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Sci-Fi
Movie Reviews
Stargate: The Movie Doctor Daniel Jackson is recruited by Professor Katherine Langford to help interpret some ancient text symbols that were uncovered along with ancient artifacts in Egypt. After Jackson makes the interpretation, they show him the main artifact, which he has correctly identified as a "stargate", and he joins a team of Air Force special ops to go through it. On the other side, they discover a stone pyramid in the middle of a desert and a village of humanoids that work and live under the oppressive guidance of powerful aliens that they consider to be gods. Jackson searches for the information they need to get home while the gods appear from the sky in a huge pyramidal spaceship and proceed to bend the people beneath their will. The interesting element missing from this movie which was introduced in the series later is the snake-like parasites referred to as the G'ould. The god Ra which appeared in the movie, later referred to as a G'ould in the series, was simply presented as a very powerful humanoid that had discovered a way to cheat death by transferring his life-force to other younger bodies. There was no mention of any snake-like parasite whatsoever. This suggests that the snake-like parasites were introduced in this series as a sensation-prop, specifically one of horrific terror, which would act as a more substantial visual representation of evil and evil-incarnate, because the mere idea that there were ancient entities transferring their life-forces from one body to another to achieve immortality wasn't quite sensational or horrific enough to pass itself off as something "evil" in true hollywood fashion. After listening to the producers and directors of Stargate SG1, this becomes all the more obvious, as they have no qualms about admitting how pressured they have been to continue to present more powerful and horrific enemies for the SG1 team to do battle with. Personally, i would have been perfectly happy without the snakes, but apparently, that's not how most of the public viewing audience sees things. Because of this fascination and perversity with horror elements, science fiction serials such as Stargate have become dominated by fear-mongering monster props seeking to enhance the sensation-arrousing scenes of science fiction. I won't harp on this horrific trend in science fiction, but I will admit that it turns me off more than it interests me and because of it, I tend to prefer the Stargate movie much more than any of its snake-dominated episodes and tend to give higher grades to those more interesting episodes that take leave from the typical G'ould conflicts by showing us other alien planets and interesting races and technology woven together by plots that do not include snakes. The aspect of the movie that turns me off the most, on the other hand, is also typical Hollywood, as it presents the American military as a liberating force of yet another state of less-fortunate people, and in this case, these people are almost exact reflections of Middle Eastern Muslims. Hollywood movies that show the US military and its leaders as nothing but liberators and saviors are not simply forms of entertainment for the average audience, they are propaganda films that place the notion in all American's subconscious minds that the US, its governmental leaders, and its military always represent the good guys and never do any wrong. The perpetuation of this myth in Hollywood war-movies has obviously found its new home in science fiction. Coincidentally, Stargate was first aired in 1994, just 2 years after the Persian Gulf War and during a time when the American public was being programmed to think that Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and many other Middle Eastern countries and their peoples were being unjustly oppressed by dictatorial regimes. The idea that these countries and peoples needed a chance to practice American-style democracy was the pretext for the green-light to let the US bomb and invade them. The catalyst needed to make such action possible was the ultimate terrorist act, and that came on 9/11/2001. The point is, the American public is dumbed-down by the mainstream media while Hollywood feeds its American egocentricity, and movies and serials that paint the US military and its political leaders as only benevolent and well-meaning liberators and saviors are part of the regular American's viewing diet. There is no shortage of such ego-feeding ethnocentric entertainment in the USA. I would suggest a more balanced diet of entertainment that doesn't paint the American military as the liberators and saviors ad nauseam and gives more credit to foreign intelligence. Nick Zentor, 3/6/07 |
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