This week, the Stargate franchise came back to life with a new web series, Stargate Origins, on the Stargate Command streaming service. To celebrate the occasion, Stargate Command has posted the original Stargate movie on YouTube for free. And you can watch it right now!
Stargate hit theaters in 1994, and it was created by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich at an early point in their partnership, before they became known for disaster movies…and movies that were disasters. To be honest, parts of the Stargate film feel like a mash up of Indiana Jones and Star Wars. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t fun! Stargate takes Egyptian mythology as a starting point, and postulates that the ancient gods were actually ageless aliens who enslaved the people of Earth. The stargate itself allowed the main characters to travel to a world where Ra still reigned over his slaves, before they led a revolution against him.
If you came into the Stargate franchise through the three TV series, the film doesn’t line up very well with what came later. But on its own terms, Stargate really holds up as an adventure. Any movie would be lucky to have Kurt Russell and James Spader as the co-leads, and Stargate gave them both good material to work with. Russell had a particularly powerful arc as Col. Jack O’Neil, a man who spends most of the movie mourning his son’s death before forming an emotional bond with a teenager from another world. As for Spader’s Daniel Jackson, he gets to go from book worm to action hero.
You don’t even have to watch the TV series to enjoy Stargate. It works as a standalone film as well, and if you never watched Stargate SG-1, then it leaves the characters in a pretty good place. Devlin and Emmerich keep threatening to remake this film so they can do “their trilogy.” But they got it right the first time. If you haven’t seen Stargate before, now’s the perfect time to give it a try. It probably won’t be free forever.
What do you think about the original Stargate? Let’s discuss in the comment section below!
Images: MGM
