Stargate Origins

[Julius Seeker]

This one completely slipped under my radar... and I'm a fairly big fan of the franchise.

Interesting for fans who want a bit more Stargate or a little background. It takes place in 1928. The main antagonists are the Nazis. It's in a more comedic style than previous Stargates, lower budget, actually more along the lines of a Sam Raimi flick. It falls more than a little south of SG-1 season 1 in production value - there are only 3 locations where the whole film takes place - the Stargate hangar, the temple, and the small village.

It takes elements of both SG-1 and the 1994 film. One of the small tidbits is the gate on earth is the one from the film, and the gate on Abydos is the one from SG-1.

Story:

Spoiler: show

* Nazis are the ones who discovered how to open the gate. They wanted the power of ancient gods for Hitler.
* Isis (Aset) is the Goa'uld ruling Abydos - although the name Goa'uld isn't mentioned.
* Isis offers the Nazis naquadah, mined on Abydos in exchange for slaves. This was an SG-1 invention.
* She has a child, a Harsesis, who - in SG-1 is a forbidden child of two Goa'ulds, who would inherit the full genetic memory of the Goa'Uld.
* Her dealings are all about putting together a revolution against Ra.
* She erases the memories of everyone involved but plants the motivational seed in their heads to form a team to take out Ra.
* Kasuf, the teenager, is the same as the one from the film (he leads the people of Abydos at this time).

I am hoping to see a return to the world of Stargate; although a continuation of the SG-1 and Atlantis world. While I have seen SG-1 and Atlantis twice, I haven't seen Universe, so I can't comment on the third series; what I heard is it was designed to scoop up the fanbase of Battlestar Galactica as it ended - and it failed to do that, and alienated the SG-1 and Atlantis fanbase in the process of failing.

[Eric]

Yeah I heard about this and I was turned off by the insanely low budget and short length nature of it.

[Julius Seeker]

It’s also a different sort of feel than Stargate - very light and and comedic; although amateur comedic, they rely too heavily on character themes. There’s a full length film that essentially stitch s the episodes together.

I watched it, but mostly because I wanted to see how it linked in with the rest of the franchise, what’s added. It more or less adds to the original film, and shows a background on some of the SG-1 concepts: but not enough to be really satisfying for SG-1 fans since they didn’t get into the Goa’uld biology; although it’s not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t have the budget to show a goa’uld symbiote.

I ended up watching the beginning of the spaceship-based sci-fi show Dark Matter on Netflix - which was made by the makers of the Stargate TV franchise; it’s decent, has a better beginning than SG-1, and a bit of an Atlantis feel to it. IMO it feels lacking in spirit, and it might be that the cast seems to have much less chemistry than the Stargates - despite its extreme bumpiness, SG-1’s cast had tremendous chemistry. That’a so far, I have only seen a few episodes. The series lasted 3 seasons and was canceled a few months ago: the season 4 twist was revealed - it was that they were in the Stargate Universe. We’ll never see that now. There is little chance the story will continue under a different network since the lease on actor contracts, sets, and set pieces have all run out.