Saturday, August 2, 2008

Type-Past (think 'Drive By') Dissing of Stargate: Continuum

I used to be a fan of Stargate SG-1. The first 6 seasons were good, entertaining, television-version science fiction. Season 7 wasn't bad. Season 8 was okay. Season 9 stank, and I didn't even hang around for season 10.

But, lots of folks whose opinions I respect told me that the second Stargate movie, Continuum, was good. It wouldn't disappoint. So, I bought it today, and watched it this afternoon.

It wasn't good and I am disappointed.

I’ve heard numerous times that Richard Dean Anderson brought his A game for this movie.

Little good that does when Jack O’Neill, in all versions, is in the thing for all of ~ 5 minutes. Even less good it does when he gets killed by a needle stab that wouldn’t be remotely fatal in real life (hell, whatever that glowy fluid is doesn’t even kill the extracted symbiote, so I doubt it’s poisonous either) in one scene. Ignominious end for Jack O’Neill, and, whatever’s between him and Carter, she doesn’t even get to shed a tear for him on screen. Very disappointing on both fronts. The entire presentation (stage/set, blocking, lighting, dialogue) of the extraction ceremony carried all the visual and cultural interest and emotional impact of waiting in line to get lunch in the canteen – rather less, in fact, as the lunch experience expends less time, requires less observation of people standing around carefully still, in obviously specific places for never explained reasons, and the chow line is more likely to be enlivened with intriguing conversations (we’ve been known to have Hindi lessons in line).

And then there's the ship frozen in the Arctic idiocy. Hello. Do you really expect us to believe that a ship with a hole that big, that close to the water line, sailed any distance in the open ocean, especially with its entire crew dead? The ocean is rarely as smooth as what they showed, and it doesn't stay that way more than a day when it is. Yet, the Achilles lasts long enough to not only reach the Arctic Circle, but get frozen ever so gently into the pack ice. And then, wonder of wonders, the pack ice cradles the ship with all the tender, doting care of a writer polishing his favorite coyly hero-worshiped Marty Stew character, for 70 years - instead of crushing the damaged, compromised, weakened vessel. In real life, ships that do arctic exploration and can therefore be expected to be frozen into the ice are specially built and specially reinforced expressly for the purpose of keeping the ice from crushing them when they're frozen into it whole and undamaged. Poor research and poor writing in the service of contrived plotting, melodrama and pretty (and no doubt expensive) but ultimately unbelievable visual effects, there, oh Continuum team. Might have been a lot more fun if the Achilles had gone down, and the Soviets recovered the huge, dense ring of metal out of it at some point, given their Stargate universe propensity to pull things off the bottom of the ocean. And then hapless actors pretending to be SG-1 eventually debouched into the gateroom of a fully functioning, just-as-successful-as-the-US-version, Soviet Stargate program - and had to convince their Soviet counterparts to help save the universe.

But - that would have required research, thought, plotting - all the bothersome bits of writing outside of heroics, plot devices, melodrama and special effects. But we most obviously had no hope of getting any of that from this left over and oversized season 9 episode of Stargate SG-1 which was somehow allowed to masquerade as a movie.

Then, when SG-1, more or less, has gated into the holed Achilles, the water is so close to the compartment that the Stargate’s in that one’s foot can go through the deck and right into it, but it doesn’t flood in through that hole thereafter, and there’s time to find and put on antique cold-weather gear before the ship sinks? If the ice that the ship was caught in was what was providing the buoyancy that kept the ship from sinking previously, then breaking the ship out of the ice should have caused it sink immediately if it had negative buoyancy without the ice, or if the ice had been sealing out water, or sealing structural damage and thus maintaining the ship’s own buoyancy, then when the ice was removed, the water should have started streaming in, wherever it could, including through that hole. Plus, if the steel deck was that weakened by years of cold and exposure, that a foot would go through it, why were the wooden boxes and trunks and the leather / canvas / wool cold weather gear still intact? Not to mention why was the weakened deck still holding up something as heavy as the Naquadah Stargate when it couldn’t support a footstep? I don’t think Michael Shanks went on that Arctic adventure, and the whole thing came off as a lame plot device to avoid having Daniel Jackson walking around on the ice, and / or provide some ‘ooh, poor Daniel’ moments in the plot. The sinking of the ship could have generated some suspense and jeopardy, but it came across to me as quite mundane.

I have to note that an entire Everest of hype amongst mountains of hype was committed, and no doubt oodles of dollars expended for just those few minutes of film footage of Cam (Designated Hero) and Sam (designated not hero) walking around on the ice pack. Actors go to the Arctic. Much telling the fans about the incredible oh-wowness of the whole experience. And all the viewer gets from all that hype and ‘oh-wow’ was… that? The walking and the shots of the Alexandria coming up through the ice and starting down again? How utterly ho-hum, boring and jejune. That was totally not worth it, in my estimation. The camera work was pedestrian during the walking – go visit whatever that glacier is where Solitudes was filmed if you need snow and ice. At least the topography might inspire a bit better camera shots. The emergence of the Alexandria was also every bit as visually exciting as squeezing the ketchup out of one of those little plastic pack’s that’s just been torn open. The camera angles came straight from a snap-shot photographer’s mundane photo album, and gave no real feeling for the shuddering, shattering, rumbling ice, for the metal scraping and squealing and thundering out of it, for the amazement of the onlookers. Oh, yes – of course, here’s a sub. Ho hum. Should have realized they’d send a sub. On with the plot by numbers.

In fact, this whole movie leaves me with that impression – it’s all done by the numbers, by rote, in the most perfunctory and reflexive manner possible. Move the pegs around the cribbage board. Set up the dominoes and knock them over. I already know how they’ll fall. In fact, the only thing that surprises me about this movie is that people like it.

The whole thing seemed to have been cobbled together out of bits and pieces of ideas that Stargate had already done and redone – time travel, alternate timelines, the Goa’uld come to take over a defenseless Earth, what if the Stargate had never been found, the present timeline is the most important one, the inhabitants of other timelines arroantly refuse the participation of our heroes until very very nearly too late which precipitates supposedly exciting desperate jeopardy which our heroes must resolve in the teeth of planetary peril because that’s what SG-1 does best, the chase to get the Antarctic gate before something destroys the earth, the Russians have the other gate, people who are closer than family to the character die in front of them and are forgotten seconds later, the Hero does all the Heroics, Daniel cracks wise and cranky, Sam is scientific, loyal, competent, emotional and useful by turns as the plot requires it – and dull, dumb and out of the way the rest of the time. They seem to have forgotten she’s an Air Force officer, and a trained warrior as well as a scientist – just like they forgot Daniel’s cane and limp at the end so he could do the shooting while Sam played scientist. I did notice that Amanda Tapping got to wear heels though, so I’m sure that went down well.

The whole thing was like one of those episodes from season 9 that made me give up on the TV show extended to fit all the favored plot complications. Void of inspiration. Boring. Routine. Written from an inventory list and executed on autopilot.

Stargate SG-1 by the numbers – paint by numbers.

Mechanical.

Waste of $19.98 - though the flick itself is a good explanation of why it's selling at that price.

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