posted
My wife and I are big fans of the series, but haven't seen the movie in a while, so we watched it last night. I was watching it with an eye to making it the first episode of the series and seeing how that would work.
What struck me is how bad the movie is, especially compared to the series which is awesome. From cheap special effects problems (like using Earth's moon twice for the Abydonian moons and spelling mistakes in the subtitles during Ra's speech), to gaping plot holes (like genius scientists too dumb to pick out the seventh symbol or even to try all of the symbols until they found the one that worked with the other six that they already knew, and Jaffa who get down to the Stargate room without using the rings), it really just wasn't well done. The plot was only so-so. I never really believed Earth was in danger.
The Jaffa looked awesome, though the staff weapons definitely got improved for the series.
Connection pluses: 1) They mention they've been working on it for two years, which is the length of time Carter says she worked at the Pentagon on the Stargate program before it became a reality.
2) Ra's backstory. At first, the whole thing about him being a big grey thing seems like a problem until you consider that noone ever really saw this. It wasn't a flashback, it was just a lazy way for the audience to see what had happened. Daniel was reading cave drawings which were put there by the Abydonians. That could've been a representation of an Unas, or some other lifeform Ra was in before coming to Earth.
Daniel does say that Ra was one of the last of his race, not the last, and that his race was on the verge of extinction. All supported by the series, especially if you give leeway for a relatively uninformed Abydosian scribe, who couldn't exactly interview Ra for the details of his life.
3) They knew what the Gate was before they turned it on. Everything about the base and the attitude of the people there says they knew what the Gate would do if they could get it to work. This ties into the fact that SG-1 activated the gate in 1969, and Ernest activated it in the 40's, both with military witnesses around. The airforce knew what the Gate would do, they just didn't know how to make it do it.
4) Naqueda (though unnamed in the movie) being the basis of "Ra's" technology.
Connection drawbacks: 1) Little details like the name and appearance of the mountain, O'Niel's son's name, etc. are annoying and impossible to reconcile because they were simply changed. Did anyone ever notice that the sound effects for the death gliders launching in the movie is the same sound effect they use in the series for the Gate shutting down?
2) Big details like the different symbols on the Abydosian Stargate and the fact that they were supposedly in another galaxy. I attribute the latter to an error in the software they were using. Obviously, it just didn't know how to read what was happening.
3) The Jaffa. I only saw two kinds of Jaffa, but unfortunately, one of them appeared to be an Anubis Guard. The other was Horus, of which there were several. The series points out that the Horus Guard protect the family of Ra, which Herour is. But we'd have to come up with a reason why Ra has Anubis Guards (which I don't think we ever saw on the series) in his service.
4) The lack of a DHD. I know, it could've been off in an alcove somewhere, but noone was even concerned with how they actually dialed the Gate. This is more laziness in the writing, and I chose to believe that all the conversation about how to get back took place behind closed doors, and that they basically already knew how to dial manually. Whether they found the DHD while they were there or not... who knows?
posted
Well, Sam for sure didn't know about the DHD until she saw it in "Children of Gods" (you know, the "We had to McGyver it" scene). So probably Jack's movie posse dialed manually for the return trip. I forget if there was explicit dialogue about Daniel discovering the DHD soon after Jack's team had left, but I think there was.
The team probably also misdialed a bit, and ended in one of those parallel universes where everybody had subtly different names and faces...
The abysmal quality of the movie made "Children of Gods" all the more awesome when I first saw it. My heart missed a beat every time the pilot episode rationalized away a gaffe in the movie, in a scientifictionally plausible way no less.
Too bad that "Emancipation" so quickly fell to the English-speaking space aliens plothole, when the show could quite legitimately have evoked a Babel Fish clause of some sort. But there were many good retcon-type saves later on, too. For a few seasons, the show simply could do no wrong, which was an amazing exception to the general rule governing theater movies and their TV "sequels".
Thinking back on what Daniel actually did in terms of deciphering the Gate, it is possible to say that he got it all wrong. The Gate team simply was so desperate at that point that they'd accept any outrageous "expert opinion" they could present to the USAF to get their program back on track and the funding flowing. They probably already knew enough to get the Gate activated, but lacked the authority to use it since the last legitimate user had gone missing. With Daniel's "knowledge", they could lay a thick smokescreen in front of Pentagon, throw the switch, and pick up from where they left.
posted
There's no dialouge about Daniel finding the DHD, only about finding the cartouche with all the addresses on it. The DHD is just there suddenly in the middle of the Gate chamber when they go back to Abydos.
There is dialouge where they see a DHD in video footage (The one on Chulak, I think) and postulate that it's a control device, missing from the dig at Giza, and should be available on every world with a Gate. Jack doesn't chime in about seeing one on Abydos and Daniel doesn't say anything about finding one. But we can safely assume that he found it while looking around, explaining why everyone on Earth was so interested in seeing it. The original team must have dialed manually. That's essentially what the Gate computer at the SGC is doing, afterall. They supply the Gate with power, then the computer tells it which symbol to turn to. So dialing manually should be something they're familiar with. When it's brought up for the first time in the series, I think it's without any Eureka moment, as though they know how to do it.
posted
I've always thought that the DHD was always around, and even mentioned in O'Neil's report in passing, but it was a simple case that no one aside from the four movie survivors had seen one. Dialogue from Carter in COTG was along the lines of "this must be what was missing from teh dig at Giza! Look how small it is!". We KNOW that Jack is hardly a real stickler for detail in his reports, and may have simply noted "Jackson found some small device to activate the gate, but I wasn't paying attention".
It's also noteworthy that in the movie-universe novel follow-ups, they never go into how people use other stargates, and they don't have DHDs either. It was always simply that someone "re-aligned the gate", without describing any detail as to how.
posted
In other words, the books were as lazy as the movie. I just can't wrap my head around how they could leave such a basic thing out. There's no way they would go there without having some plan on how to get back. And we know they had *some* plan, because O'Niel ordered Daniel to realign the Gate and get everyone back almost as soon as they got there. And they talked about dialing back before they left.
I'm more interested in reconciling the Jaffa issue. Were post-ascension Anubis' guards ever seen with their helmets up?
WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
Just a thought, but aren't the symbols on the gates representative of the stellar constellations? If so then if you were actually dialing a different galaxy, wouldn't the constellations appear different? (Not to mention the millenia of stellar drift and how these constellations would change shape.)
I was let down by the movie when I first saw it because it wasn't what was advertised. While I thought it was good overall, what was portrayed in the previews was more action oriented. Kind of like advertising a Ferrari and getting a Civic.
If I remember right, once they first get to Abydos, their plan WAS to prepare to dial right back. That's when Danny boy springs the whole "I gotta find the right symbols cause I just ASSUMED they'd be right here" line on the less than happy troops.
As for not ringing down, Ra's ship was docked on the pyramid at the time so they might have taken the stairs...literally. I would really like to see a schematic of just how this "docking" with a pyramid works. I believe the comment was made that it was the same size as the one at Giza. So what other dynamics are involved in this? This should mean the ship is virtually hollow, but does this mean that the sides are more or less there only as solar collectors? Otherwise what's the point in such a massive ship with so little internal volume for the size?
I also wondered what benefits the Jaffa helmets provided. They seemed more a matter of intimidating the locals than actual tactical benefit. But I do miss them in the series. Imagine going from those to the skullcaps that pretty much was all you got in the TV show...poor Jaffa.
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged
posted
The "constellations are only visible from Earth" problem is no problem at all, when we remember that Earth is the center of the Gate network.
Regardless of whether the Ancients originated from Earth or not, the Goa'uld certainly used the planet as a hubworld once they switched over to human hosts. Now, assume that the symbols are Ancient lettering that as such has nothing to do with constellations. However, sooner or later a proud Jaffa will inform a lowly Egyptial slave that his Master goes to that place in the sky (insert hand gesture) when these symbols are punched in - and lo, the slave begins to see exactly those symbols in that part of the sky!
If the literal interpretation of the symbols as constellations indeed is bass-ackward, then it's also easy to see why the computers in the movie would so completely misunderstand where the Gate was taking the MALP. With the greater amount of data from the Abydos cartouche, SGC would finally get the math right and would realize that Abydos was in fact next door to Earth.
Of course, the "symbols are Earth constellations" model still works as a rough approximation, assuming that the Egyptians paid attention and got the correlation between symbols and hand-pointing mroe or less right. It won't work for all combinations, but presumably relatively few combinations would have been dialed from Earth and witnessed by the slaves, perhaps so few that no major contradictions arose.
As for the helmets, they certainly continue to appear in the show; it's just that we see LOTS more Goa'uld underlings in the show than in the movie. Costuming must be a financial issue not only for the TV producers, but for the Goa'uld as well!
posted
That's a good explanation of the constellation problem, but the fact that different symbols exist on the Gate in the movie is still a problem. In the series, all the Gates (in this galaxy) have the same same set of symbols except the point of origin, which is unique on some Gates. This, in fact, is a bit of a problem in the series as well, because sometimes we see the point of origin is just one of the standard symbols.
We could just ignore the difference if it wasn't such a major plot point. However, we could rationalize it this way: Earth apparently has the same address in the series no matter which Gate you're dialing from. But, presumably, they would have had to have figured out what that address was. Maybe that's what Daniel *really* didn't understand in the movie. What order to put the symbols in.
What makes the movie even worse, as has been touched on, is that Daniel really didn't do anything except identify Earth's Point of Origin symbol. The fact that they were (maybe) constellations meant nothing in the long run, because it didn't help him figure out how to dial home. He still needed it to be written down.
posted
The six points in space using constellations always irritated me because a constellation is not in one spot in the galaxy. Some of the stars in it could be separated by hundreds or even thousands of light years.
And I hated the snake-head helmets. They were clumsy and just looked bad, especially after seeing the Anubis and Horus helmets in the movie.
posted
Yah. It always felt like the Snakehead Jaffa were about to fall over from the top-heaviness.
Maybe the point in space represented by the constellation is the geometric center of the constellation. There's still no way that anyone on a planet would be able to figure out where those points were unless they could tell where the stars were. It doesn't seem like the Ancients ever meant anyone less advanced than themselves to use the Gate system.
posted
ALL the helmets were extremely top-heavy. They ditched them after the fourth season or so, after which they showed up only in flashbacks. In the series, we only see the helmets used by the families of Apophis and Ra (Serpent and Jackal/Anubis heads), and only ever hear of the Setesh guard helmets and their droopy noses.
The skull caps were pretty much gone after the seventh season too. Remember, all Jaffa were originally supposed to be bald! And it was pretty funny in "The Other Guys" when the science nerds steal a couple suits of armor and their skull caps - which are supposed to be solid metal, mind you - and then just peel them off like the floppy foam rubber the props really are.
posted
I don't think the jackal heads are ever in the series Mark. The family of Ra are guarded by the Horus Guard with the bird heads. The Anubis heads were seen in the movie, though.
It would be really cool to see designs for helmets of the Jaffa from all the other Goa'uld we've seen over the years, especially the ones pretending to be gods from cultures other than ancient egyptian. I wonder if any dork artists like myself have done that... must Google...
quote:It doesn't seem like the Ancients ever meant anyone less advanced than themselves to use the Gate system.
I'd say the exact opposite. These things are apparently built to be idiot-proof: they are nigh-indestructible, can be dialed without any technology whatsoever (as long as the DHD hasn't been destroyed), have multiple backup options for dialing in case the DHD goes missing, "intuitively" shut down only after everybodeee's aboard who's comiiing aboard...
In short, everything smacks of being built for the safety and comfort of a truly clueless user. The only skill you need is the ability to draw the symbols on a "phone book" of some sort (or otherwise memorize them) so that you can keep tabs of where the device takes you when you dial this way.
And I still think Daniel figured out exactly zip about the dialing system, but his home-cooked technobabble was convincing enough for the USAF boneheads in charge of the operation to finally make them yield to a "go".
posted
The system does seem fairly idiot-proof, but it's also apparently nigh-impossible to figure out. Almost all the Earth level cultures who have found their Gates haven't figured out how to use them. But, the of course there's Dr. Giggles who figured out how to go Unas hunting... but he only figured out that one address.
Once you've figured it out, though, yah... it's almost impossible to screw up, unless you're SG-1... then there are endless ways to screw it up.
posted
Even beyond needing to figure out an address in the first place, there's another problem. Once you find an address and get through, you're stuck. The gates don't have their own addresses written on them or anything. If you haven't found the address to your own world somewhere, you're probably never getting home.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic
