Stargate

Roland Emmerich’s 1994 film Stargate made use of all the special effects demanded by science fiction’s avid fans (whose expectations are constantly pushed higher by technology), combining them with an action-packed adventure. Nevertheless, the film was panned by some critics as being too derivative. It didn’t run to a sequel but did, instead, inspire two TV spin-offs, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.

The story concerns a strange stone artefact found in Eygpt in the 1920s. Years later, Egyptologist Dr Daniel Jackson (James Spader) cracks the hieroglyphic code on the stone and discovers it is a ‘stargate’ – a teleportation gateway to another planet. Travelling in a party including US military Colonel Jack O’Neill (Kurt Russell), they find themselves on a planet called Abydos, ruled by an evil dictator posing as the Egyptian god Ra. The ruler takes away a nuclear weapon that the Americans were carrying and threatens to destroy the earth with it.

The film’s writers, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were sued by an Eygptology student who said he had approached them with the storyline several years previously and they had rejected it. An Eygptologist from John Hopkins University vouched for the student and the writers settled out of court.