Movie Trivia for Stargate
Memorable Movie Quotes
Colonel Jonathan “Jack” O’Neil: Give my regards to King Tut, asshole.
Lt. General W.O. West: So you think you’ve solved in fourteen days what they couldn’t solve in two years?
Trivia
Ra’s glowing-eye effect was added in post-production, because test audiences didn’t think that he was alien enough. This trait was continued in Stargate SG-1 (1997), as an identifier to people who are taken over by the Goa’uld.
The horse-like creatures on the planet were, in fact, real horses with external costumes draped over them. Dogs were also used.
The stargate is a system designed to open a wormhole. A wormhole is a hypothetical way of space travel called an “Einstein-Rosen bridge”, named after scientists Nathan Rosen and Albert Einstein. According to them, the wormhole should be capable to unite two distant points in the universe, altering space-time laws to cross from a point to another in a brief period of time. The name “wormhole” compares the universe to an apple, with a worm boring through it to reach a point on the other side instead of crawling the long way around on the outside.
The film takes place in 1928 and 1996.
Goofs
In the opening scene, depicting a car from the 1920s, the sound effect of the horn is obviously of a dual-note horn from a modern car.
Throughout the movie, Kawalsky’s character wears the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, but is referred to as “Lieutenant”. A Lieutenant wears either a gold or silver bar, not a silver oak leaf, and a Lt. Colonel is never referred to as “Lieutenant”.
The gold jewelry given to Daniel Jackson was referred to as the “Eye of Ra.” However, the engraving on the medallion is the “Eye of Horus.” There is no such thing as the “Eye of Ra” in Egyptian mythology.
When O’Neil grabs the weapon from one of the guards and aims it at ‘Ra’, the children gather around him to form a shield. However, a moment later, the children are not there, in fact, far less children are in the scene than previous.
When Stargate was initially tested with a probe, they had a system that indicated the probe’s molecular deconstruction and a star map to show its location, which turned out to be “on the other side of the known Universe”. Although by that point in the movie they had some general idea about Stargate’s operation, it wouldn’t be enough to construct devices capable of such functions, which go far beyond our present knowledge (the movie clearly implies that the events happen in the 20th century). In particular, a star map indicating the position “on the other side of the known Universe” simply cannot exist, if only because all existing star maps encompass only a small portion of our Galaxy, which is just a tiny speck compared to the size of the observable Universe. Somehow they managed to squeeze every star in the Universe into a glass board some 15 feet in length.
USA Box Office Info
Budget: $55,000,000
Opening Weekend: $16,651,018
Gross: $71,567,262
Filming Locations
Yuma, Arizona, USA
Buttercup Dunes, Imperial County, California, USA
Queen Mary Dome – 1126 Queens Highway, Long Beach, California, USA
Long Beach, California, USA
Ballroom, Park Plaza Hotel – 607 S. Park View Street, Los Angeles, California, USA
Park Plaza Hotel – 607 S. Park View Street, Los Angeles, California, USA