Stargate (film)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: The series is more widely known to audiences than the film that inspired it, partly because the original cast got replaced in all subsequent entries.
  • Cliché Storm: Roger Ebert's review boiled every element of the movie to this, right down to the snare-drum "military" music as Daniel arrives at headquarters.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: French Stewart in a movie about aliens.
  • Inferred Holocaust: So all those children on Ra's ship got nuked? Sure, the bomb was rigged to go off anyway, so the choice was between letting innocent people die or killing the Big Bad and presumably fewer innocent people. Thus, nuking Ra and the kids is arguably the lesser of two evils, but the Fridge Logic still pushes the act straight into Black and Gray Morality.
    • The morality of that still doesn't seem too gray to me. We only saw a handful of kids on the ship, versus a colony of thousands of men, women and children on the planet's surface. The good guys had no way to disarm the bomb, nor any other way to stop Ra. It was a decision made in the heat of battle. All things considered, the morality of the ending was as close to black-and-white as it could get without the good guys using some kind of phlebotinum of their own. If there's any Inferred Holocaust in the movie, it's simply from blowing up the ship in relatively low orbit.
    • The Novelization has the children escape the ship at the last moment though.
  • Special Effects Failure: Retroactive example from the Blu-Ray edition. The picture quality is so much higher than when the movie was filmed that you can see the wires holding up the Death Gliders (especially during close-ups on the pilots.
  • Values Dissonance: You have to admit that all those scantily-clad children running around Ra's ship would raise eyebrows if it were done today. Yes, apparently 1994 was a more innocent time. Either that or they wanted to give Ra an implied push across the Moral Event Horizon.
    • Given how he has them trained to use themselves as human shields for him and has his own little Child-Emperor theme going, it's likely it was a different horizon they were aiming for.
    • Still an improvement over reality considering Ancient Egyptian children generally went around completely nude aside from jewelry.
  • What the Hell, Casting Agency?: Jaye Davidson as Ra.
    • You'd think so, but Ra in Egyptian mythology was supposed to be somewhat androgynous.
    • Jaye did come across as appropriately creepy.
    • Oddly enough, Jaye Davidson initially rejected the role, basically daring the crew to offer him a million dollars to play Ra. They called his bluff.

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