical theories about ancient Egypt had caused him to be regarded as a joke. He is able to decipher the symbols and activate the ring, which turns out to be a stargate, providing instant access to another planet. There Jackson and a team of soldiers led by Colonel O'Neill (Kurt Russell) discover what appears to be an ancient Egyptian civilisation still thriving, but dominated by a powerful alien who has adopted the identity of the sun-god Ra (Jaye Davidson). They learn that Ra had long before transported the Egyptians from Earth to this planet to mine the rare mineral used to make the stargate. The team find themselves battling with Ra for survival and to protect the Earth.

I must admit I enjoy this kind of story – I am fascinated by the sheer alienness of ancient Egypt (without believing that it must therefore have been created by aliens!). I also like the concept of the stargate, which has featured in so many SF novels that it can be regarded as one of the standard tropes of the SF genre, along with spaceships which can travel faster than light. No-one has any idea how either type of device might practically work but they are too convenient to space opera to ignore, so they are usually passed off with mumbo-jumbo about wormholes and warp drives. Another trope is of course the academic with crazy ideas who everyone laughs at until he proves to be right all along, so this movie ticks lots of comfort boxes.

There are also the less forgivable Hollywood SF tropes, notably that radio works instantly, everywhere. The vast distances and timescales of the galaxy (let alone the universe) are far too inconvenient for Hollywood to bother with, so they just ignore them. In more advanced scenarios they apply some more mumbo-jumbo about tachyons, ansibles or dirac transmitters, but in Stargate they don't have such fig-leaves, just ordinary steam-age radio. This doesn't deter them from taking this trope to the extreme, with a robotic probe sent trundling through the newly-opened stargate instantly sending back a radio message via a cute little foot-wide dish antenna from a location which the scientists are able to work out is on the other side of the universe. Umm, guys, you do know how long it would take for a radio message to arrive from the other side of the universe (assuming it had sides, of course)? About 13 billion years….which is even longer than the combined running time of all of the Stargate spin-offs!

Having poked some fun at it, I have to admit that I still like this film. I admired the dramatic alien spaceship and the way it used a pyramid as a parking bollard, and was intrigued by the androgynous Ra – I still wasn't certain whether Jaye Davidson was male or female until I looked him up. There are some engaging characters among the people of the distant planet, supplying both humour and romance. The CGI is dated but adequate. Despite its age, it is well worth watching and still provides far better entertainment than the majority of SFF films. About the only aspect which niggled me this time was the obtrusive and over-dramatic background music constantly sawing away, which does date the film.

A final dose of reality which crossed my mind – the next expedition to the planet had better take a large quantity of vaccines and other medical supplies or the ancient Egyptians would be rapidly wiped out by the accumulation of evolved viruses and other pathogens which we carry around with us.

(An extract from my SFF blog: Science Fiction & Fantasy)

 

[PTeppic]

There are also the less forgivable Hollywood SF tropes, notably that radio works instantly, everywhere. The vast distances and timescales of the galaxy (let alone the universe) are far too inconvenient for Hollywood to bother with, so they just ignore them. In more advanced scenarios they apply some more mumbo-jumbo about tachyons, ansibles or dirac transmitters, but in Stargate they don't have such fig-leaves, just ordinary steam-age radio. This doesn't deter them from taking this trope to the extreme, with a robotic probe sent trundling through the newly-opened stargate instantly sending back a radio message via a cute little foot-wide dish antenna from a location which the scientists are able to work out is on the other side of the universe. Umm, guys, you do know how long it would take for a radio message to arrive from the other side of the universe (assuming it had sides, of course)? About 13 billion years….which is even longer than the combined running time of all of the Stargate spin-offs!

For me, the fact that a vehicle can travel to the "other side of the known universe" in 20 seconds through this Stargate seems to be a reasonable justification for the radio waves from the probe also travelling backwards through the wormhole. I'm more bothered by the unexplained asynchronicity: the probe's signal being able to clearly travel back (i.e. it works till the connection is cut) yet people are stated to be unable to make the same travel ("we have to dial home from here").

 

[Anthony G Williams]

But if the signal came back through the wormhole, that wouldn't tell them anything about where the probe actually was.

I agree about the other point you make, though. In fact, even if we accept that radio signals were for some reason able to travel in both directions when people couldn't, then that would have meant that the explorers should have been able to remain in radio contact with Earth throughout the expedition, instead of being cut off.

 

[Ursa major]

There's the assumption in the above that there is but a single link between stargates, the one that allows the transfer of physical objects. But it's highly like that other, much lower bandwidth (and very much lower power), paths exist as part of the control mechanism. After all, how else does the originating gate find the terminating gate without setting up full-scale worm holes during the dial-up process?

In telecoms networks using common channel signalling (such as C7 aka SS7), the control plane is kept separate from the user plane. In theory, that is. However, low-capacity user traffic (SMS being an example of this) can be and is sent through the signalling network if the network is organised that way.

The radio may piggyback on one of these control paths (again, like SMS).

Note that if the radio service is intermittent, that would suggest that the control paths are temporary, i.e. there isn't a permanent connection between two stargates. That would seem sensible as they must consume power. (Perhaps a very low power/bandwidth connection is semi-permanently maintained by the stargates themselves. The bandwidth required to keep the network together could work over extremely low bandwidth paths which might have difficulty carrying any user data at a reasonable data rate, let alone radio. Or, for security reasons, use of these paths might not be permitted to carry any user data.)


This may or may not be the explanation the film's and shows' producers use.

 

[Anthony G Williams]

This may or may not be the explanation the film's and shows' producers use.

It's ingenious, but I'd be very surprised indeed if the producers thought it through to that degree, at least for the film.