Stargate

Stargate (1994)
Dir. by Roland Emmerich

Starring Kurt Russell, James Spader and Jaye Davidson

[content warning: Orientalism, transphobia, white savior narratives, depression, suicide, child death]

Plot:

Egyptologist and conspiracy-theorist Daniel Jackson is hired by the government to translate a series of hieroglyphs on a stone unearthed in Giza in the 20s.  When he succeeds, he learns that they are the code to activate a portal to the other side of the universe.  Traveling with a team of soldiers to investigate the destination planet, Jackson becomes entangled in a revolution by the humans living on that planet against their alien overlords, who have taken the guises of the Egyptian deities.

Nostalgia:

I’m almost positive that I saw this movie in the theaters.  I don’t actually remember having done so, but it’s exactly the sort of movie I would have gone to see. If it wasn’t in the theaters, I certainly saw it on Pay-Per-View the next year.  We taped it off of TV, and the Extended Cut DVD is one of the first I can remember buying when I was in college and got my first DVD player.  I had several friends who were obsessed with the TV show at the time, but I never really watched it while it was airing.  Saw the first couple of seasons on DVD about a decade ago now, and that’s about it.

Review:

How the hell did this movie start a franchise that’s lasted for 25 years?  There’s been three TV shows, two direct-to-DVD movies, and a web series, all stemming from this action B-movie from the guys who brought you Geostorm and The Day After Tomorrow.  What did this movie had that so many other mid-90s movies didn’t?

I think what it had going for it, more than anything else, was its setting and design.  This movie came out in 1994, at a time when CG was beginning to take over the film world.  Sci-fi movies were big, and there hadn’t been a big, traditional fantasy movie since NeverEnding Story II in 1990, four years earlier.  While this isn’t, strictly speaking, a fantasy movie, the ancient Egyptian trappings give it much more of a time-traveling fantasy feel than most of the other sci-fi movies of the time.  It was something different and unexpected. 

It also helps that the movie has two strong leads.  An almost unrecognizably young James Spader, of The Blacklist fame, plays Daniel Jackson as a nerdy scientist who’s incredibly competent in his field, but is completely out of his depth in most other situations.  As a very nerdy kid myself, who’d later be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, I saw a lot of myself in Jackson, and immediately emphasized with him.  Despite his social awkwardness, Spader manages to imbue Jackson with some of the quirky humor that he would later bring to Alan Shore on Boston Legal. In one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, Jackson, in an attempt to communicate to the planet’s citizens that the disgusting-looking food they’ve given him tastes like chicken, flaps his arms up and down and makes clucking noises repeatedly.  Everyone – slave and Earth soldier alike – just stares at him.  It’s equal parts endearing and cringe-inducing, but goes a long way to making Jackson an actual person instead of a character defined by his job or role in the film.

The same can be said for Kurt Russell as Col. O’Neil.  The role could have just been played as a hard-ass military commander, and that’s what he seems to be for the first couple of scenes.  However, he’s introduced in a depressive state, with his son having recently died in an accidental shooting.  As the movies goes on, Russell brings in not only the sadness that one might expect with such a background, but also the anger.  His Russell is bitter and self-destructive, but not in a way that he’s willing to take down the rest of his men with him.  While I enjoyed Richard Dean Anderson in the role in what I saw of the TV series, I think that his portrayal is barely the same character as what we see in the movie, rounding off all of the sharp edges of his personality and making him a more lighthearted individual.  It works for the show, but I don’t think it would have for the movie.

Now, the setting does bring up legitimate concerns about Orientalism. The movie essentially revolves around the (already existing at the time) conspiracy theory that all of the great works of ancient Egypt were completed with alien assistance.  Because, of course, a culture from that part of the world wouldn’t have been able to do it on their own.  No, the pyramids were just landing docks for alien spacecraft, and all of Egyptian culture is based on lies and manipulation.  And it takes the arrival of the strong, Western military power to free the backwards, tribal slaves from their oppressors *eyeroll* (though, in the movie’s defense, they were deliberately kept in that state by the aliens.  The script wisely incorporates two millennia of linguistic drift and doesn’t have them speaking an existing dialect, and you could posit that there would have been a corresponding 2000-year tech increase if not for alien intervention).

So yeah, the cultural politics of Stargate aren’t great.  Also complicating matters is the casting of Jaye Davidson as the villain Ra. He had just come off of his debut performance as a transgender woman in the movie The Crying Game, a performance for which he’d received a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  His role here is obviously playing up that association, deliberately going for a very young, androgynous look for the utterly evil alien.  That this movie came out the same year as Ace Ventura, a movie also inspired by The Crying Game for its negative portrayal of a transgender woman, makes me convinced that the filmmakers were going for the same thing.  It seems to have actually been enough to get Jaye Davidson to quit acting altogether after this movie.

  

Fortunately for the franchise, from what I remember the TV show’s more complicated mythology manages to help alleviate this problem somewhat, though there are definitely individual episodes that are still cringe-worthy in an early TNG way (I’m looking at you, “Emancipation”).  I’m not sure I could recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, especially if you’re sensitive to Orientalism or white savior narratives. I still enjoyed the movie, however, despite its more obvious flaws, though that enjoyment has drifted more into the “guilty pleasure” status over the years. 

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-One thing I definitely can’t fault the movie for is its score. I really like David Arnold’s music, especially the main title theme, which they’d use for the TV series as well.

-My roommate in college was from Colorado Springs, which is where the real complex that the Stargate team is fictionally located in resides.  He always got great amusement from the fact that in real-life there’s a zoo sitting on top of the mountain the Stargate’s inside of.

Big Trouble in Little China

They just don’t make posters like this anymore.
God bless Drew Struzan 

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Dir. by John Carpenter

Starring Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun, Kim Cattrall, James Hong and Victor Wong

[content warning: discussion of racial stereotyping/Yellow Peril movies]

Synopsis:

After a night of drinking and gambling, trucker driver Jack Burton accompanies his friend Wang Chi, a San Francisco Chinatown restauranteur, to the airport to pick up his fiancée.  When she is abducted by a street gang, the two mount a rescue attempt, only to become involved in the evil plans of a two-thousand-year-old Chinese sorcerer, who intends to use her to break the curse that is imprisoning him.

Nostalgia:

I first remember seeing the poster for this movie as a VHS box cover some time in the late 80s.  It was in one of those old-school video stores where you had to bring up a key on a hook with the movie’s number on it to the clerk, who would then retrieve the movie from a storeroom.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t see the movie itself until I was quite a bit older, closer to high school age, though I can’t remember the first time I watched it.  It’s just always been there, a cult guilty pleasure that I’ve had fun introducing to various people over the years.

Rewatch:

Like Sneakers, this is one of my favorite movies of all time.  Therefore, this won’t really be a reevaluation of the movie like earlier reviews have been, since I’m not all that capable of being truly objective about it.  However, I can definitely explain why I like it so much, and why I think it was vastly misunderstood by critics of the time and has come to be a cult classic now.

The premise for this movie, at first blush, looks like it’s going to be both generic and offensive.  The white guy hero helps the goofy Asian sidekick rescue his fiancée from a bunch of stock character stereotypes.  However, that’s the genius of the movie: Jack Burton is the goofy sidekick.  He only thinks that he’s the hero, and we’re seeing the entire movie from his point of view.  In reality, Wang Chi is the real hero of the movie, and Jack Burton pretty much fails at everything he attempts for the majority of the film. 

One of the people here doesn’t really belong. Wonder which one. 

I mentioned in my review for Romancing the Stone how I admired that movie for being a satire of a genre while also being a top-notch entry in that genre.  Big Trouble in Little China does much the same thing for the “kung fu fantasy” genre (I hesitate to call it wuxia, as the focus really isn’t on the martial arts.  Would anyone know the proper term for it?).  Now, the movie never (overtly) pokes fun at Burton in the way of a parody, and it’s not really a comedy at all, though there definitely is a strain of humor running through the film.  It does, however, take pains to subvert his self-styled awesomeness at every turn, showing how much of his John Wayne bravado is simply overcompensation for having absolutely no idea what’s going on.

For example, one of my favorite moments in the film comes in the climactic fight.  The good and evil forces are squared off in a room, and both sides let out battle cries before charging each other.  Caught up in the moment, Burton screams along with them, firing his gun into the air.  Reality ensues, however, when the low plaster ceiling he just fired into collapses and hits him in the head, knocking him out of the first part of the battle.  Later in the same fight, he’s picking himself off the floor when he’s cornered by a large warrior in imposing armor.  Still on his back, Burton slips a knife out of his boot and stabs him, killing him.  This moment of badassness soon turns ridiculous, however, as the armored warrior collapses on top of him, and he has great difficulty extricating himself from underneath.

This is not the hero you’re looking for

Critics at the time failed to pick up on any of this, and savaged the movie for having an ineffectual hero.  Several critics, Roger Ebert among them, also compared the film to overly racist caricatures like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu.  However, I feel like there’s way more going on here than they’re giving the movie credit for.  First, the movie is told from Burton’s point of view.  He is a complete outsider to this culture, gets all of his information second-hand, and spends most of the movie running from one supernatural encounter to another without any clue what’s actually going on.  He should be seen as an unreliable narrator. 

Second, to satirize a genre, you do have to utilize the tropes of the genre.  Since a lot of the critics missed on the satire, I think that they assumed that the tropes were all being played straight.  If that were the case, then they’d have a point.  I don’t believe that they’re right, however.  I also think that there’s no attempt to claim that any of this is reflective of actual Chinese legends or culture.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  There’s a line of dialogue halfway through the film that I find very telling in this regard.  Egg Shen, the sorcerer on the good guy side, comments about all of the different conflicting religions and magical traditions in China by saying “We take what we want and leave the rest, just like your salad bar.”  So too, I think, does this movie.

In the end, Jack Burton may be the one who deals the final blow to the evil sorcerer Lo Pan.  However, Wang Chi and Egg Shen are the real heroes of this movie.  Not the clueless white guy.  And coming in the middle of all of the mid-80s Stallone/Schwarzenegger action movies with Middle Eastern/Asian/South American villains, that’s something that I can really appreciate.

Stray Thoughts

-I didn’t mention it above, but I find this movie as equally quotable as Sneakers.

-The reporter character is literally only in this movie to provide exposition, and very clunky exposition at that.  However, there’s this wonderful little moment when she rattles off like a paragraph of exposition that everyone (other than Burton and the audience) would already know, and everyone else just turns and stares at her.

-There was this stuntman named Al Leong, who was in pretty much every major action movie of the 80s (he was the terrorist who steals the candy bar in Die Hard, for example).  I think this is the most screentime he ever gets in one movie, as the extremely badass cleaver-wielding leader of Lo Pan’s army of soldiers.

-This movie was apparently one of the major influences on the original Mortal Kombat game, specifically for the characters of Raiden and Shang Tsung.  We'll get to the other main influence, Bloodsport, further down the line.

-The scene where one of the main henchmen kills himself by deliberately inflating until he explodes has to be one of the most memorable death scenes in movie history.