Stargate

Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s script rests on one idea, and it is a pub idea: the pyramids were not built by Egyptians but by a visitor from somewhere else, who posed as a sun god and left a door behind. Stargate takes that idea seriously for exactly as long as it needs to, which is until the door opens. It is a decent adventure, better made than it had to be and thinner than it wanted to be, and if sand, hieroglyphs and men in boiler suits with rifles sound like an evening to you, it is worth yours.

The gate is the best thing in it and the film knows it. Holger Gross builds the ring as a slab of grey stone with chevrons that lock in turn, and when the last one seats the centre fills with a surface like water pushed from behind. Karl Walter Lindenlaub shoots the Colorado silo in cold steel blues, so that when the team steps out of the pyramid on the other side into hot yellow sand the cut is a slap. David Arnold’s score, all brass and a choir doing its best impression of a procession, carries the whole sequence. We sat up when the gate opened and stayed up for the walk out onto the dunes; it is a plain piece of showmanship and it worked on us completely.

James Spader is the other reason the first hour holds. He plays Daniel Jackson as a man with a permanent cold and no social instinct, sneezing through briefings, delighted by every carving, holding up the whole expedition because a wall is interesting. Kurt Russell plays Colonel O’Neil as a man who has decided not to talk, and the film gives him a grief in its first act that explains why and then has the sense to leave it alone. Russell does almost nothing and it is enough. The two of them standing in the desert, one talking and one not, is the film’s one real relationship.

Jaye Davidson’s Ra is a stranger piece of casting and it pays. Joseph A. Porro dresses him in gold with a headdress that folds back mechanically, and Davidson moves through his ship as if the gravity were lower where he stands, his voice pitched down and spread wide. The guards, Horus (Djimon Hounsou) and Anubis (Carlos Lauchu), wear falcon and jackal helmets that open the same way, and the first time one does is the sort of image a children’s matinee is supposed to produce and so rarely does.

Then the film runs out of new things to show. Once the team has found the people who work the mine, Kasuf (Erick Avari) and his children Sha’uri (Mili Avital) and Skaara (Alexis Cruz), the story settles into the oldest shape going: the strangers teach the locals to fight, the locals are grateful, the god is cross. Michael J. Duthie and Derek Brechin cut the gunfights cleanly, but there is nothing in them beyond men running across sand while things explode, and we were bored, and then faintly irritated, because the first hour had promised something odder. Viveca Lindfors’s Catherine, who sets all this in motion, stays behind on Earth. John Diehl and French Stewart, as the soldiers Kawalsky and Ferretti, are given names and little else.

Emmerich went on to blow up the White House in Independence Day two years later, and you can see that film forming here: the clean set-up, the big machine in the sky, the second half as a shooting gallery. This is the smaller of the two and, we think, the better one, because its first act is about a man reading a wall. The reviews ran from warm to scornful when it opened, and the scorn is understandable; nothing in the plot would surprise anyone who has read a comic. We would answer that it is honest about being a comic, and that the parts it cares about, the door and the man who reads the wall, it gets right.

It runs 121 minutes and carries a PG, and both are correct. See it with a child of about ten if you have one, on a wet afternoon, and do not get drawn into a conversation about who built the pyramids afterwards. It is a serial with a strong first chapter, and most serials would settle for that.