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.

An American Tail

An American Tail (1986)
Dir. by Don Bluth

Starring Phillip Glasser, Nehemiah Persoff, John P. Finnegan and Dom DeLuise

[content warning: extensive talk of antisemitism, immigrant persecution, child labor, trauma-inducing images and a brief reference to the Irish-English conflict]

Plot:

After their home is burned in an anti-Jewish pogrom in the 1880s, a family of Russian mice emigrate to the United States. Separated from the rest of his family upon arrival, young Fievel Mousekewitz sets out on a quest to find them, and ends up inspiring the mice of New York City to fight back against the cats that are oppressing them.

Nostalgia:

As I said in my The Land Before Time review, I know that this was one of the first movies that my parents took me to see in the theater. However, I have absolutely no memory of doing so, and only remember it from the VHS copy that I grew up with. I did have a Fievel stuffed animal, however, that I retained for a very long time – probably at least middle school, if not high school.

Review:

What is it with Don Bluth and making incredibly dark movies, anyway? This is the second Bluth movie I’ve watched for this project, and I have strong memories of the other two big Bluth movies (The Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go to Heaven). And from what I’ve seen and remember, all four have content that would be likely to give their target audience nightmares. It’s like each successive movie in his filmography was playing an escalating game of “hold my beer” with childhood trauma.

This movie begins with the destruction of the Mousekewitz family home in Russia by Cossacks, in a rather intense burst of sudden violence. While I was definitely too young to understand what was going on, I now find it pretty clear that this is supposed to be an anti-Semitic pogrom, especially given the family’s surname and nationality. Their religion is never brought up explicitly during the film, though there’s definite allusions to it in the ending (more on that later). While I think that there’s definitely a missed opportunity for more concrete representation here, I’m not sure how much of it really would have fit the narrative they devised, given how much of the movie focuses on a fairly young child trying to navigate a city on his own. 

Speaking of which, this movie really doesn’t shy away from the horrors that might happen to a lost kid in 1880s New York. Almost the first thing that happens to Fievel after he arrives is being sold into labor in a sweatshop by a businessman that pretends to be helping him find his family. He gets chased, nearly eaten, attacked by humans, and even after triumphing over the cats is left for dead and ends up crying alone in a puddle in the rain. Thanks, Bluth, for attempting to traumatize the parents this time as well as the kids.

But hey, at least there are songs in this one, to break the depressing mood and give some light to the movie, right? Yeah, about that… The songs are all pretty memorable, even if I only remembered the one distinctly going in. However, even the happy ones are quite dark when you look at them closer. The big rousing number at the beginning, “There Are No Cats in America”, in addition to being dramatic irony itself in that we the audience know that there are indeed cats there, is actually just a series of stories of loss and murder. The Italian mouse portrays cats as mob bosses who murder his mother (in what might be a Godfather IIreference), and the Irish mouse’s girlfriend is eaten by a calico – a cat whose colors could easily be described as “black and tan.”

And the actual plan that the mice enact to get rid of their cat oppressors is something right out of a horror movie. I only had vague memories of the movie’s ending, but I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a steampunk mecha-mouse version of the Golem of Prague! The fact that the “Great Mouse of Minsk” is clearly rotoscoped over actual photographs of a real-life version of the thing makes it even creepier and nightmare-inducing. Are we absolutely sure that Bluth wasn’t paid off by a cartel of unscrupulous child psychologists looking for extra business?

Despite all of that, however….I still actually enjoyed the movie! The animation itself is gorgeous, obvious rotoscoping aside, and all of the songs are quite memorable. I’m not sure I’m going to be showing it to my nieces like, ever, but as an adult I definitely appreciate the craft that went in to making it a lot more than I did as a child. Still not sure why I never had any nightmares about it, though.

Nostalgia: B
Rewatch: B+, extensive “WTH, Bluth!?” notwithstanding

Stray Thoughts:

-“Somewhere Out There” positively destroys me every time. I watched this on my laptop using a Buffalo Wild Wings’ public wifi, and I was sloppy-crying in the restaurant.

-Even though critics were mixed on the movie, it ended up becoming the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film in U.S. history up to that point. It actually beat the Disney movie released that year, The Great Mouse Detective, at the box office by quite a lot. Disney and Bluth would have a rivalry for several more movies, going head-to-head until The Little Mermaid started the Disney Renaissance and pretty much ended Bluth’s time as a major competitor.

The Land Before Time

The Land Before Time (1988)

Dir. by Don Bluth

Starring Gabriel Damon, Candace Hutson and Pat Hingle

[content warning: (dinosaur) children in peril, actual child death]

Plot:

A group of young dinosaurs, led by the Apatosaurus Littlefoot, are separated from their families by an earthquake.  Together they seek out the Great Valley, the only place remaining with abundant plant life, while attempting to avoid the predation of a hungry T. Rex.

Nostalgia:

While I’ve been told that The Black Cauldron was the first movie I ever saw in theaters, and I know I saw An American Tail as well, this is the first movie that I actually remember seeing in a movie theater.  I had a Littlefoot stuffed animal that I loved growing up, and watching this kicked off a several-year-long obsession with dinosaurs.

Review:

It’s probably been a quarter century since I’ve seen this movie in its entirely.  We probably sold the VHS in a garage sale some time in middle school, and I don’t even recall watching any scenes on Youtube or anything.  However, it’s so ingrained in my childhood that I found myself recognizing scene after scene as if it had only been a couple years at most since I’d watched it.

I’m well aware of Don Bluth’s reputation for producing dark children’s fare, and from what I remember of his three other big 80s movies (The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and especially All Dogs Go to Heaven) that’s a deserved reputation.  This movie isn’t really an exception, though I found that the antics of the young dinosaurs cut the darkness with significant levity in a way that I don’t remember from the other films.  While most of the movies have a single comic relief character (usually voiced by Dom DeLuise), all five of the main dinosaurs here take turns providing the physical comedy.  When you think about it, the concept of five dinosaurs, who may or may not be orphaned, who have to travel across a deserted, blasted landscape while being stalked by an enormous predator, is inherently dark and disturbing, so the extra humor to break the mood was actually quite appreciated.

The animation itself is simply gorgeous.  A relatively large part of the movie is dialogue-free, which allows even more emphasis to be placed on the artwork, especially all of the backgrounds.  This was also the first major dinosaur movie made after the 1970s renaissance in paleontology, and the animators clearly showed their work, at least up to the level of knowledge they had available in the mid-80s.  These clearly aren’t the swamp-dwelling, sluggish creatures of prior decades (and films), even if they do get a couple of dinosaurs from different periods mixed together.

I actually liked all of the vocal performances, even the “annoying” ones, and also appreciated the decision to leave Sharptooth the T. Rex unvoiced, as it’s just as much of a force of nature for Littlefoot and co. to overcome as any of the earthquakes and tar pits.  While on the subject, I do feel like I need to touch on the tragedy of Ducky, whose voice actress, Judith Barsi, would be murdered by her own father before the movie would come out in theaters.  I really can’t think of either this or All Dogs Go to Heaven without thinking of her (and if you’re not crying yet, Ducky’s “Yep Yep Yep” catchphrase is inscribed on her tombstone).

Another thing I’d completely forgotten about in the intervening decades was just how short this movie is.  Animated movies not produced by Pixar tend to be on the shorter end as is, but this movie was short even for most theatrical animation, barely making the 70 minute mark.  From what I’ve read, over ten minutes of completed animation had to be cut out of the movie to earn a G rating (this was a time when G was the expected rating for all animation.  The first Disney movie to get a PG rating, The Black Cauldron, had debuted only a couple of years earlier, and had bombed in part as a result).  This included fairly graphic sequences of Sharptooth mauling Littlefoot’s mother, a scene that remains in the movie only in the form of shadows against a wall.  Reportedly, Steven Spielberg himself, no stranger to child endangerment in his movies, told Don Bluth that he’d have “kids crying in the lobby” if he didn’t make the edits.  As far as I know, none of the removed footage has ever shown up on any print or home media release, but I’d love to see it if it ever became available.

Inexplicably, this rather dark, dangerous dinosaur journey would go on to spark a very long-running franchise of happy, bright direct-to-DVD animated musicals.  I wonder how many of the kids who grew up with those movies have ever gone back to watch the original, and been completely shocked by how different from them it is.  While it’s a little too slight for it to have a lot of rewatch value for me now, especially when compared to Bluth’s other 80s movies, I can still definitely appreciate the impact it had on me as a child.

Nostalgia: A

Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-I didn’t mention it above, but the score for the movie, composed by James Horner, is really quite excellent as well, and gets more of a spotlight than most scores due to the lack of dialogue in a lot of scenes.

-My favorite scene in the movie is actually the one scene that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the narrative.  For about two minutes, the movie comes to halt while we watch a group of small pteradons fight wordlessly over a cherry, until eventually another unrelated lizard saunters up and eats it.  They’re all dejected, until the mother shows up with a cherry for each of them.  Finally, as they’re walking away, they pass a depressed-looking Littlefoot, and one of them attempts to give their cherry to the dinosaur to cheer him up.  It feels like something out of the golden age of Disney animated shorts, and I found it positively charming.

Krull

Well, they were DEFINITELY going for Star Wars
with the poster

Krull (1983)

Dir. by Peter Yates

Starring Ken Marshall, Freddie Jones, and Lysette Anthony

[content warning: spiders (including picture), child death]

Plot:

A young prince teams up with a mysterious wise man, a cyclops, an ineffectual sorcerer and a band of thieves to rescue his fiancée from the teleporting fortress of an interplanetary marauder, who believes that the princess’s child is destined to rule the galaxy.

Nostalgia:

None!  That’s right, we’re finally tackling a cult 80s movie that I’ve never seen.  At least, never seen in its entirety.  I’m pretty sure I’ve caught bits and pieces of it here and there on TV.

Review:

If you think that plot summary above sounds like someone took the scripts for Legend and Star Wars and ran them through a predictive text algorithm, you wouldn’t be far off the mark.  This movie was clearly inspired by the latter film, although with a much stronger fantasy emphasis.  There are prophecies, shapeshifting wizards, cyclopses, flying horses, and trap-filled fortresses, but there are also weird alien slugs encased in metal suits that use laser rifles.  And unfortunately, the whole movie doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Unlike Star Wars, where George Lucas was able to cover for incomplete (or at least under-communicated) worldbuilding with a grand mythic plot structure and wonderful lived-in production design, Krull seems to jump from set piece to set piece without rhyme or reason.  Ostensibly, they’re on a mission to discover the future location of a fortress that teleports to a new place every dawn.  However, all of the connective tissue is missing from the screenplay.  It feels like it’s a D&D session where the players go so far off-script that the DM ends up just rolling on the Random Encounter table over and over. 

For example, at one moment the party is dealing with quicksand in a swamp and a shapeshifting assassin that attempts to take out the prince by replacing one of the party.  After a brief cutaway to the captured princess, the group is suddenly out of the swamp and in a forest, and is being brought food by a bunch of never-seen-before women.  No explanation of how they found them or where they came from is ever offered, merely that one of them is the wife of one of the thieves, played by an extremely young Liam Neeson.  And every time they seem to run into an unsurmountable problem, one of the crew suddenly remembers or mentions an alternative route or plan of action, one that had never been even hinted at before.  Sure, that sort of pull-it-out-of-nowhere plotting is typical for a fairy tale, but it really isn’t going to pass muster for anyone who stops and thinks about it for a minute.

It doesn’t help that, after a fairly pretentious opening monologue about the prophecy, we are introduced to the prince and princess, about to be wed, in a set of scenes that reminded me of nothing as much as the Druidia parts of Spaceballs.  In general, the sets, costumes and effects are wildly hit-or-miss.  Some of them, such as Prince Colwyn’s costume and his distinctive weapon, show where some of the huge budget (almost $50 million in 1983 dollars) went.  Others, such as the rest of the party, look like the crew knocked over the warehouse holding the spare costumes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  And having re-watched Willow already, made only five years after this, the transformation effects look downright awful.  Actually, now that I mention it, that’s exactly what this movie is like: Holy Grail as a drama instead of a comedy.

We are gathered here today to witness Princess Vespa, daughter of King Roland, going right past the altar, heading down the ramp and out the door!

Now, I’ve been very down on the film so far.  And don’t get me wrong: it might be the worst movie I’ve done for this project so far.  But there was at least one sequence that I did think was of a significantly higher quality than anything else around it: the Widow of the Web.  In this sequence, party member Ynyr the Old One (why “Old One” we’re never told, especially because the actor looks about mid-50s, tops) has to cross a giant spider’s web, complete with translucent-bodied giant spider, to obtain the location of the fortress from the witch imprisoned at the center.  That the witch is his ex-wife, and that she was imprisoned for killing their child, adds emotion to the scene that is completely lacking in most of the rest of the movie.  The effects here are also noticeably better than the rest of the film, and the stop-motion spider, its body transparent enough to vaguely make out organs inside, is the single best effect in the movie.

 So, yeah, this movie is…not good.  However, I’m still kinda glad I watched it, as it gets referenced a lot (if usually only for its badness), and it was a significant blind spot in my fantasy film knowledge.  Now, it’s time to watch something a bit better.

Nostalgia: N/A

Watch: D+

Stray Thoughts:

-Prince Colwyn is played by Kenneth Marshall, none other than Michael Eddington from Deep Space Nine.  I actually had a hard time recognizing him with a full head of 80s hair, and I’m not sure I would have if I hadn’t known that Marshall was in it.

-Speaking of recognizing actors, in addition to an extremely young Liam Neeson, another of the bandits is played by an extremely young Robbie Coltrane, though his voice was dubbed by someone else for some unknown reason.  It’s not an accent thing, as Neeson was using his native Irish accent.

-Sorry, but my D&D background and Medieval Studies classes won’t let it pass: you keep using the word “glaive.”  I do not think it means what you think it means.

A glaive is a polearm, not a spinning death Frisbee

-While I’m on the subject, if you do have a magic spinning death Frisbee, why the heck would you keep it in your pocket until the last five minutes of the movie?  Especially if you spend a good 5-10 minutes on obtaining it at the beginning of the film?  Just saying…

-The planet Krull has two suns.  Why?  Because Tatooine did, obviously.