YMMV / Stargate

• 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. Interestingly, most of those same people are introduced to the film retroactively, after watching the series first.
• Adorkable: Daniel Jackson with his floppy hair and big glasses.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Roger Ebert panned the film as a Cliché Storm (listing examples such as the snare-drum "military" music as Daniel arrives at headquarters) and placed it on his most hated film list. Cue the Stargate-verse and a successful TV series continuation.
• Awesome Music: The theme song. Perfectly captures the epic scope of the film, and would go on to be recycled in several spin-off series and countless trailers for unrelated films.
• Better on DVD: An extended cut that was released on DVD adds more character development and explains elements of the plot better.
• Cliché Storm: Roger Ebert's review (he put this movie on his most hated list) boiled every element of the movie to this, right down to the snare-drum "military" music as Daniel arrives at headquarters.
• Complete Monster: The supposed god, Ra, is an alien overlord who possessed a young boy on Earth and ruled it as a god-king until a rebellion forced him to the planet Abydos. Ra exploits the humans for slave labor, and when the heroes arrive and present a threat to Ra's divinity, Ra takes his anger out on the population by having his forces strafe them in their ships. Ra offers Daniel Jackson a choice: kill his comrades and proclaim Ra's divinity, or Ra will kill him and everyone who has seen him because "there can be only one Ra!" Finally, in retribution for his defeat long ago, Ra plans to send a nuclear device the soldiers had brought with them back to Earth, equipped with a mineral to enhance the explosion a hundred times over, claiming "I created your civilization. Now I shall destroy it."
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Jaye Davidson's Ra, whose creepy presence and androgynous appearance made this alien tyrant a very memorable villain. It helps that this was Davidson's much-hyped follow up to his groundbreaking film debut in The Crying Game...and then he immediately retired from acting to go back to the fashion industry.
• Fair for Its Day: While modern viewers may see the soldiers freeing the natives from Ra as a case of White Man's Burden, Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich note in the DVD Commentary that they had to fight with the studio to have the natives independently plan and lead the final assault against Ra.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • French Stewart in a movie about aliens.
  • Massive pyramids built in ancient Egypt? Aliens.
    • Likewise, Daniel's academic critics mockingly inquiring if the Pyramids were built by men from Atlantis. Adding to the amusement is that SG-1 viewers know full well Daniel will go on to play an instrumental role in locating the Lost City.
  • The film's main characters are Ultron and Ego. And Korath into the mix as well.
• 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 Novelization has the children escape the ship at the last moment though. Specifically, it's stated that the teleporter only works if there is something on each pad, to be switched with each other—this is why Daniel and Sha'uri (with Ra's hand) were able to beam down as Anubis's head went up, and the children coming down enabled the bomb to be sent up.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: There was a Stargate video game released in 1995 for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It was generally panned in reviews for being a fairly generic side-scrolling platformer/shooter at a time when the market was full of such games and also for not following the plot of the movie particularly well.
• Retroactive Recognition: In one of his earliest roles, Djimon Hounsou, credited by just his first name at the time, plays the Horus guard (he's the one who's exposed by Daniel as just a man after being shot dead, ending the god charade for Ra among the villagers).
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The tacked on romance subplot between Jackson and Sha'uri adds precisely nothing to the film.
• Signature Scene: The first successful activation of the Stargate.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Ra and his buddies only show up about an hour into the movie.
• 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) and the pasted-in CGI of the Collapsible Helmets.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Watching poor Nabeh as he gets blasted. Skaara's understandably devastated reaction is also hard to watch.
  • The scene when Shau'ri suffers a fatal wound after getting shot by one of Ra's soldiers. Not only is Daniel horrified by this, Jack also appears shocked.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The time period is only given as "Present Day", but Catherine Langford's age pins it down as taking place in the mid-1990s: she appears as a preteen child in a flashback to 1928, which places her birth sometime in the late 1910s or so. In present-day scenes she's played by Viveca Lindfors, who was in her seventies. (Incidentally, Catherine's age seems to have been retconned by the TV series, which specified that she was twenty-one in 1945, thus placing her birth around 1924).
• 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.
  • The novelization of the film says the kids are there just for such an occasion; if someone managed to get into position to take a shot at Ra, they'd be unlikely to shoot through kids. It certainly works to keep O'Neil from taking the shot.
  • Still an improvement over reality considering Ancient Egyptian children generally went around completely nude aside from jewelry.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The film had some really good special effects for its time:
  • The first Kawoosh, when you had no idea it was coming, and in movie-sharp clarity, especially if you were watching on the big screen. In the shows, it's cool, but seen in the movie, for the first time ever? Breathtaking. Also, the way the masks retracted into themselves.
  • The trip through the portal itself is pretty spectacular in its own right.

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