Stargate on Blu-Ray, Finally

I've been a big fan of Stargate for quite a while now, for any number of reasons. It's not an easy movie to like unless you're of a particular breed of human. To wit, the movie features wormhole travel, Egyptian-style pyramids and civilizations, pyramid-shaped spaceships (known from now on as space-pyramids), laser weapons, pre-bronze-age cities, bizarre animatronic alien animals, alien spacepod strafing runs, and basically everything else that would deliberately drive any fan of subtlety and eloquence literally nuts. There are plot holes a-plenty, poor dialogue, and deus ex machina rears its ugly head without shame. The suspension of disbelief that must be maintained throughout the entire affair is Herculean in task; yet, for all that, this movie is awesome. Not necessarily "good," mind you, but awesome and incredibly entertaining.
James Spader stars as some kind of linguist, an expert researcher on prehistoric Egyptian heiroglyphs. He is contacted by a mysterious woman about a job deciphering symbols on a piece of rock dug out of the Egyptian desert about 80 years ago. Kurt Russell stars as a borderline-suicidal military man, complete with standard-issue jarhead haircut; his is the role of the defender, in case, he puts it, "they succeed" in activating the Stargate.
To really compress a long story (the "extended cut" is safely over two hours long), they activate the Stargate, natch. An elite military strike team (with Spader in tow as comic relief) travels to another planet, and are thrown immediately into battle with a seemingly all-powerful, immortal alien god-king who was apparently responsible for human civilization and now wants to destroy it. I never said it has to make sense - it just has to be awesome, which it does vigorously.

External shot shows little noise.

The Video
Before I say anything about the video quality of the BD version, it's safe for me to say that no matter how good or bad the picture is, it will be better than how it looked on DVD. With that said, the BD picture, compared to other movies from the same time period (around 1994), is absolutely miserable. This is one of Lionsgate's earliest offerings on the HD media and it shows. Exterior shots in the desert, and in general any other well-lit shots, are generally acceptable, but ocasionally display dull edges and blurring. However, any time the movie is in the slightest bit dark, or there's a scene where shadows cover any portion of the screen, there is an exceedingly high amount of video noise and compression crush. I'm not talking film grain here, either - this is full-on noise. In addition to that, in some scenes there is banding, particularly at the top of the screen, and black levels are grayish and crushed to within an inch of their existence. Unintended softness is visible is several shots, and detail is sorely lacking in all cases. I can say that so far, the only worse picture I've seen from a BD is Ocean's 13.
However, oddly enough, it appears that great pains have been taken to correct some mistakes from the original DVD pressing - for example, the wires that were painfully visible on the spacepods as they flew through the city, shooting anything that moved, are now merficully gone, perhaps removed by the original theatrical production team. It's a shame that the BD production team couldn't pay as close attention to detail.

At the time, these were groundbreaking special effects.

The Audio
Audio comes courtesy of a DTS HD ES 6.1 track. There's also a standard Dolby Digital EX 5.1 track, but I stuck with the next-gen format. Overall the sound is not excellent and in some cases terribly disappointing, but again it shows grand improvement over the original DVD. Treble is muffled throughout the entire movie; gunfire is lifeless and dim, and laser fire is weak. The bass, particularly in the LFE channel, is similarly crushed and in some cases actually suffered minor reverb.
However, the movement through the sound field was well done, and the movie used the surround channels to great effect. Crowd noise swallows the listener, as does the amazing wind from a sandstorm. Dialog is front-and-center, as it should be, and vocals are easy to understand and unhindered by sound effects.

The spacepods, with wires mercifully removed.

The Disc
Considering the fact that Lionsgate used only a BD25 to store this movie, the compression is understandable. Not forgivable, but understandable. This being an early entrant into the blu-ray race, Lionsgate offers a truly bizarre TUTORIAL in the paltry "extra features" on how to use the disc, the main menu, and the pop-up navigation display. This tutorial is narrated by what sounds like the main villain in the movie and the vocals are distored as such; an incredibly bizarre experience.
Also, in what appears to be a deliberate-yet-frustrating move, the discmakes saw fit to bury the subtitle track. The way the movie plays by default is to have no subtitles of any kind, which is great when you're watching the scenes that are in English; however, when the movie takes us to Egypt or an alien world, we have no idea what's going on. The first English subtitle track subtitles everything, even the regular English words. Also no good. If you want to just have the Egyptian and alien languages subtitled, you have to skip ahead to the subtitle track marked as English3. This is something that should come by default and is a ridiculous task to perform every time the viewer would put in the disc. (For the record, the subtitle appears layered over the picture, instead of underneath the frame.)

First contact.

Overall
As a personal note, I've had an interesting history with this movie. I saw Stargate way back in the day, at a crappy theater in a mall that no longer exists; in fact, this was one of my first experiences going to see a movie without one of my parents there. When I bought my first DVD player for about $350 (if I remember correctly, this was circa 1999 or so, when DVD was still really getting started - AND IT STILL RUNS), this was one of the first movies that I purchased, along with The Matrix. In fact, my DVD of this movie is so old that halfway through the movie I have to take the disc out, flip it over, and put it back in the player. What I suppose I'm trying to say is that for any criticism I have here, it's done out of love for this quasi-cult classic. I'm overjoyed that it's made the transition to HD, but I wish it could have been done better.
For all its flaws, both as a movie and as a BD release, this movie is still awesome. This latest presentation is by far the best it's ever had, and for that reason and for that reason alone is worth a purchase (I personally got this for $12 in the bargain bin at my local big-box electronics store). This is NOT a movie that you would use to show off the capabilities of your system, and should only be viewed by those who understand that technical quality does not an entertaining movie make.

(All images borrowed with respect from blu-ray.com)

Comments

[Tim]

[this is good] Which crappy defunct mall was it?  I saw this movie in the theater at both Saratoga Mall and Northway Mall.  I loved it then and still love it now, even followed both spin-off TV series through their runs.  I think that the MMO Stargate Worlds that they are working on has some potential as well.

[william]

This was Mohawk Mall. I only saw it once in that theater but it's stuck with me for this long. I admit, I have actually never seen either television show based on it; I think I just couldn't get over the intrinsic theoretical awesomeness of MacGuyver and Stargate together, and nothing could live up to my expectations, so I just skipped it. It must have been like what happened when peanut butter met chocolate.