STARGATE Starring Kurt Russell, James Spader and Jaye Davidson. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Category II. At Cosmo, Dynasty, Liberty, Park, Prince, Tuen Mun, UA Queensway, UA Sha Tin, UA Times Square, UA Whampoa, Yuen Long.
THE title might suggest some kind of celebrity scandal (a la Camillagate) but the film itself is something altogether sillier. It's one of the daftest movies to pass this way in many months; almost cult-worthy in its camp grandiosity but just not well enough sustained to qualify for true immortality. Still, this is definitely a good call for the late-show crowd, especially the Trekkies, techno-heads and various sub-species of anorak out there.
There's nothing shockingly original about Stargate. It has basically borrowed bits from a lot of other, generally better, books, movies and television shows, notably the Lucas/Spielberg school (the Star Wars films in particular, a couple of old Star Trek stories (including one called The Gates Of Time), the pioneering FX sequence from 2001 - once so beloved of hallucinogenics enthusiasts - where they zap through the, er, gates of time. Also, and most heavily, the British-made 1960 film version of H.G.
Wells' The Time Machine - a genuine camp classic, in which gentlemanly time-traveller Rod Taylor fast-forwards 800,000 years to rally an enslaved human race against their technologically superior overlords. There's a dash, too, of the eccentric teachings of '70s cult writer Erich von Daniken (he of Chariots Of The Gods fame), who reckoned the pyramids had been built by aliens.
Put all that in the mix, and the gloop you get out sends two unlikely space travellers, steely Kurt Russell and wimpish James Spader, hurtling through a worm-hole in the heavens to a planet on the other side of the universe ruled by Jaye Davison out of The Crying Game.
They are able to do this because archaeologists had unearthed a structure in Egypt which the US military, who had, of course, got hold of it as of right and correctly deduced, the way you would, that it was the gateway to a kind of cosmic superhighway through space. Spader is the brilliant-but-misunderstood Egyptologist, and, evidently, von Daniken disciple, they bring in when stumped to translate the secret space formula hidden in a tablet of pictographs they had found with it.
