pvedder
I'm seasoned Stargate fan and looked forward to this title being released. In fact one could say it was once my favorite series. Lo and behold I picked up the DVD a few days ago and set aside my night to watch it. The film starts with promise then descends into a banality that is awesome to behold. The first battle between the remains of SG1 and the Ori troops found me cringing with concern in the corner of my couch as perhaps one of the most poorly matched orchestrations ever showed itself. The triviality of the scene was breathtaking. The Ori, a force to be feared are reduced to squabbling school kids. Later the new IOC new recruit is paraded to us and conducts a meaningless interview. Shortly after this the one genuine moment in the film arrives - Tealc gets to show his empathetic side. What follows is a cluster that digs itself deeper and deeper as it goes, culminating in replicator man, a ridiculous and done to death idea, not even worthy of a B grade horror movie. Some where along the away Tealc cops a staff blast then walks a journey over some mountains that would have made Edmund Hillary tired before being healed by an ascended Ancient (what the????). Vala swans around in the Ori home base whilst her brain dead ascended daughter dares her to open the ark and goes on walk about (maybe baking some cookies for afterward). Vala then releases Daniel etc without resistance (where are the priors - at morning tea?). After the Oddesey get multiple Ori ship blasts (which it couldn't survive in either of the previous series) the 20 cent ending is with us. I never thought I would write comments such as this about the Stargate series, but here I am, bewildered and disenchanted at the PC. This movies rates with Dracula 3000 which also has a one star rating. Stargate should have finished at end of Series 7, but some how was allowed to linger and now we have this cash cow. If you must watch this item, I implore you to at least wait until 2 dollar Tuesday - failing that you can probably have mine for the same price.
yogi_jm
Stargate: The Ark of Truth was a very good moving, surprisingly good in all honesty. I was not sure about the conversion from TV series (AMAZING AT THAT) to a movie. It seemed a bit ambitious although I was completely wrong, the end result does justice to the Stargate series.The movie does not go at the same pace of a 40 minute episode of Stargate and at first it seems odd to see the different tempo. The Stargate "humor" is still present and despite Richard Dean Anderson's absence in the movie still presents a good laugh. The only reason I gave the movie a 9/10 is because of RDA's absence and still a 9/10 on IMDb is superb! However the Ark of Truth is strictly based off of the show's Season 9 and 10 and thus I recommend that you watch those two seasons first.Despite a questionable set on the opening scene of the movie and some minor continuity errors, any Stargate fan should not be disappointed and in all honesty the change from TV Series to Movie was surprising but the end result does not disappoint. I can't wait till Continuum!
Virgil Ierubino (Aquillyne)
'Stargate: The Ark of Truth' closes the story left open after the series 'Stargate SG-1' was cancelled. What we must bear in mind however is that the story it closes only began in SG-1's ninth season, and only lasted 40 episodes. The main storyline of 'Stargate SG-1' was already closed at the end of Season 8, after 174 episodes; and I personally would have preferred if the show had ended there. The last two seasons of SG-1 suffered a severe dip in quality that runs straight through into 'The Ark of Truth'.The film makes absolutely no compromise for new viewers, so I will provide a brief backdrop (although even this will be insufficient to understand the film fully). The Ori are beings living on a higher plane of reality posing as Gods, and the more people who worship them as such, the more powerful they become. A set of similar beings, known as the Alterans (or Ancients) are the only defence against the Ori taking over the Milky Way. However, neither beings are able to directly interfere with physical reality, and hence the Ori use their religion, "Origin", to have their bidding done by humans. A huge army of followers has created a "Supergate", a teleportation device, that they will use to send a fleet of starships and troops to Earth - where they will convert its inhabitants to "Origin" by force. SG-1 is the primary five-strong team taking orders from the U.S. Government to counter these inter-galactic threats.There was a lot that could have been done with a Stargate film - something that hasn't been seen since 1994 - and the fans of the TV show were certainly expecting a lot. This is perhaps why the film begins so badly – it's like they couldn't think of anything good enough to match the anticipation, so for safety they picked something completely nondescript. That is, a full 2 minutes of mountains; and literally nothing to go with the mountains other than music. I do not exaggerate - there aren't even titles or credits. It's like it's trying to be the epic introduction to 'The Two Towers' (Peter Jackson, 2002) - which begins by gliding through the snowy peaks of a fantasy land - but lacking the brevity, grace, grandeur and beauty. The only thing epic about 'Ark's beginning is the anticlimax.The ultimate downfall of the film is encapsulated in these first 2 minutes: the production team behind 'Stargate SG-1' had spent ten years making 42-minute episodes - they just didn't know how to handle the scale of something feature-length. The whole film feels like an early Season 10 episode with 60 minutes of padding, as exemplified by these opening fly-bys. Why mountains? As the plot reveals, the mountains have nothing to do with anything. I can easily imagine a brainstorming session the creative team went through, where someone suddenly shouted, "Mountains! Mountains are epic! Just look at the start of The Two Towers!". Any entertainment production needs to grab you from the outset, and 'Ark' crucially fails to do this.What is perhaps most annoying about the introduction, besides its sheer tedium, is that Joel Goldsmith did indeed provide the film with a grandiose score, and it completely fails to make use of it. In the overture, a subtle, multi-instrumental build-up leads to the familiar but deeper and richer Stargate theme tune which, as anyone who has heard it will know, has a very clear "moment of climax". Indeed, in every Stargate production made to date, except one or two early episodes, this climactic musical note signalled the moment for the display of the title. 'Ark' ignores this and continues flying past its unimpressive selection of mountains.Immediately following the introduction we have a short discussion between some Alterans, set millions of years ago when they were human in form. They decide that they cannot use the eponymous 'Ark' as a weapon against the Ori as it is too unethical. Immediately we skip to the present, and SG-1 is searching for the Ark to use as a weapon against the Ori. Have I missed something, or has Stargate quite simply thrown away the very thing that made it stand out from the crowd of sci-fi productions; i.e. philosophically and ethically troubled protagonists? This notion is dealt with very lightly; the main character throws some lines at the screen a few times about how the use of the Ark is the better of two evils, or that they are in desperate times, but this pales in comparison to the Season 5 episode where he literally gave his life to save a civilisation. Why the change? The answer is simple: the writers couldn't think of a better solution to the Ori threat, and so they needed their characters to be okay with it.Because ultimately, what could the solution have been? The show had spent 2 years reiterating that the Ori were a force impossible to reckon with, that their technology was superior to Earth's by light-years, and that if Earth ever came into any kind of combat with them they'd be frazzled before they could don their uniforms: this overbearing power was a necessity both to create tension and also to make the Ori an even more potent foe than the mega-enemies that had just been defeated at the end of Season 8. So when Season 10 concluded, and the Ori were on the brink of invading Earth, what could the solution have been? War would have been out of the question, 40 episodes had demonstrated that negotiation or reason was impossible – we were doomed. Enter the Ark. It is a Deus Ex Machina solution of dizzying proportions, and a McGuffin that sends SG-1 on a padded hunt for 90 minutes, interrupted with improbable enemies. I would have appreciated more creativity than what is effectively looking for a device that has a button reading 'Click Here to Beat the Ori'.
