Sleestak? Rubber? You mean it was all just a big fat....NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!


(crumbles to the ground, sobbing, as the last vestiges of his childhood reality is torn to shreds, and blows away)

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Angel of the Abyss
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"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

I am very sorry that, as a result of insomnia, I am in the unfortunate position to be able to report that someone did remake The Land of the Lost. (I guess this is what you mean when you say the 70's version was the "real" one.) And it looked as though they did it with a lower budget, worse special effects, and worse writing than the original 70's show. But apparently they thought they could compensate for all this by making it "cuter." I don't know what it was called and I had no desire to find out, but it was so very, very bad. It wasn't like Cheetos, dangerously cheesy, it was like a Chernobyl of bubbling radioactive, fatal cheese. Possibly the main reason why I no longer watch TV.

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Oh joy. Will Ferrel. Somewhere there are crude stop motion dinosaurs sobbing inconsolably.

1.5 billion. After taxes.

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I just finally got around to watching the movie with my fiancee, and wouldn't mind expressing a few thoughts (and jump starting this conversation again). With SG1 being the only series I ever really got into and followed all the way through, I had high expectations. I just put my review online here and, while I thought it was a decent movie, it didn't have nearly as much substance as I was hoping for, and I was dissapointed in some of the plot holes/devices. To detail a few complaints:




The Ori are, for all intents and purposes, gods in their own galaxy. The ancients certainly seem to know every details of what's occurring in our galaxy. One would think the Ori could do the same. Sure, an underground resistance in their billions upon billions of followers may be a bit complicated to track down, but a lone Earth ship that just jumped through their only supergate, now beyond the protection of the ancients? SG1 should've been smited the moment they emerged without some kind of ascendant protectant. This would be irrelevant if the Ori were really gone, of course, but they knew this wasn't the case; They watched Adria ascend themselves. Sure, they could hide technologically in their own galaxy where no ascended beings could take action, but in the Ori realm? Why they were allowed to continue unobstructed was a major plot hole I had trouble getting past.



The replicator plan makes no sense, especially when the IOA clowns made them immune to the only weapon Earth has against them. First, the Ori have free reign in their own galaxy, so if the replicators looks like they may be a problem, your friendly neighborhood Ori can just swoop down and eliminate them without a concern. We've seen the ancients do similar things, and the Ori have the extra power from their followers. Even if they couldn't, the Asgard were able to win by using the knowledge of the Ancients (through Jack), implying that the Ancients could have easily wiped them out technologically if they desired. And the Ori are ascended, which we've been led to believe means that they have access to knowledge of, well, everything; just plain everything. Far more than the pre-ascended Ancients did anyway. So they would be able to easily create an effective weapon against any mere physical threat.

Even if the plan does work, that leaves the replicators with a working supergate back to our galaxy. And what moron thinks a self-destruct script will work? The whole problem with the replicators from Pegasus is that they got around such a script, but that was just written by the most advanced race to ever inhabit the known universe; I'm sure Earth can do much better . The IOA needs to read the evil overlord list and hire a five year old to review their plans. Any reasonably intelligent child could tell you this was a bad idea. Though the IOA have acted selfishly and short-sightedly before, they're rarely outright irrationally moronic, making this a rather jarring plot point. I sighed when this whole issue started in the movie, because I knew it would subtract time from more interesting story elements while adding nothing but mindless action.

Of course, the situation is bogus anyway as the premise is faulty. They have the replicator under control and in a force field when it's created. If the plan is to infect the Ori galaxy, why did the IOA dufus not just beam it to the City of the Gods? What possible good would it do to let it cannibalize the ship first? Yet that's exactly what the IOA nut lets it do.




Speaking of boneheaded plans, what good would nuking the supergate do? The Ori followers can obviously just build another, and then Earth wouldn't know where it was. That would just make things worse. Again, the IOA may be shortsighted and selfish, but they were never made out to be truly stupid.




Now let's talk a bit about power. Ascension gives you a fair deal of power. We've seen this from the ancients time and again, destroying ships, killing people, and affecting the physical universe in major ways, and they did not have the advantage of billions of followers. Human devotion may add to that power, but how much? Orlin even said that the addition was relatively minor, even with a whole galaxy on their knees. Even if it increased Adria's power tenfold, that still means that twenty ancients could take her out. She is no longer a threat to them. So why did everyone act that Adria taking over the Ori's leech-power made her as powerful as them. It didn't; it made her as powerful as them minus every single Ori but one. In other words, where N is the number of Ori, A is the power of an ascended being, and L is the (limited) power leeched from followers, P, the total power of 'The Ori', could be expressed as:

P = (N * A) + L

Assuming there were 200 ascended Ancients and 200 ascended Ori, and the leech power was equal to another 100 ascended beings, it was no wonder the ancients were concerned; the Ori were 50% more powerful. But using the formula above that leaves Adria with a power rating of 101, against the 200 rating of the Ancients, suddenly leaving the Ancients with almost double the strength. This certainly may be an oversimplification, but I think the drama could have been maintained without trying to imply that Adria was now equally as powerful as the Ori were. Even if she was no longer a threat to the Ancients as a whole, that still made her plenty powerful to mere mortals.

And how does that power transfer work anyway? Why does it get transferred to Adria? Just because she calls herself an Ori? 'Name magic' was used earlier, but said to be implemented technologically like a password. The followers don't know who they're surrendering their will to. In fact, they know very little about ascended beings by necessity, so how does that power get directed? It just seems a little convenient that Adria can just take over after the Ori are gone and assume all of their followers' devotion, despite not being one of the original goddesses being worshiped. You would think it would at least take a few years of work to get everything redirecting her way.

Also, power is said to be measured in the quantity (no mentioned of quality) of wills being surrendered. As such, to even cut her power in half, they would need to convince half of the entire Ori galaxy to stop believing. That's billions of people. But they didn't; they convinced the priors, a drop in a galaxy of oceans. Sure, the priors might have started a chain reaction, spreading the word and undermining Adria's power, but it would've taken months just to begin to get the word out. Even then, as shown (extremely well and realistically) with the Goa'uld arc, many will cling to their fanaticism even when face with obvious naked truth. It could take years just to diminish her power to the point of your average ascended being. Sure, that would still save our valiant crew from the Ori ships, but certainly wouldn't bode well for Morgan LeFay. Attacking when she did would pit her against Adria while still at 99.9999% of her power.

Sure, there's probably some convoluted treknobabble that will explain all this away, but I enjoy SG1 because it's above that. It doesn't usually use such technobabble as a cover for sloppy writing. This time it did.




Then there's Tomin. It was implied at the end that he becomes the leader of his people. Why? He was a commander, yes, but just one of many. Also remember that only the priors were turned. So I envision this would have gone down one of two ways:

1) The priors tell the truth to all, and use their position, knowledge, and powers to create a new political hierarchy with themselves at the top. Even in a best case scenario, Tomin would remain little more than a 'middle manager'. However, much more likely is...

2) The priors, having already shown they are mostly complicit with the Ori and were only mislead about the 'ascending the priors' part, would now take it upon themselves to fill the void left by the Ori. After all, they are highly evolved, with much of the knowledge of the ancients, and it would only be a matter of time before one learned to ascend. From there the others would follow, and the state of things would be not much changed from before. Even without ascension, there would be no reason not to use their position and power to maintain the existing hierarchy with themselves at the top.




This last one is more minor, so maybe I should skip it, but what's with the newly reinforced shields? The ship was almost taken out in Unending by two Ori vessels. You can count a total of less than 10 Ori weapon blasts being enough to take out the shields entirely. Yet in the movie they can magically deflect 20 or 30 attacks, many at nearly the same time (hopefully there's no synergetic effect or shield recharge time), while taking only minor internal damage? These were the same weapons, mind you, that took out entire Goa'uld motherships (and I think an Asgard ship) in a single shot. Maybe I'm a little oversensitive to this from playing 4X video games where you're constantly comparing shield points against incoming damage, but this major inconsistency draws me out of the SG1 universe. It reminds me it's only a movie, and that takes away the magic and enjoyment of watching.




The ethics also bothered me a bit. The ancients are painted as libertarians of sorts. Above all else they believe in free will. However, nearly as strong as that belief, is one in truth and openness, and using your intellect and rationality to explore and understand the universe as it is, and not how one might want it to be. In short, they're scientists who hold truth above all else, while the Ori are painted as fundamentalists who have no problem trouncing all over the truth if it makes them feel warm and squishy inside.

This makes the Ark a non issue. The presentation makes it out as though there are pros and cons of this technology per the previous paragraph. The pro is obvious: the ark will impart the truth to the viewer, and will somehow assure them that such is the truth. It's even stated at one point that it can only show truth, not just anything that the programmer wishes, and there's no way to change that (otherwise an all-knowing ascended being, like Adria, would have known how and done it). The con presented is that it usurps free will, it is even called brainwashing, and that trumps the good that it can accomplish.

However, this is untrue if it really works as presented in the movie. The ark does not force a decision. It imparts knowledge. What one does with that knowledge, and what decisions they make, are the real component of free will. The ark does not usurp free will any more than a college class does. It spreads knowledge that is guaranteed not to be false. This is at the core of what the Alterans stand for. Should someone wish to surrender their will to the Ori anyway, that's still their choice. Knowledge does, of course, restrict what one might see as reasonable decisions, but again, that does not usurp free will any more than a college class. Are we to believe that the ancients never taught one another; that all of science had to be rediscovered by every individual? The ethical objections are not rational.

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Not "Star Wars". When it was first released, it was only "Star Wars", the colon was added years later.

Interesting, when "Star Wars" was first released, Lucas was claiming a budget of 24 million dollars. I wonder if the 13 million also covers the cost of the model, and spfx shop, or if that is where the 9 million dollars extra went to as a separate budget. The motion control system couldn't have been cheap to make.

One thing to remember is that the Wrath of Kahn reused practically every set from the first ST film which helped them meet their lower budget. I suspect that the SG1 company had a lot of resources accrued over the years that helped with the look movie.

David.

I usually still refer to it as "Star Wars" without any darn suffixes or elaborations. That was, and always will be the real Star Wars to me.

You would be right. I watched the movie recently, and it was pretty much stock from the series. There might have been some extra detail in a ship closeup or two, but I'm not sure.

I'm largely burned out on SG1, so I didn't expect to be wowed by it, and I wasn't too surprised. On the other hand, I didn't consider it a waste of time - it seemed like a pretty good extended finale episode (though it looks like they're going to do another SG1 movie, this would have been a good place to stop).


****SPOILER WARNING****













There were a number of Star Trek references (that isn't new with SG1), but there did come a point in the movie where I felt I was watching Star Trek: First Contact. Then they took it even further, with a bit of Terminator worked in. I suppose it isn't possible to avoid plot reuse these days, but this felt just a little too obvious.

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Most of the re-used stuff for Star Trek II was re-used from the first movie, not the series.
Aside from the obvious re-use of the sets (for both the Enterprise and the Reliant) they also re-used shots of the Klingon ships attacking V'ger in the Kobayashi Maru sequence and the Enterprise in drydock and leaving it. They also re-used the Enterprise model and Regula I was simply the "spacedock office" model from the first movie turned up-side down and with a few modifications.
The did build a few new sets - the surface of Ceti Alpha V, the Regula I research lab, and the tunnels and Genesis cave on Regula. And the Reliant model was new.

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I was referring to the SG1 movie, The Ark of Truth, which reused CGI and sets from the SG1 series (or at the very least, I didn't see too much that looked new).

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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I thought they opted for German when they couldn't finnish the entire script.

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So, did you like it or not?

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immediately after i got done watching the movie, i watched the dvd extras. they talk a lot about how they used much of what they developed over the 10 year run of the series to make the movie. the whole production staff is almost like a tightly knit family that has been together since the pilot episode of SG1- and even some people from the movie.
one woman spent like 3 months just making the fire that surrounded Adria for a total of a few minutes of screen time during the movie.
lately, i've been watching SG1 dvd's starting with season 1 and going from there- i just finished season 3 a few days ago, and will probably get season 4 this weekend and go on a 4 day binge of nothing but SG1 season 4- and you can definitely see how the special effects are progressing as they go along. right at the end of season 3 is where the Replicators are introduced, and just drawing those little buggers looks like a huge technological step in and of itself.
and for the guy that has all the problems with the stuff that happened in the movie- you gotta realize that they took a 22 episode season and cut it down to a 90 minute movie, so some thing had to give. if they had been given another whole season to tell the story, i'm sure they would have gotten more things right.

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I would consider most of them "colon movies" based on their conceptual origin point...

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