Movie Info
Movie Name: Stargate: Continuum
Studio: MGM
Genre(s): Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Action/Adventure
Release Date(s): July 29, 2008
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Well…it’s a nice day for a walk in the Arctic
The Stargate team is sent to watch the Tok’ra extraction ceremony for Ba’al (Cliff Simon), but when they start disappearing from the ceremony, they realize that Ba’al has somehow tampered with the timeline. With only Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping), Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks), and Cameron Mitchell (Ben Browder) escaping to the Stargate, they find themselves back on an Earth where the SG-1 never existed. Now, Samantha, Daniel, and Cameron find themselves trying to convince the people they once called friends that they are from a different Earth and that Ba’al’s plans for Earth aren’t close to being finished!
Directed by Martin Wood, Stargate: Continuum was a stand-alone movie spinning off the Stargate SG-1 series and following Stargate: The Ark of Truth also from 2008. The movie was released on DVD on July 29, 2008 but made its television premiere on the Sci-Fi channel in 2009.
Hey Qetesh…you’re going get a surprise!
To be fair, I wasn’t really a watcher of Stargate SG-1. I might have seen an episode here or there, but I can’t say I know the show. I have seen Stargate (the movie) a few times so I know the basic plot and plot set-up of the show. I was curious if Stargate: Continuum would stand-up as a stand-alone movie for those who didn’t watch the series and felt the movie was surprisingly forgiving.
The story just does like a bigger than life episode. The characters are on the run and facing desperate odds, but I also felt that there wasn’t much threatened since it is an alt-timeline story. It was pushed too far with too many characters dying and being lost. I felt if the deaths were less frequent that there would be a better chance of the deaths sticking…but they killed most of their main characters allowing even me a casual viewer to know that this was going to be reset at some point.
Who needs a Stargate when you have a time machine?
The acting is solid. The series had a pretty good cast for a TV series and the acting continue to be good. The alternate timeline is both a blessing and a curse. Realistically, many of the characters wouldn’t be that different in their development in the timeline so they’d just be slightly different, but it might have been fun for some of the actors to be radically different in the new timeline which would have allowed them to flex more.
The show also looks bigger than the standard episode. The locations and sets are good and (once again) for a TV series, Stargate SG-1 did look bigger and better than a lot of similar shows. Once again, it might have been fun to see a radically different Earth, but it also doesn’t make much sense that it would be.
Stargate: Continuum is a decent little sci-fi movie for those with just a little Stargate background. It was a solid entry, but it also was the last entry since it showed a decline in sales when compared to Stargate: The Ark of Truth (the series was a planned Jack O’Neill-centric story called Stargate: Revolution). Stargate is a brand, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see it return some way or another…and I wouldn’t be upset by it.
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