Stargate

The film opens in 1928, with archaeologist Paul Langford unearthing cover stones and a huge metallic ring at Giza while his daughter Catherine pockets a gold amulet. In 1994 the elderly Catherine recruits Daniel Jackson (Spader), a linguist whose theory that the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs did not build the Great Pyramid almost nobody accepts, to translate the stones now held in a military installation in Colorado. He reads them in days: six constellations and a point of origin, seven chevrons, and the ring opens a wormhole to another world. Colonel Jack O'Neil (Russell), reactivated while suicidal after his son died with his pistol, leads the team through carrying a nuclear bomb. On the far side they find a tribe speaking a variant of ancient Egyptian, mining the mineral the gate is made of for Ra (Jaye Davidson), an alien who took a human body millennia ago, enslaved Earth's people and was thrown off the planet in a revolt that buried the gate. Ra decides to send the bomb back to Earth, and a slave uprising ends it.

Russell turned the part down several times before realizing he had been sent an early draft; Spader took it because he found the script "awful" and then got excited after meeting Emmerich. The gate facility was built inside the former Spruce Goose Dome in Long Beach, the largest set in the film, and the original gate prop was painted black until it looked like a giant tire and was redone in silver at the last minute. Egyptologist Stuart Tyson Smith kept the hieroglyphs and spoken language accurate, and Kleiser-Walczak's effects team shot the gate's opening "kawoosh" by firing an air cannon into a water tank. David Arnold, who was working in a London video store when he was hired, wrote the score that made his career.

MGM released it on October 28, 1994. It took $16.65 million in its opening weekend, at the time the biggest October opening ever, a record that stood until Antz in 1998, held number one for two weeks until Interview with the Vampire, and finished with $71.6 million domestic and $196.6 million worldwide on a $55 million budget. Reviews were mixed at best: Rotten Tomatoes has it at 53 percent, audiences gave it a B+ CinemaScore, and Roger Ebert wrote that "the movie Ed Wood, about the worst director of all time, was made to prepare us for Stargate" and kept it on his most-hated list for a decade. It won the Saturn Award for best science fiction film. Devlin and Emmerich had planned a trilogy that never happened; instead MGM hired Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner in 1996, and Stargate SG-1 premiered on Showtime on July 27, 1997, ran ten seasons, and begat Atlantis and Universe, with Richard Dean Anderson's O'Neill gaining a second L and a sense of humor along the way.