Blank Check with Griffin & David - Stargate

Episode Date: May 31, 2020

It's a Ben's Choice bay-bee! Dry, dusty tombs ✓ Crazy convoluted tech ✓ Vast intergalactic conspiracies? ✓✓✓ 1994's Stargate really does have it all. This week Ben gets to makes his case for this Egyptian/Sci-Fi Roland Emmerich cult favorite, and why it's best viewed from a porch.

I'm on Planet X looking for a dweeb who wears green fatigues. He wears glasses. He has long hair. And he... Shoot! Chicken! Yes! Yes!

Chicken podcast! Perfectly executed. perfectly executed is that kurt russell's longest stretch of dialogue in the entire movie i think so anyway oh sorry no i was just gonna say it it is bizarre uh how long he goes essentially being a featured extra for swaths of this movie yeah and then it points to like no no no he's actually no he's one of the stars he's one of the stars sorry we forgot about that he is still one of the stars but i gotta say this is pretty star great oh i see what you did there he was he was trying to get that in there hello and welcome to blank check with griffin and david i am ben hosley because on today's episode we have a ben's choice what's i i haven't heard that name in years it's been a while it's been since our classic It's been since our classic episode on Assassin's Creed.

Yeah, okay, right. Iconic. Iconic. Fully iconic. Love that movie. I think I'm going to buy the game, the pirate one. You bought a Switch and you've been using your Switch to try to quit smoking. Yeah, that was the idea.

And now it's just become another habit. Sure. No, but that's the goal is just eventually it becomes the all-consuming habit. Right. I sort of like, I move that into place, right? Instead of like smoking. But right now they're both in place.

But we'll see. Sure, sure. Yeah, we'll see. Wait, is Zelda the only game you have right now? Well, i got the mortal kombat 11 you have the mortal kombat 11 which which you are in yeah you're not a playable character yet it's so great yes right i mean who knows maybe with like an expansion pack they're adding they'll throw me in but you are rule your entire list of nicknames is, in fact, in the game Mortal Kombat 11, for those who don't know.

Yeah. You have to unlock Arnold, which I don't know how to do. Interesting. Arnold, Arnold. Or whatever. Terminator. Yeah. Because it's the Terminator.

Yeah. It's the Terminator. I call him Arnold. He just plays the governor of California. But when you go to his point of view screen. After he kills someone, after a fatality. Right. Oh, in his like his heads up display.

I see. Yeah. It says like subfolder Ben Honsley and then the folder opens up and every nickname is listed. Including many serious nicknames. But like in the initials of it. It's so great. Right. We should shout out, who is that person? I forget their handle on Twitter.

I don't know if I should say their name. Yeah. I forgot. But let's just say that it does exist there in the game. Yeah. And that perhaps whoever did it snuck it in. Yes. Which is even better because that totally fits my vibe yes bad boy activity breaking the rules a blankie who is an sb a classic sneaky boy

snuck that easter egg into the game and it maybe got a little more attention than it should have and i regret bringing it up on this episode now but let's keep it in all right and let's double it all right and we just heard it twice. We heard it twice. Ben, do you like Stargates because they break the rules of travel by creating Einstein Rosen bridges across galaxies? It's also like wet tech, but it's ancient.

It's got all the things, man. It is, I will say. You know how people say like Jaws, 50% of the success is because of the score, right? Like, you know, that was like a Spielberg quote where he's like, that's like 50% of the movie. Whoever decided to make the Stargate look like water, that was 50% of Stargate's entire success, TV shows, everything. 100%. This is a perfect episode to drop at this time because you're going through

a bit of a brand transition. You've been really into wet stuff. Slick flicks for a long time, but it's almost like you've crossed through that threshold. You feel like you've gotten all that you could get out of that, and you've been rebranding as a dry guy.

You've been really into dry, dusty stuff. And this one takes place in a goddang desert i know once they cross through the water yeah the water ironic that the water the water gate yes water gate let's call it what it is it's a water it is a water gate yes does and and Nixon's inside of it. You hear him. Right. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, I love this film.

But yeah, it does take you to the- For him and Al Gore. Yes. Yes, exactly. Right, right,

right. It takes you right to the driest place on, not Earth. It's not actually Earth, guys. Well, okay. I should introduce,

of course, that was David Sims Sims you just heard. Hey. We also have Griffin Newman. Hey. And then Ange Faraguda. What's up? All right.

We're in the house, baby. And we are going to discuss 1994's Stargate. A Roland Emmerich film. Wait, there's more setup that Griffin says for the intro of Blank Check. I'm trying to think of it. What is this podcast about, Ben? Oh, it's about filmographies.

Directors who have massive success and are issued a series of blank checks to do whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baby. Ben, when does when do those early successes

tend to happen? I fucked it up. I said the thing. You were trying to. It's fine. It's all good. It happens early. It happens early. early right yeah um this directors who experienced massive success earlier in their career which i just want to point out because this is his american breakthrough this is the guarantor that gives him uh independence day i mean it's universal soldier yeah universal soldier gets him this he sort of climbs like by about like 30 million bucks

at a time right like universal soldier that costs like 25 million this costs like what like 55 million something like that yeah yeah right and it makes like 180 worldwide right and this is so silly and everyone's like ah come on man like a gate to the through the stars is ludicrous but audiences are like we love it i've heard of a map to the stars but a gate through the stars right uh and then so then he gets independence day i guess that's his biggest but independence day was cheap 75 million dollar budget well well it's pretty impressive well well i things to say. And let's let's state here. Very often, Ben, when we give you the checkbook, when we let you pick the movie with a Ben's Choice episode, they tend to be very often films that are more star driven. What you've really attached to is the movie star at the center of the film.

You're like your Chevy Chase. I thought you meant like literal stars in the sky. Well, that too. That's true. I mean, we've gone from stars to a stargate but chevy chase and bill murray and martin short and people who were big to you you know influential to you assassins well i was gonna say and then of course assassins yeah right the sort of league of assassins in general right right um this is more of a director-driven film, which we have usually tried to scare you off from doing

because we don't want to tiptoe into territory that might be covered by a miniseries someday. But we are never doing Roland Emmerich. And this isn't that bit where I say we're never doing Roland Emmerich. No, we're not going to do... He is literally on the blank check blacklist of miniseries. Yeah. Have fun Googling Roland Emmerich, Bryan Singer.

This is our Roland Emmerich episode. Move it along. This is our Roland Emmerich episode is my point. Okay. Sure. I can't imagine. I mean, I guess we could do, I'm trying to see if there's like a franchise. He's sort of in the Godzilla universe a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like if there was a fourth, a third American Godzilla, we could do that as like, look at all the different American Godzillas. But I mean, that's about it, right? Two Independence Days.

I think this is the only time we're ever going to cover him on the show. Yeah, I mean, the Independence Day franchise is not really compelling. No, no. But this is a big thing about Rolandland emmerich to your point that like independence day is cheaper than you think it would have been although that was a hefty budget for 1996 his big selling point to the studios at the time when he started making these films when

he made the jump from universal soldier to stargate and then from stargate to independence day is i know how to make these movies cheaper than anyone else because I have a lot of dialogue scenes that can take place in the same locations over and over again. I know how to structure these films on a script level. So the big moments happen and you get your money shots for the trailer and they're doled out across the film, but there's a lot of stuff in the middle in between that is deceptively inexpensive and this definitely falls into that this is the first time he's testing that model where you're just like there's a lot of the movie where they're just in a hut yeah and then it's bookended by some exciting shit happening or a monster or a fight scene well and also right as you say that very

90s thing of every big special effects shot feels like a big deal. Right, right. You know. He was one of these guys where it was like, I'm going to make your money count. I'm going to give you the big money stuff, but I'm going to understand how to stretch that dollar in between the money shots.

And his other thing was, I'm not going to try to make these movies with Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson or Sylvester Stallone. You're guys who are going to demand 20 million dollars i'm gonna pick people who are either a a little bit like on the wane or b haven't done a movie like this before and want the paycheck or c are just like i don't know that seems like fun but they're like proven leads who aren't necessarily box office big budget movie stars well he likes like also just the classic uh action guy nerd combo right totally yes that was my first

thought watching this yeah russell and spader and then independence day he's got will smith and jeff goldblum and then in uh godzilla he's got jean Matthew Broderick. Right. Like he keeps doing that until it doesn't work for him anymore. Yeah. No, totally. And then that also becomes like a model that others follow. I think a problem is as we get to the end of the 90s and into the 2000s, people stop having the conviction to hire an actor who is convincingly the brainy guy and they start wanting an action star to also play that part they just slap some glasses on

someone they're like your glasses in this one can i can i make my argument for the one that breaks it because the ideal of this model is obviously uh goldblum in Jurassic Park and in Independence Day, right? Like, he's the best version of that where it's like, oh, this guy is genuine movie star energy, but he's not a conventional leading man. But you believe him as the brainy guy.

Totally. And then the peak of it for my money is Nick Cage. Not the peak, I'm sorry. The for my money, is Nick Cage. Not the peak, I'm sorry. The one that breaks it is Nick Cage in The Rock. Because at that time, it's seen as a similar thing to Broderick or Spader, where it's like, Nick Cage in an action movie? Why would he do this?

He's playing a nerd. He's playing a doctor. And he's so good in it. And it totally plays off of the fact that he doesn't belong in a movie like that. Perfect film. Perfect film. Great movie. Perfect film. plays off of the fact that he doesn't belong in a movie like this perfect film perfect film great movie perfect film and unlike roland emmerich we have no clear reason to avoid doing a michael bay miniseries for the time being sure yeah no there was no paper trail despite him being an unpleasant

person roland emmerich has given interviews it's not even a thing where it's a secret he has like done interviews where he's like, I love throwing those parties. It's great. I'm not speaking out of turn. I should make a movie about slavery. He loves it. He loves having sex parties with Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer.

The wildest thing about him is like, yeah, let's get off that. But like Godzilla, he's like, Godzilla doesn't really work, right? Kind of a bomb. Okay. All right. He's like, i'm definitely qualified

to make a revolutionary war movie insane insane that's the lateral move here but wait there are two things i want to say here the the cage move that breaks it is after the rock works so well cage is like okay i want to keep being in action movies but i no longer want to be the nerdy guy who shouldn't be in the action right in con i want to be the nerdy guy who shouldn't be in the action movie. Right. In Con Air, he's- I want to be the cool guy. Yeah, he's the cool guy. Right. So then it becomes, if you cast a character actor-y guy to be in an action movie, he's like, I got to get jacked.

I got to be conventionally handsome. I don't want to be the low status guy anymore. The other thing is, I think there was a secret sauce to Roland Emmerich, which is that Dean Devlin was his nerdy guy and he was the jock. He was the more conventional movie star. Like, Roland Emmerich in the creative team was the, like, muscular, like, I'm going to do the effects and make shit blow up. And Dean Devlin was, like, the nerdy guy who, like, cared about the world building and sort of did the, like, bare minimum, what's the emotional backstory of these characters kind of stuff and the patriot is the one where dean devlin stops working with him right it's after that no he always produced with him he stops writing but that's a big shift it is a big shift i mean i'm sure right i'm sure he had no interest in writing the patriot that's a randall

wallace no it's robert rhoda I take it back. I enjoy Day After Tomorrow a lot, but Day After Tomorrow definitely feels like a movie that is lacking Dean Devlin. Day After Tomorrow is putrid trash and I will never understand that movie's cult. And you're not the only one. Jake Gyllenhaal's hot. That's all you need to know.

I'm fully aware that he's hot. Although he's so hot why is it freaking snowing in that movie well that's how he survives it's just like all of the heat is just centralized with Jake Gyllenhaal

and everything else is cold so if you stay with him you survive David I want to say actually thank you for enlightening me I now realize that climate change is a hoax. Because that's true. If we were really experiencing a nuclear winter in the fictional world of that movie, then why is he so hot? It doesn't make sense. I mean, Day After Tomorrow, another Roland Emmerich movie, is a good example of how things change.

Where I guess the nerd in that is Dennis Quaid. It's sort of like they start giving up on that. It's like his friend in the movie. We should point out, has a podcast. Quaid does have a podcast now. Quaid's got a podcast. It's the Quaid-a-sans. Yeah.

It's the Quaid-a-sans. He has acclaimed it. He has proclaimed a Quaid-a-sans. I don't know if there's like consensus on that. If there's anything I know aboutis quaid is that it's a good idea to have that guy behind a microphone as much as possible we just want to get as many of his thoughts on the record all right because the more he shares the happier we're gonna be i have to read his his twitter bio because it's so good okay where is it i sent it to you right

ben is he the one that just married a 26 year old yep okay he has a 39 year gap with his fiancee yes that which is a hefty gap i mean you know she's 26 years old the plot of the parent trap is they're like our dad's dating a 26 year old and that movie came out like 15 years ago 20 20 a full 20 a gentleman's 20 i did forget that all right here's his bio besides being an actor musician song songwriter writer he he separates out songwriter and writer by the way and podcast pioneer semicolon he is also a jet pilot amateur astronomer fly fisherman philosopher low handicap golfer medical safety safety advocate, and armchair historian. Wow.

Rich people are annoying. Yeah. I do think that's, and even though I'm defending Day for Tomorrow, which I love in spite of it being abject trash. It's so bad. Oh no, it's denissance. We are messing this up.

No, we blew it. Oh no, he's at my door right now with a battering ram the intruder himself he's trying to intrude in your home um no i was gonna say i think day after tomorrow the problem is that the roles are not defined because dennis quaid is kind of the old timer hero character we're talking about the more conventional action hero and then jake jillenhall is not the nerd and they're not together their father and son right so there's like a family thing right right right and then from there on out like 2012 i also love as trash it's objectively 12 is better trash i like i mean roland emmerich's thing is that he takes absolute junk conspiracy shit which i'm

sure ben is about to talk about and just turns it into something that's just very entertaining. Like great silliness. He's also, he's Spielberg for morons. Right. Like everything is like the worst sort of like lounge act impression of Spielberg. But guess what? I love Steven Spielberg. I will watch a bad impression of Steven Spielberg because it still ends up being more artful than a lot of other blockbusters because he's ripping off the right guy and like in terms of just like his half-baked characterization but be like the striking at

trying to have the profound emotional arcs that spielberg would have you know like every character in a roland emmerich movie has a bad version of elliot's arc in et but he definitely he's lost it i mean you went right he's completely lost it his movies are pretty boring now well i mean white house down was not bad white house down is great i forgot about that one that one's good he has the right stars there right i haven't seen the last three well you haven't seen independence day resurgence i did not i did not uh rise up and see the resurgence well i will say there's a scene in that where the alien ship, which is like the size of a continent now, picks up Europe and like drops it on America or something like that.

Like it picks up one continent and drops it on another continent. Like a puzzle piece? Yeah, a big puzzle piece. And Jeff Goldblum says, what goes up must come down. That's what he says to that does he say that dramatically right before europe he says it like kind of jokingly and i'm like isn't that like a couple billion people just getting dropped wait where are they when this is happening i don't know they're somewhere else there's a whole thing with oceans too

okay for that one he didn't even try he just was like get me three hotties like he just he got liam hemsworth micah monroe and jesse usher it was just like i don't know find me three attractive people um do you know why i didn't see independence day resurgence i don't know you had better things to do no not a joke uh there was one there was one mistake they made which is that uh will smith isn't in it that was an issue who gives a fucking shit they were trying to make it for so long and then he finally got fed up of waiting for will smith to have an opening in his schedule because will smith wouldn't commit and he was like you know what i think we can do it without him which is one of the dumbest decisions of all time there is no reason to make that movie without will smith

back they wrote the script of will smith and he was the president of the dumbest decisions of all time. There is no reason to make that movie without Will Smith back. They wrote the script with Will Smith in it. He was the president of the United States. And at the end of the movie, he was going to get inside the fucking jet like Bill Pullman does at the end of Independence Day. And everyone would have cheered and it would have won the Nobel Prize. It would have been terrible. And we all would have loved it.

Will Smith did a great job not being in that movie because that movie stinks to high heaven. But don't you think it would have been better if he was in it and do you know what movie he chose to do over resurgence i don't know what would he tell me okay well i i mean i'm sure there's a version of that of resurgence that's okay the but the script they filmed is is not fantastic i would say maybe need a little more honing from the five-credited screenwriter. Just half of Europe on America, not all of Europe. What goes up must come down.

But you go like post-Resurgence, then it's Stonewall. No, that's pre-Resurgence. Oh, okay. That movie is hauntingly bad. I mean, that movie like well that's like a shit show from the trailer it's like who threw the first brick this white guy yeah right i mean politically that movie's a shit show it's also just unwatchable like it's not good anyway like right right but but like the people who uh uh sparked the Stonewall Rebellion were trans POC.

And Roland Emmerich himself is an openly gay man, is one of the most successful openly gay men in Hollywood. And just openly recast all of those characters with handsome, young, white, pretty boys. War Horse Boy. It's War Horse Boy. characters with handsome young white pretty boys warhorse boys it's warhorse boy but people asked him about that in interviews and he just went like well you know you have to sell a movie you can't put a person like that at the front of the film jesus um and then he made midway which i did not see did not see i also have a i have a soft spot for his shakespeare movie i never saw the shakespeare movie look i mean he's my flavor of trash i'm not proud of it but it almost always goes down easy and part of it is that even in

something like 2012 or uh a day after tomorrow i think he knows how to execute these set pieces better than anyone else if you're doing disaster porn his looks better than everyone else's at least at least for a long... Yeah, I guess no one's really taken the crown from him, right? No. And here's what you compare it to. You go like, well, what about something like War of the Worlds? The Rise of Skywalker.

Well, that's a different type of disaster porn, Angela. But something like War of the Worlds, you're like, oh, this is like a great evocation of a disaster happening, of like a horrific, like apocalyptic event roland emmerich doesn't do that he's like how cool can i make the world ending look like i don't want this to be haunting at all it'll be great it'll be pure spectacle and i think he does that incredibly morbid vaguely fucked up thing better than anyone else now ben hosley i want to throw this back to you we should we should loop back around to the star it's ben's episode and we're not hosting. Why did you pick the Stargate?

When did you enter the Stargate? These are all great questions. And since we are connoisseurs of context, for any listener who, you know, has not heard of Ben's Choice before, here's the deal. A lot of these movies I watched on a porch. When I was a kid, I had multiple friends' porches I would hang out on and watch movies.

They were cold sometimes, but we still watched movies. Usually watched inside the home. Not in this situation. In suburban America, often people have a den, right? That's a room in the house. You got a TV in there, maybe a couch or two. That wasn't your vibe. Nope.

And so these movies, again, when I have the option to pick, I have always just wanted to pick the movies that I had on VHS or I would watch all the time that have just this porch vibe. Here's a question I've never thought to ask, I don't think. Were you running an extension cable through the window indoors out to the porch. Or maybe there's an outside outlet. That's what I want. There's an outlet. Okay.

No judging either way. I was just curious. The lighting and the audio situation strike me as, you know, like, you know, maybe you get some sunlight on that cathode TV. You're not going to see the screen too well. sunlight on that cathode TV, you're not going to see the screen too well. I mean, it was more that we didn't have anywhere

else we could watch the movie. It was really it. The parents would be in the room and we would have nowhere else to go. You weren't going to watch Stargate with a couple cops looking over your shoulder. Yeah, definitely not. Parents are the ultimate narcs. They're going to watch Stargate with a couple cops looking over your shoulder. Yeah, definitely not.

Parents are the ultimate narcs. They wouldn't get Stargate. They're going to take our candy. No way, man. Yeah. So, as Griffin was sort of saying, a lot of the things you've chosen have been comedies. You know, obviously endlessly rewatchable. We love a comedy.

Yeah. And King Ralph has sort of been promised for a long time. That's always been the hopper as a future Ben's Choice. It's our waiting for Godot. For years, for sure. Waiting for Ralph. But there was the question, we were looking at the slot and we went, is it finally time for King Ralph? And then you threw

out Stargate and we sort of stroked our chins and went, that's kind of an interesting new angle. That's sort of a new expansion because at the time, Assassin's Creed felt like a complete left field oddball pick. Right. Especially because it's a modern one because it's an HBO go at night while your girlfriend sleeps movie rather than a Ben Porch classic.

Yeah. And I kind of jump around. I mean, I get to curate it how I want, but I feel like we're taking it in this direction that's going to be a little bit more like TNT in the middle of the day, you know, you're on summer break kind of movie. We've covered a lot of TBS films and now we need to build a wing onto the Ben's Choice Museum that is the TNT

films. Yes. Assassin's Creed and another universe would have been a 90s TNT staple. 100%. And it has the same vibe as um stargate in that it like it has a hint of conspiratorial nonsense i was gonna say i was gonna say this you know that this has the ancient aliens that has the sort of like knights templar kind of thing but it's the same thing where it's kind of like something that a wikipedia article could like plant a seed for you to then like think like well the thing is society is actually you know run by aliens because you

often mock us for liking sci-fi when this podcast started and it was about star wars you were like i don't get it i don't understand why these nerds like this thing so much so i was somewhat surprised hearing that you loved both assassins creed Stargate so much. I had not seen either movie until forced to watch them for your episodes. And in both cases, like two minutes in, I was like, oh, I get this because this is like the kind of sci-fi Ben would

have read in a zine. Like this is that kind of... Okay, yeah. There's no machine guns in Star Wars. Right. And I think the other aspect of it is, David, as you pointed out, Stargate has the ancient aliens thing going on. Right. But it really has the action Bronson watches ancient aliens on Viceland vibe. Yeah.

That's the real, that's the added element it needs to push it over the edge to being a Ben's choice. You know what I mean? It feels like a conversation starter for Ben as a teenager, right? You watch Stargategate you come out of that being like i never thought about those dang pyramids like what's going on with them it's it's anarchist cookbook sci-fi oh man i was so into like ancient egypt and like tombs what a surprise like mummies it was like definitely peak like getting into that stuff and because like also is into aliens too and like i you know i've said on this podcast i want to be abducted right now

i've always wanted to be like if right now you're the roof you're under just ripped off and like a tractor beam grabbed you i would love. Ben would be like the kid in the movie, just like use my body for thousands of years. Run right for it. I got to say though, Ben, this is actually pretty much an ideal time to get abducted by aliens. It's true. I mean, we're talking mid-April 2020.

I would love to be pulled off of this planet. Man, imagine leaving my house. That's exciting. Yeah. Yeah, and it's just like, I don't think the virus has spread to spaceships, right we don't know though we don't know no but come on instead of your apartment you're on an alien spaceship yeah cool i i would not resist at all all right you've got ancient egypt right mummies you got aliens so this movie is bridging those two things and it has a stargate

in it yeah it's bridging them with a wormhole well no stargate should be in more movies well this is crazy i think this is an interesting point you're making ben because there are many movies with aliens there are many movies that cover ancient egypt in some capacity yeah there are a smaller section of movies that overlap the two, but there is literally no movie other than Stargate that covers all three circles in the Venn diagram. That is ancient Egypt, aliens,

and a Stargate. You are correct that this is a cinematic dead end in that way. There should, I want there to be like portals as a genre. Like a Netflix portal movies. Ben, can I ask? Were you

someone who was already into the idea of how did the pyramids get here? Ancient age aliens. Before this movie or was this movie kind of an activation point into that sort of level of theorization activation yeah because i mean you were pretty young did you see this in theaters no i saw this on the porch this was stp for you the premiere for you straight to porch

i definitely saw this in theaters i was really I was eight years old. I was definitely, I was old enough to now have an interest in, you know, like moderate action, right? You know what I mean? That's crazy. Nothing too intense. So you and your family walked out of your Upper West Side apartment and walked to what, the Lowe's 84th Street?

I mean, Lincoln Square 68. You nailed it. It was 1994, my friend. Okay, cool. Well, we're on the same page. Of course, Lincoln Square, 68. You nailed it. It was 1994, my friend. Okay, cool. Well, we're on the same page. Of course, you grew up in New York City, and you saw the movie New York City, and that's all I was trying to say. Because I think Star Trek

Generations is also 94, right? Or is that 95, maybe? No, that's 94 as well. Those are like the early, this, Star Trek Generations, the early blockbusters I can remember, like action movies, that i can remember like action movies that i can remember seeing in theaters and as a kid being kind of like oh this is a lot like there's guns there's explosion like you know you know it was it was the sort of the next step

up from your disney do you guys notice the reload the cocking sound effects in this movie are amazing. They're so present and loud. They're mixed so loud. It's perfect. And they sound so fake. It's like out of a video game. I mean, when you're a kid and you're like pretending to have a gun, that is a clot, right?

You really sell the cocking of a gun. Yeah. Can we say that this movie has a very strange relationship to guns oh this is when roland amrick hasn't quite figured out how to do the like melodramatic uh human emotional storyline you don't think it's close to the iron giant at all i i just think i i love the bearish effort and then you sort of forgot about it. At the beginning. Right. Because Independence Day, he nails it.

Can I say that's my favorite part of the whole movie? They're like, that guy's a little nuts. What's up with him? That kid shot himself. A little weird. I was going to say, that's where I go into this is a bad impression of Spielberg stuff. Because you have this moment, this sequence that's entirely visual where it's like wife looking out the window. Smoking a cigarette like at the kitchen counter.

Military men come in. Can we talk to him? You can try. Okay, good. That's actually good. You're telling us a lot in one line of dialogue. This guy is gone. He's got long hair.

Right. Then we cut there. Long hair. He's staring off. Looks despondent. Photo of the son. He's holding the gun right you're like okay i'm getting a vibe of what's going on here there's some pieces to be filled in but i

at least have a sense of who this character is and it's mostly being conveyed visually and through energy and then the two military guys go to the car and they're like what happened to that guy and they're like you didn't hear son shot himself in the head with a gun now he's broken too bad probably no coming back like they have the one scene where they're trying to like explain it subtly and then the following scene they just walk out just say it out loud fully list his character biography as if it's on the back of a trading card good thing we're sending him on a mission where he might blow something up and not care about his wife because what's there to live for anymore anyway right not to spoil the movie but after that it's not spoken of again until basically right at the end james spader's like are you good and he's like yeah i am good

it's like that you're like this is it all he needed was a little stargate trip to clear his head out well he needed to hand a machine gun to a child i know i know i know this all worked out i know he finds a new son or you know at the other end of the galaxy knowing that this movie deals with like uh alternate uh dimensions and all this sort of shit when it goes from here shaggy haired kurt russell despondent with a gun looking like he's on the verge of committing suicide himself. So then two scenes later he shows up. World's crispest

haircut like completely together man on a mission all business. I was like is this an alternate reality version? Does Kurt Russell play two different characters in this movie? And he just seems super high functioning if a

little bit impersonal for the rest of the movie yeah and then there's like the one scene where he overreacts to the boy taking the gun yeah he does give a kid a cigarette gives a kid a cigarette doesn't want the kid to have a gun that's good right that's good lessons and then there's the moment when they sneak into the temple and he just goes like fucking full rambo with like the gun hidden under yeah take us through the plot of stargate man are we all hyped or what this movie man very exciting movie a lot of fresh and provocative ideas okay like stargates for example such as stargates or einstein rosen bridges what's that it's forming an einstein rosen bridge which is basically what we would think of as a as a wormhole

that's not canon david okay call her stargate please call by its proper name david i do want to ask because i feel like maybe you want to get into like the writing or pre-production of it or should we just get into the plot? I'll just sort of throw out that when I was 10, I was thinking about it, right? Cause that's how, about how old I would have been in 94.

Sure. I was definitely into stealing basketball cards. Sure. Sure. Okay. Okay. I knew you were going to say that it was so obvious. Yeah.

And I was like the kind of kid that had pegs on my bmx and i would like you know ride around on that and cause you're the kind of kid i was scared of yes i understand yeah as a kid um yeah it was just a good time like i look back on all this finally hanging out in the woods getting up to uh no good oh you know uh this is what i wanted to talk about you guys ever ring the doorbell and run away uh no uh not really ding dong to ditched no it always seemed like a very low reward situation like it is always so good. Anyway, that was the kind of stuff I was up to when I was 10. Um, Ben, I will say the,

the origin of this movie, if that's what you're asking for in terms of context, seems to be that Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich really wanted to make a franchise. They had proven themselves with universal soldier that Roland Emmerich had made a bunch of German films before that, that Dean Devlin was the key to him getting into the American studio system, and that he was sort of the nerdy sci-fi guy. They designed this to be a trilogy. That was always their intention. They wanted this to be their Star Wars. They thought

this was going to be like the table setting for their money franchise. Anytime there's a successful movie, and especially when a movie spawns a whole media franchise like stargate has with multiple tv shows uh there is almost always someone who comes out of the woodwork and says uh i wrote this movie 15 years before they made the movie like you know finding nemo becomes the highest grossing animated film of all time someone goes i sent a spec script to disney in 1984 that had a fish in it. Clearly, I wrote this movie. And then the case is thrown out. There is a guy who showed up sometime in the late 90s with evidence that he had directly shown a script to Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich called Egypt Scape. Who was himself a very big sort of conspiracy theory i think scientist nerd

sure and i believe the case was settled out of court it seems that perhaps yes his name was omar judy it was settled so we don't know exactly what the terms were but but very often especially with big studios behind it uh these cases will get dismissed. And the fact that there was a settlement points towards the fact that maybe some guy showed them a concept that did not work as a script that was maybe a little too heady that they ran with and turned into Stargate.

He sued them for $140 million and it was settled out of court for $50,000. Okay. All right. So they didn't give him much. They didn't give him much. They didn't give him much. He didn't even get a Stargate out of it.

He didn't. He should have. Because I can only imagine how much money Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin have made off of this script, considering all the TV spinoffs and all that. I was doing that math as well. There are a few cases in which I think someone, because of the nature of how this movie was made, because of the fact that no one thought that it was going to spawn a franchise like this it was a French co-production they sold distribution to American studios later I have to imagine they have such a good piece of

Stargate as a property and then you go like 10 years of the first show like five years of Atlantis a season or two of universe and then an animated one yeah plus like all the merchandise and whatever like if they had never done anything again for the rest of their careers they would be living insanely well off of just stargate right right you started to tell us david about what the shows were like oh sure uh yeah we can delve into that well i mean uh this movie comes out in 94 and stargate sg1 debuts in 97 obviously kurt russell was replaced with macgyver richard dean anderson this became richard dean anderson's post macgyver cash cow right um everyone else was replaced mostly by guys you've never you know like, like sort of randos, right?

It was a Canadian, one of those shows that had a lot of Canadian stuff going on. I guess French stayed on. Wait, who stayed on? What? French Stewart. French Stewart did not stay on.

No, his character is replaced and renamed. Everyone, everyone is replaced. Oh, he's in Stargate universe. I'm sorry. He played Dr. Andrew Covell in Stargate Universe.

Is that a different character? It must be because it came around. His character is a recurring or a regular character on SG-1. I guess the original Stargate TV show.

Right. The guy he is is is a yeah a recurring character i think and it's just basically their military has this gate and they keep going it's like what if the gate's still there yeah yeah and it's connected to a network of gates now there's many other stargates the whole milky way is littered with them whoa and so they can go all over the place fighting that's smart aliens there's various gods yeah but like there's all kinds of gods like you know who are other egyptian gods right and it's like there's a whole expansive universe of you know infighting within the alien races and all that. There's other aliens that eventually show up. I mean,

it ran for 10 seasons, 214 episodes. It mostly, it began on Showtime and used to be kind of like hyper violent, not hyper, but it was more like R rated. Yeah. And then it moves to the sci-fi channel and becomes a little more anodyne.

But then there's Atlantis. Then there's Atlantis. Five seasons. Insane. Seems to be doing what Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin had always planned to do with the sequels. What they said was they want to make a trilogy where each one would be discovering a new Stargate.

A new kind of mythology. Right. Tied to a different culture, a different sort of myth. This is real. Atlantis is like, what different sort of myth. This is real. Atlantis is like, what's another thing? Atlantis is real. But what happened, all of that stuff. Their big goal was, we want to make a trilogy of films that will ultimately connect all mythologies.

To say that they all were the byproduct of aliens coming here early on in human civilization. And then, so yeah. So Stargate Atlantis, they find like an Atlantis Stargate and it goes to Atlantis and Jason Momoa plays an Atlantean and there's all kinds of other fun stuff. It was like that and Baywatch Hawaii

were the two things that made him. He was for so long, like a kind of like king of syndication actor. Yeah. So do we have this movie to thank for Aquaman basically? Kind of, kind of of and then you have stargate universe uh in which they're on a spaceship that's lost in an unknown area of the universe and i guess it must have a stargate too i don't know and that had robert carlisle

i was gonna say nah stargate universe was the other two shows had ended and they were like okay now we're gonna make a big budget one like this franchise has clearly proven itself can we make the breakthrough show that becomes like a mainstream success and let's get really big name actors in all the parts and it got canceled after one season because it was too expensive two seasons it did too but yes I mean right if you're working at a higher budget you're gonna be you gotta you know you can't just skirt by but there's also an animated series that is out of canon yeah yeah it's called stargate infinity or something like that it's an idea that has legs and the reason is because anything can be beyond those stargates it's so good and now I want to throw this out as just a thought experiment. Okay. Okay.

Like, did they work from just writing like Stargate on a board? Like, do you know what I'm saying? Like, that's where the writing process started. I think it looked like James Spader's chalkboard at the beginning of this movie. I think it started with a board where they were just writing all these ancient Egyptian symbols. I mean, let me take it. Well, here's my idea. ahead man star blank if you just start there i'm i swear to god like we could you could like make 20 movie ideas out of just that process do you know what i mean star jail boom you've got a like a space prison break movie you know what i'm saying ben you should watch yeah you'd love lockout ben you would love lockout lockout is unfortunately called lockout but it

should be called space jail like that's about someone who's escaping from space jail but ben i'm doing you a mitzvah right now yeah lock. Lockout is Guy Pearce playing Snake Plissken. It's 100% stolen, beat for beat, that character. Cool. And it's rather than having to get the president out of New York, he has to get the president's daughter out of a space jail. Yeah, she's in a space jail. As you're saying, Ben, like imagine it's 1990, I don't know don't know three right like you're in your movie

multiplex you see a poster okay the poster is the great pyramid of giza fine cool with a portal hovering above it that's like beaming alien energy at it okay so the build stars are kurt russell and james spader which is no actor faces on no no faces no it's just portal pyramid like those are your two things we're working with right because you see spader first build and you go is this an erotic drama and then you see kurt russell and you, is this like a stripped down action film? Right. I guess it's Kurt first build. Kurt is first build.

Kurt is first build. You're not looking at the actors. You're like Stargate. But if you cast your eyes to the top of the poster, though, you would be like James Spader. Like, I mean, what was James Spader's biggest movie before this? He was not a box office guy. I mean, he was an esoteric actor he always seemed to resist being pigeonholed as a conventional leading man um he played creeps

and weirdos anyway and then and then tagline pretty good it will take you a million light years from home but will it bring you back it's a big question i mean yeah pretty great but it's just confusing considering that you're seeing a pyramid where you're like well that's on earth it's just a lot of questions i just think it's an eye-catching image right yes can i just say quickly before we get back onto the plot of the movie because i was trying to make sense of the the extended stargate universe. Carries over the characters, right? Spader and French Stewart and Kurt Russell's characters into the original TV show.

But all of their names are changed. And some of them it's like, oh, O'Neil is spelled with two L's instead of one L. Or some of them are like, we changed his name from Dave to Jack. Well, I think it was also because they didn't want to step on Emmerich and Devlin's toes. Like, MGM wanted to milk this property, and the two of them had gone on to Independence Day and Godzilla, and it seemed like they weren't going to make a Stargate 2 anytime soon. But they also didn't want to negate

anything that those guys might do in Stargate 2. So there's this weird degree of plausible deniability of like, well, maybe this is a different character. He's almost exactly the same, except his name is spelled with one different letter. And then in like 2008, Emmerich and Devlin were like, I think we're finally ready to make Stargate 2. And it's going to take place in a way that it doesn't negate the TV series.

It will fit in between Stargate and the TV series. Then it never came about. And then like another seven or eight years later or 10 years later, like 2018, they announced full reboot. Emmerich's going to direct it. It's planning to be a trilogy. And then it also never happened.

But in both, in the first case, Russell and Spader were on board. I mean, sure. Why not? Can I read you guys the quote from James Spader about why he chose to do this film? It says, He admitted he did the film for money

and he found the script to be awful. He said, Acting for me is a passion, but it's also a job and I've always approached it as such. I have a certain manual laborer's view of acting there's no shame in taking a film because you need some fucking money wait so i can't quite tell if he's saying that uh this was a pay job very subtle

well you know the other incredible paycheck story about this movie, right? Jay Davidson, unknown model, is spotted at a party, cast in The Crying Game, right? A role that necessitates a completely unknown actor because the twist is predicated on you not knowing the gender of the actor. Right. So, Crying Game comes out, becomes a sensation. Jay Davidson gets nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Through the process of making one movie and the ensuing sort of media like excitement

and an Oscar campaign and all of that, Jay Davidson is like, I don't like movies. I don't like fame. I'm out of this. I'm back to being a model. I have no interest

in the film industry. No interest in being an actor anymore after having one of the most celebrated debut performances in decades. He. No interest in being an actor anymore after having one of the most celebrated debut performances in decades. He's so good in... Agreed.

In both this and The Crying Game. So doesn't make another movie. And then Roland Emmerich reaches out and is like, you have to play Ra. This is like,

you have the otherworldly sort of presence that I need for this character coming in in the last 30 minutes. You need to make I need someone like you to make that much of an impact with the limited screen time. And Jay Davidson doesn't want to do the film so badly that he just goes, I'll ask for a million dollars and then they won't give it to me. And then I'll be able to say, well, I would have done it so that, you know, people don't get mad at me.

And Roland Emmer calls his bluff and Jay Davidson gets paid one million dollars for Stargate and then never appears in a movie ever again. Two feature films. One of them gets him an Oscar nomination. The second one, he gets a million dollars for probably 12 minutes of screen time. Well, yeah. Never actually. That's when you hang it up. Once you're in Stargate're done you're done you're done perfect career two for two yeah i would also like to point out the whole trivia page is just jay davidson fucking hates this

he also hated his costume so much that at the final cut of his final scene that he had to shoot he fully stripped naked on set like didn't go to his trailer and then he retired right after this movie so his retirement literally just fully nude yeah he's one of those people who was like i just don't i don't like this i don't like any of this nothing horrible happened to me there's no tragic backstory i just this sucks i'm out yeah making movies sucks being in this industry sucks i got my million dollars smell you later fuckheads um the the other wild thing is do you know who emmerich's like backup choice was who john gielgud so he was like if jay won't do it i'm zagging i'm getting an old guy i'm going

um but it's also just like was was jay davidson's voice dubbed over or just heavily modulated oh i think completely dubbed right i mean either way you you can't hear like whatever it's it's modulated so you're talking a million dollars for probably 12 minutes of screen time with dialogue refuse to wear the big uh mask thing because it was too heavy so basically it's just like you know mostly not wearing clothes mostly just on one set saying lines that will be redubbed or whatever cool million great and yet i think it's an excellent performance and i think makes the movie i agree I think the movie doesn't work without it. I think you can fucking throw

Kurt Russell and James Spader in the garbage and replace them with MacGyver and the muscles guy they got for the TV show. The movie would still basically function. Would not function without Jay Davidson. The best shot in the movie is the reveal of Jay Davidson. Is the CGI like morph.

Agreed. And it's also one of these weird things. It's almost like the Tommy Lee Jones effect where like if Tommy Lee Jones hates being in your movie it only makes your performance better.

Like for what this movie needs from Ra it helps that Jay Davidson just has such disdain. Like general all encompassing disdain every moment he's on screen. Total fuck you

presence at all times what is the stupid fucking even talking to humans just completely grosses me out all i want to do is be in my pyramid spaceship and be tended to by my army of eunuchs and otherwise leave me alone it by complete accident ends up lending the movie an incredible air of legitimacy. I agree. The thing that makes the movie feel substantive is that Jay Davidson hates being in this movie. Yeah. Like, in a TV show, I believe the alien villains are played by people who, like, monologue and they have big personalities and all that.

They don't do this again. No. They're played by people who want to be acting on stargate the tv show all right well we're close to an hour into the episode so let's get into the plot you said that you were a connoisseur of context you want some context no i thought it was great i mean we covered so much territory yeah Yeah. Ding dong and ditching. I mean, all kinds of stuff. Yeah. We already sort of talked about the beginning of the movie,

which starts off strong. We learn a little bit about Kurt Russell's character in which his son was, or did shoot himself. I watched the director's cut on my Blu-ray. I was trying to find it. Which has the first scene of rob being abducted oh the director's cut restructures it yeah yeah it's not it doesn't really change anything and i don't think it's really necessary no this did egypt first just the little white girl discovering

and stealing a necklace right right but yes instead, we see the discovery of a Stargate. Someone digs one up or digs up a thingy. You've got a real Indiana Jones opening. Yes. It's dusty. They found this circular thing, right? And they're picking it up. It's our Stargate, okay?

Fuddy-duddy archaeologists. Yeah. And there's a little girl, okay? And she's got a locket, okay? Boom, fast forward. She's old now. You're not wrong. And she's going to see Spader just bomb hard, okay?

Can I say, has any movie centered around an old lady holding on to a necklace for decades? I don't know. Not fucking been a home run. Every movie should open or end with the reveal of someone holding onto a necklace forever. So everyone walks out because they don't believe in the truth, which is that aliens built the pyramids.

Sure. They're all right there's so also so many movies that have that in the early where it's like a scientist is like but my papers and everyone's like no no no you're you're a crackpot like we'll never listen to you this is a time where if you were into conspiracy stuff like obviously the internet was, like, I think, kind of around. But it's like, you really had to hunt for all that trashy kind of stuff. You know what I mean?

Well, no. This was right when Al Gore invented the Stargate website. So the internet was really just forming at the time of this release. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. Anyway, the old woman talks to him and, you know, like, in this really fun, great setup where it's like raining hard. You know, and he's all like got his papers and stuff. That's fun. You know, it is. It is a storytelling trope I love, which is very, very passionate. Intellectual is constantly at and dismissed by everybody.

And then there's just some quiet benefactor standing in the back, not showing any support of their theories, but then inviting them into their expensive car once they're leaving the building. Yeah, because there's actually, yeah, there's some shit going on. Like, you know, this, he's not, some's some there's some shit going on like yeah

this he's not some people know he's not such a crackpot right but she's not she doesn't want anyone else to notice that she knows that he's not a crackpot she's trying to keep a lid on so she just quietly stands in the back and then when everyone else is gone she waits patiently in the car to invite him in and go like you're fucking on the right track. And also your life's a fucking mess and you have no other choice but to do this project for me. And also hold my necklace.

Does she give him her necklace? Yeah. But he's about to go through the gate. Right. But okay. Boom. Now we're in a military base. Alright? and they meet Richard Kind and the gang oh my god Richard Kind

not enough of him looking very svelte a svelte kind and this is a movie that really proves it's cruel to be kind because he is so dismissive of James Spader without reason because James Spader without reason

because James Spader fucking takes him to school. He corrects his entire translation on his first crack. Right. Which I love when a character comes in and people have been working for years and he just nails it right away. Yeah. That rules. Cause you're like,

Oh man, well of course this guy's the best. Right. That's just good storytelling and and kind has that energy of like uh good luck son i i've worked through every possible angle of this thing there's nothing you can do and then james spader is like let me just see star gate eat my farts and i think uh the best symbol to use would be the one that looks like a pyramid. Is there one that's maybe pyramid-y? We've never thought of that.

They had Egyptologists, right, who worked on the movie to make sure that all the hieroglyphics and the language are relatively accurate. Well, this movie is hard sci-fi. Yeah. Okay. And so then you also, though, you have kurt russell coming in taking over right you know he's got a new haircut his life's totally together now now he's all together he's in military mode cut his hair doesn't look like such a damn hippie anymore no and he's not he's not sad he's just like extremely stoic very focused and i mean you know there's just gonna be some back and forth between him

and the old lady i don't even remember what they really talk about but i mean all this setup i will say to the movie's credit they zip through yeah it's pretty quick to let's turn the stargate on and then let's go through the stargate right if you're like me and you have add you're like hell yeah let's just keep on rolling right right right all right so i feel like the one thing i want to mention with sort of the vibe of the military in being involved in this project you know because like area 51 as we all know is a place where aliens are being stored currently right currently they're on ice or do you think they're like walking around i think they like are wearing lab coats and working at computers yeah the only person on ice is austin powers

so ben do you remember when there was that was it last year it feels so long ago when all the teens were gonna naruto run at area 15 i wanted to go where it was like we know it's near here let's all meet at this point on the map and then we'll just naruto one run and the military had to be like please don't do that we're gonna be obligated to shoot you like the military had to be like we all appreciate a good joke but david 2019 was also like our world is so insane right now 2019 was a year in which the new york times and like three or four separate articles have confirmed that there have been alien spacecrafts on the planet and like it's just getting buried under like like whatever trump just just said. Like, I know it was wild.

This is happening. Right. Trump would be like, right. Kofi and everyone would be like, what does it mean? And then the Navy would be like, here's some videos of spaceships.

Probably. I don't know. You check them out. Can I say, I have a friend who was friends. I have a friend. I was jealous. I have a friend who was a duck. Jealous. I have a friend who had told me, hey, I just got like the biggest tip of my life. New York Times is going to break a story next week that will actually change the world.

And I was like, oh, is there some crazy movie news coming out? Is someone about to be canceled? Is there some scandal? And he was like, no, you cannot cannot even comprehend i cannot tell you anymore but i just have a friend who's working on the story and it's gonna drop this week and it will actually change the world and he sent me the link when the first government acknowledges an unexplainable ufo phenomenon here's the record of all these times that like fighter pilots have seen spaceships and shit. And he was like, boom.

And then I just saw the world not really react to it. And then for six months after that, like every couple of weeks, they would drop another little story and it would just be like, oh yeah, no, okay, yeah, no, I guess aliens are real. It was because the New York Times no right okay yeah no i guess it was because the

new york times wrote about it in that way where it was like video comma purports to show you know like and everyone was like what is this about like taxes or something not interested like they took it too seriously you had senators being accused of being sleepy and low energy all the time so that had to make the front page. That's true. That's true. Marco Rubio did sit in a big boy chair and he is a little baby boy. And we needed to talk about that a lot.

Top story. Yeah. So, all right. All of this to say that the military always looks at like the presence of aliens as a threat. Okay. Yeah. that like the presence of aliens is a threat okay yeah which is like this trope that i feel like like why is the military always trying to like make a situation bad do you know um wait what do you mean like you mean they find a stargate and they they're always like sorry how can we be

bad you know what i mean like it's like alien technology how can we be bad like i think it provides good dramatic conflict within a movie. Interesting. Within a sci-fi movie that you always need to have a believer and a skeptic. Yeah. And in movies, the skeptic tends to be someone who wants to bomb them to death. God. To address your question seriously, like, and I think this is very easily documented,

like post-Vietnam for a good 20 years, the military is a totally suspicious entity in movies. And The Rock is sort of at the peak of that, where The Rock is basically about the military being like, we never got over Vietnam, so we will occupy The Rock. Right, there's just such massive distrust at anything the military says is necessary. Right, and they're shitty at their jobs and like you say they're always like and also maybe what if we like snuck a nuke through the stargate i don't know maybe that's a fun idea like you know like they're like in armageddon i mean there's a there's a nuke on the space shuttle and everyone's well actually no they're gonna blow

up all right forget i take that back take that back oh no it's right the line in armageddon that i love is when william fichtner has the gun and will patton says what are you doing with a gun in space it's a great line but stargate also it's just like they don't lay out the track they just sort of go like here's a bunch of military dudes acting really sketchy they're really cold to james fader there's clearly something that they're doing that's fucked up and they like they only know how to blow things up it's same with independence day where they're like let's nuke the aliens we'll nuke them that'll do it right it's not gonna work like it's both not really a plot twist and also not really established it's just kind of like you have to know that their motivations are bad and

you hope that kurt russell will see the light by the end of the movie because you want to be rooting for that guy but you're right it's barely see the light by the end of the movie because you want to be rooting for that guy. But you're right. It's barely a fight. They're just kind of like... Barely. Yeah. But they, I mean, they are like hoping that Spader is going to be the guy who helps them get through the Stargate. They don't want him to go with

them, but Spader kind of makes his case for, I'm probably the only guy who could help you get back out. He's a bit of a sneaky boy about it. Let's be honest. He really is. He's sneaking into the fucking box

at the Barclays Center. So, alright. Let's just go over some of the stuff leading up to them going into Stargate. We'll get it over really quick.

Great tech. Like, great screens. Great, like, even the map sort of like movie moving thing looks great and like really is effective uh i wanted to talk about

he gets the locket right before he goes in which is an important thing for later when they get through the stargate um well there's nothing there's nothing else that's really very crucial right he just finds what the seventh symbol is and that turns it on. I do like that everything is like vibrating and like they're like, we've only gotten to six, like as it steps up.

I remember now. As they like poke a button. So I think it's cool how he's all, he's into all these like dead languages and stuff. That's something that I've always felt like would be cool to know or study, but then it's like study. I'm not going to do that. So I just cool to know or study, but then it's like, study? I'm not going to do that. So I just wanted to mention

I think that's cool. Oh, sure. Right. You should learn Aramaic, Ben. I don't know, man. I mean, you got time. I do have time, that's true. I could get Rosetta Stone for that. You're going to need the real Rosetta Stone.

Can we talk about the moment when I saw it? I imagined must have instantly transformed this movie from a one time porch watch to a Ben Hosley porch classic. I would say I want to say Forky also while we were this, was like, man, this is a real Ben joint. Like, it was very obvious. Go ahead, Griffin. And then said, trash. Yeah, of course. The moment where I went, this, I understand it's gold label status in the Porch Classics collection, is the visualization of traveling through the Stargate.

Yeah. Yeah. The leg of traveling through the Stargate. Yeah. Yeah. Ugh. The leg of the... Like Science Center, Planetarium opening. Right into the abyss. Yeah. The best. Yeah, this is some real, like, Encarta, you know, like...

Oh, my... Exactly. Yes. It's a CD-ROM version of the final flight sequence from 2001 A Space Odyssey. It's like you could say it's, like, I know vaporwave or something uh maybe maybe a tad vapor yeah right i didn't think about this is like the fountain of vaporwave yeah exactly even just like the poster aesthetically feels like that yeah i mean the stargate itself looks like a vapor wave yeah yeah yeah which also that the graphics on that too is so of its time right like all right so let's just get into it they're going

through they've got some little droid boy going ahead and then they're there i mean which is it feels kind of crazy how little setup they have other than him just being like, well, I'm a sneaky boy and I have to go. And they're like, all right. And now we're going in. They let him enter the Stargate like 30 minutes after meeting him and bringing him to see the Stargate. Yeah. If that. He's like, I don't know.

You're going to need some kind of symbol. They're like, he nailed it. Let's take him to the Stargate right now. Right. They're like, this military like like troop they have their bags packed they show up every morning at 8 a.m ready to walk through the stargate and they're like just let me know if you figure out that code james spader shows up he cracks it and they're like we're good to go do you want to come with us we have like just any calls you have to make get them done in the next five minutes we'll get you a lawn chair yeah right alright so

we get to see them unlock like the coolest thing ever which is a stargate they unlock the gate they unlock the gate

that's true the stargate yeah they override Mark Maron's wishes he hates this film he finds it offensive and they get out on the other side and sort of like very much a representation Override Mark Maron's wishes. He hates this film. He finds it offensive.

And they get out on the other side and sort of like very much a representation of my current sort of journey. Now they're in this arid desert alien land. Right. They move through the wet into the dry. Into the dry. It's so striking. It's like it really,

the light of it just brings this whole new energy. Okay. And now you're like, cool. They're on a new friggin planet that has oxygen. Like what's going on here? Right. They go from thinking, oh, this is just a weird alien planet to then recognizing, oh, my God, these are what they think the ruins of a long gone civilization. They think they're entering into ruins. But in actuality, it's like a whole new planet

with human beings that have evolved in their own way and they have this dead language. It's just like, it's so exciting. Man, I would love to do something like this. To go through a Stargate and find yourself on another galaxy's planet with a lot of cultural... Where humans have been stolen.

Yes. The idea is, right, that Ra was taking humans from our planet and putting them here, right? Yeah. From actual ancient Egypt. And they've been stuck here ever since. And then Egypt started to fight back and he them here, right? From actual ancient Egypt. And they've been stuck here ever since. And then Egypt started to fight back

and he was like, all right, well, I'm going to keep these guys on this side. Right, right. But he has suppressed them so that they have never evolved past the ancient Egypt mindset. He has outlawed writing. Right, right. But you got that cut as they're emerging

where you see the pyramid and then behind it you got all the moons you got three moons baby yeah not one no this different exactly right all right it's a it's a pretty arresting image i do like it look i i've seen one moon i've even seen two suns but three moons now i've seen one moon. I've even seen two suns. Three moons? Now I've seen everything. It's the rule threes, baby. Three moons. Ultimate heighten.

And so they meet this like alien horse in the desert or something. It's like a yarn steed. Yeah. And so it's got a saddle though. Oh man, there's people here right they they had set up like a base camp so they split off right one fraction stays behind of the military guys spader and uh colonel and like i think two other military dudes they go and they are going to investigate some like um tracks or something.

Oh, there's the hijink of Spader getting dragged along by the alien horse. An extended, extended sequence. This movie's got such a light touch. A long bit. Yes. I had to check the credits. I paused it because I went, I thought this was a Roland Emmerich movie, not an Ernst Lubitsch film.

It's got the velveteen touch of a dandy fop do they ever explain what's up with the alien horse thing it's just you know it's it's an alien planet yeah they want to sell some more toys what do you mean what explanation do you need i mean i right i like the look of it i like that it's a big old puppety thing that's fun i love it but it is funny that they're like yeah these guys are humans they're stuck here and also they have alien horses anyway yeah rob probably brought it with him from his home planet i don't know but why didn't he bring it to earth don't question this skipping on the alien horses for us david don't look an alien horse in the mouth okay it's a gift to us the viewing public

listen we don't need to know why this planet has the same atmosphere and oxygen is present and gravity is the same. Absolutely not. We can just exist like we normally would. We don't need to answer those questions because this movie's cool. Okay? And that's all it's going for. Accept it gladly.

And I've kind of skipped over the the trope of like the military at this time, especially as just being like bullies in this specific way. You know, and they're just being mean to Spader. But I guess. Bunch of jocks. Yeah. They're such like jocks, man. Yeah. He gets bullied by French Stewart.

I mean, that really burns. Should we talk about French Stewart? It's completely insane. We have to talk about french stewart it's completely insane we have to talk about international emergency his arms he has my arms okay he's supposed to be in the fucking military and he has my level of arms and he's not an expert in anything because then at least i'm like oh okay he's an expert in fucking, yap, yap, yap, wine, wine, wine is what he's an expert in. For sure. He should fucking work in a restaurant

all the wine-ing he's doing. Okay. It is funny though, because it's like, when French Stewart breaks out with Third Rock from the Suncoast. He's playing French in a French Stewart. David is holding up a bottle of-

David's doing prop work now. What is that, Pinot Grige? What are we looking at there? Yeah, it's a Pinot Grige. It's a big boy. It's a big boy. It's a prop work now. What is that? Pinot Grige? What are we looking at there? Yeah, it's a Pinot Grige. It's a big boy. It's a big boy. It's a chungus. David is holding up a chungus of wine.

I just got a delivery today. Okay. Keep it in your pants. David, could you just come in a little closer? A little closer? I thought that visual bit was pretty cool. For the listener at home, Ben leaned in really close

to his computer screen, thus himself executing a visual bit that will be lost on the audience. Yeah. Yeah. It was good.

All right, so we're in the city at some ancient primitive place. No one can communicate to each other, so it's going to kind of come through in just like gestures.

I wonder if they submitted Stargate for Best Foreign Language Film that year at the Academy Awards because it is like 50% in Stargate-ese. They are speaking as James Spader later says

like some form of ancient Egyptian. Like some concept of how that might have sounded which by the end of the movie he's like fluent in he goes into like a hallway with one of the ladies and she's like you know this is called this and he's like oh I totally get it

alright give me five minutes so anyway here's the exposition here's how he got his powers but they try to with their fingers draw symbols in the sand in order to ask them questions and explain where they came from. And they get fucking freaked out. They don't like that.

You're not allowed to do that. You can't write. They immediately think that they're like kings or something, right? Or like part like in with like draw and gods. They think they've been sent by the gods. Partly because he's got the raw uh, the, the raw necklace. Yes. Right.

From the old lady. And so they also tried it. Oh, there's that gross thing where they, they offer the woman, which, you know, yeah.

Peter's a gentleman. Yeah, he is. He's a gentleman. Uh, the woman is played by, uh, let me get this, uh, Alexis Cruz. No, that's, that's the gentleman. The woman is played by, let me get this, Alexis Kuzna. That's the boy. No, it's Atal.

Mili Avatar. Mili Avatar. Yeah. Right. Who is conveniently the whitest person there. She is. Yeah. Interesting.

The female lead is very, very pale with green eyes. She's Israeli. Yes. Can we talk about another cast member here, though? The female lead is very, very pale with green eyes. She's Israeli, yes. Can we talk about another cast member here, though? Eric Avari. Yes. Who plays sort of the main elder bearded. Yes.

Yes, he's an Indian American actor. Stargadian. His kick starts. What were you going to say, David? No, I was just going to say he's one of the very few actors to also be in stargate sg1 as the same character oh interesting yes but you're right this kickstarts him playing he's in the mummy he has a surprising blockbuster run eric avari because before this he's like a sitcom

actor he's one of those guys where they're just like we will cast you for any ethnicity in a sitcom like he himself i believe is indian but they'll have him play egyptian they'll have him play hispanic they'll have him play middle eastern like they'll do anything anything anything um and that's like his zone he's doing like seinfeld and shears and stuff like that and then it's like stargate uh the mummy planet ofpes. Yeah, he's in the Independence Day. Mr. Deeds. His final sci-fi blockbuster. He is fucking great

in The Mummy. He is so good in that movie. He's the guy who's like in the library who's like what this book says is bad. He's always very, very solemn. A lot of bad news from him. I just love you. Look at his career before this.

And it's like his biggest movie role is in Cino Man. And he's mostly a sitcom actor. And then Roland Emmer casts him in this. And people are like, oh, he's really good at bringing gravitas to like silly blockbuster like matinee films. blockbuster like matinee films and then he just has this run where he totally remakes himself as like a genre actor as the guy who just like gives the thing the like the grave importance uh what's the other one here there's an oh oh the 13th warrior sure one day we'll do that on the pod we will one day do that on the pod and then and then in darede, he plays Electra's dad. Yeah. And he was in Heroes, right? He played, I think, the Chandra Suresh.

Chandra Suresh. He played fucking, did no one watch Heroes? He was the dad. I just remember Save the Cheerleader, Save the World, and Zachary Quinto was terrifying. You did have to save the cheerleader to save the world. And they did do that, I think. I don't remember. And Hero.

Hero is the best. So we have Spader and the female character. What is her name? I'm sorry. You mean her name is Shaori. All right. So Spader and Sha break off, and I sort of then feel like we need to introduce now

the tribe of kids, the miscreants. Oh, boy. They're great. They're designed great. They rule. They seem to have a lot of fun. It's similar to like the Lost Boys in Hook or whatever, right? It's like a bunch of cool teens who might as well have skateboards

and slingshots or whatever, but because we're in ancient Egypt, they're going to have more of an ancient Egypt thing going on. But there's the one who sort of becomes begrudgingly a surrogate son. That's Alexis Russell. So that's why I was saying there is that pairing there. That's going to be a running thing throughout the movie. He gets to finally offer the parental advice he never got to offer his son, which is don't touch my gun. But like, no, he never got to do that. You is uh don't touch my gun but like no he never got to do

that you know no no no bad here take a cigarette instead okay but i wanted to point this out and we'll just move along if an alien handed me anything i would drink it so if an alien hands you like a glowing blue liquid, a chalice. Okay. Yeah. Right. If he handed me a floating like, like severe of like liquid smoke, I'd just put my head right into it. Okay.

Ben, I mean, why the hell not? Yeah. This is the ultimate test. If you watched before your very eyes unobstructed, an alien piss into a glass and then hand it to you. No. How do we know it's pee? Well, that's why I'm asking. That's why I'm asking.

Would you take the jump? Maybe it tastes good. I would try to figure out if they're secreting something for me that's good. You did used to vape a juice that was called alien piss, did you not? That is true. This is canon. Absolutely. Yep.

Mm-hmm. alien piss did you not that is true this is canon absolutely yep i i had picked that flavor uh for an ad uh advertiser we had on the show um it's a great flavor but uh no i don't think i would drink alien pee okay so there's one thing you wouldn't drink if an alien handed it to you but otherwise anything else okay okay all down. Okay. All right. Glad we clarified. I'm glad we did, too. So, all right. I feel like now it's just going to basically come down to Spader has to figure out the, like, one missing symbol.

Right. To get them back. Yeah, he's been out. He's looking for the way back. He's looking for the way back. This is like the Emmerich Devlin thing I'm talking about though because this movie finds a way to sort of just kill time for 30 minutes without

anything really expensive happening. Yeah, totally. It's a spader looking at a wall while Kurt Russell's in a tent. Right. And just like the only special effect really is just a bunch of people. A bunch of villagers. And some glowy eyes.

So it's true how it's like pretty chill for a while. And then a pyramid spaceship shows up. Yeah. So the other soldiers that are still at base camp where they entered, God Ra himself shows up in a frigging pyramid spaceship. He's got a pyramid scheme. He's got a,

and yes, thank you. 10 comedy points. It's a good point. He's got a... And yes. Thank you. Ten comedy points. It's a good point. It's time to call him out. He has a literal pyramid scheme. In a way, Ra was the original

Bernie Madoff. And so we learn pretty quickly that he was trying to escape death and was an alien. Like,

the design of the alien is kind of classic. Your classic Almanide alien yep and so he went to primitive earth and he inhabited the body of an egyptian and we had an award jay davidson made his whole pyramid scheme happen with some stargates and now he's off to the races and he's still alive and And I guess he's kind of just checking in. Can we just point out that there are

two different Academy Award nominees in Ra's palace? Yeah, because Jaimon Hunsu is also like the Anubis warrior. Yes, and he is credited as Jaimon. Just single? Just Jaimon, It's cleaner? Wow.

Oh, you're right. He's Horus. He is Horus. Yes. Someone, Carlos Le Chow is Anubis. But I do love their scheme where it's like they wear the alien masks to make them. They look pretty cool. Like, they're really scary.

They look like what you would see on like a wall in Egypt. It's like the Anubis. The hieroglyphics, yeah. Dog head. But that makes people- Do they have a dog arm? I don't know. That makes people think that they're gods.

That makes people think that they're so cool. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And Ra has his cool kind of pharaoh mask. That's his vibe. And he's got the eunuchs. I don't think it's cool or chill either,

especially with the context of talking about this director. I feel like we should just skip over that. Maybe just move on. Yep. But yes, and he's got some henchmen. The henchmen have seemingly just laser staffs. Laser staffs. Yeah, it's a couple laser staffs.

I will say good on Kurt Russell. When he gets his hand on one, he figures out how to fire it immediately. No learning curve for him on that yeah yeah guys great with guns so they kill all the military guys pretty quickly and it's a very

simple and I'm sure like on the cheap scene yeah it's a lot of just like them getting whacked around a corner basically yeah conveniently there's a dust storm. Right, right. And then also, I don't know if this comes here later,

but I feel like what needs to be pointed out is this movie, not that it predicted, but drones in 94? Guys, I mean, God. It was so ahead of the curve. And say that Stargate invented drones. Yeah, let's say it. Okay? I feel comfortable saying that. 100%. I'm willing to go out and say that Stargate invented drones. Yeah, let's say it. Yeah. Okay.

I feel comfortable with saying that. 100%. This movie is proving something, which is drones are cool and you should have Stargates in your movie. Mm-hmm. I co-sign fully. Thank you so much. I do also like the Stargate teleporter. Oh, right. That's like an elevator.

The multiple rings. Right. It's a very cool effect. Yeah. And it's a pretty good little Chekhov's gun. Like, you know, it's set up as just kind of cool world building and they find a way to have it like pay off dramatically like two different ways in the last chunk of the movie. And yeah, and I like how it's like, you know, we know they have Stargate technology and it's just like a little mini version of that right like yeah makes sense who wants to walk through a hallway that's a fucking slug god what a pain and that pyramid's big getting up around

that thing yeah okay so we meet raw come on can we talk about meeting raw yeah raw has cool eyes his voice is great yeah i. I love the modulation. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is pretty good. It's effective. It is pretty effective. He was spooky to me when I was a kid. I was very freaked out by Ra.

Yeah, me too. I did think it was a little distracting how in the Ra scenes, you can hear Jay Davidson on the phone with his realtor trying to figure out what he can buy for a million dollars thankfully they were able to lower in the mix so it's very subtle but no i know it can be distracting like he'll mouth out his dialogue to be dubbed later and then anytime

anyone else is speaking you hear him low in the mix going like i mean like well no i would love to have a little money left over but also i want to get maximum value like his and her sinks and it's weird how he's holding a you know a folder with laminated sheets and he's just flipping through it right he's got a group folder yeah he's got like uh fabric samples he's looking at yeah right no i think that the morph of the mask into his face is is the best moment in the movie i love that it's it it's it's not what you expect it to be right but it's a perfect as we said perfect casting the no one looks like him he's got an incredible look uh it's right in the pocket for 94 too that kind of like um united colors at benetton like you know like that kind of like, um, United colors at Benetton, like, you know, like that sort of the type of person who is front and center in a fashion

campaign then, right? Like the sort of like androgynous, beautiful, angular person. Totally. And because as you said, Jay Davidson refused to even wear the helmet.

Whereas with like a German and, uh, to whoever plays a new abyss, you can tell that they shot them with the helmet on and then shot them with the helmet off and like morph those two things so that it's a slightly cleaner visual effect. But with Jay Davidson,

the unintended result is that it ends up looking like the Michael Jackson black or white video where it doesn't look like the helmet is peeling back. It looks like the helmet is morphing into a human face. Yes. Rules. Rules. Totally rules.

I want to say about his lair. It, to me really, it also sort of just like, looks like, um, a history channel reenactment. Totally.

I wonder if they like made money by renting out this set to history channel for the following 10 years. They must have like, they just left it standing and it was like an Airbnb for documentary film cruise. Yeah, man. That's that's like,

as soon as like they wrapped Cleopatra and Mark Antony were like waiting in the wings to go film a scene. I mean, they use this for gods and monsters right oh definitely yeah yeah oh i'm sorry is it gods of egypt gods both gods of egypt yeah all right well okay so something we skipped over is we should just talk about the nuclear bomb i mean we set it up earlier in the episode, but we see Russell at one point lock and load this nuclear bomb, I guess. It looks like a trash can.

It looks like WALL-E. It does look like a trash can, but with a flashing light on it. Yeah, and a couple metal arm things. And treads. Yeah. Why did he bring the nuclear bomb bomb it's just sort of like a backup just sort of like just in case uh as someone who watched this like two hours ago he brings the bomb because it was his assignment to if they sensed any danger yeah right when they

got to the planet he was supposed to get his men across and then he would stay behind and blow it up because he's got nothing else to live for. He yearns for death. He doesn't tell his soldiers. No, he doesn't tell French Stewart. Or there is another character actor who's like, I feel like I've seen a bunch of times and he's really good at this.

John Deal who rules. I love John Deal. That guy's the best. Yeah, but he's like the right hand man yeah Kowalski rules but uh yes um he uh Ra hits him back with you brought a nuke well I'm gonna put an alien crystal next to your nuke

send it back it'll blow up the whole planet it's a hundred times now more powerful pretty good it is a power move yeah and like that's just like 100 times now more powerful. Pretty good. It is a power move. Yeah. And like, that's just like classic one-upmanship, you know?

Yeah, it is. And Kurt Russell gives him credit. He's like, you plused it. Good job. I feel like we were talking about this on the rise of skywalker episode recently but it definitely feels like a move where kids are like yeah well this will make it a hundred times stronger it's infinity plus one yeah it is so affinity plus one yeah um and they're they're jumping around a lot and this is when they do all the spectacle this is is when Roland Emmerich brings out all the effects. Those ships come out, the ancient Egyptian spaceships.

Drones. And it just becomes a lot of action. Yeah. It seems like they were kind of going to go towards, like, we're going to... Because they find out those people are all humans. So it's like, are we going to help them? And they do, but they don't bring them back to Earth or anything. They're like, yeah, they just got their own thing going here here we'll give them some guns it's all good i mean right i

mean the the uh uh james spader's uh beloved who there's the weird scene where they make a joke about him being her husband and then she says don worry, I didn't tell them that you didn't want me. And then he smooches her and then they're officially in love. Obviously, I'm super horny for you, even though I met you yesterday. But then she gets shot in the middle of this. So then he has to bring her back to Ra's bath to bring her back to life, even though Kurt Russell has already activated the bomb. And a lot of this is just like Kurt Russell learning to want to be alive again. And nothing makes him feel more alive than murdering a lot of this is just like kurt russell learning to want to be alive again and nothing makes him feel more alive than murdering a bunch of ross

right nothing makes him feel more alive than distributing assault rifles to the peasant children he has met on this alien world he has like a full rambo sequence like he goes all the way back and he's like, actually guns fucking rule. I'm going to smile while shooting them and give them to everybody and encourage them to do the same. I love Kurt Russell. He's an incredibly charismatic actor. He's extremely hot. Yeah.

He's a good looking guy. He's a movie star. It's wild how he has nothing to do in this movie. Nothing to do. What you're describing. And also, it's kind of fundamentally bad casting because it feels like this part is written for a Bruce Willis, like an action star who has an innate sense of sadness to him. Kurt Russell's very charming, very confident.

He does not play vulnerable. Yeah, likes to have fun. So he just ends up seeming bored most of this movie. I enjoy looking at him. I mean, it's always fun to look at Kurt Russell, but you never get the sense of like, oh man, this guy's still really broken up about his son. Yeah, but at the end he's kind of like cracking jokes

and like looking snarky as he starts shooting people. But you know, it was a real time for him because he got Captain Ron in 92. Okay, that's fun Kurt Russell. That's wild Kurt Russell. But then you have Tombstone, Stargate, Executive Decision, Escape from L.A., Soldier. That's a real run of him playing sort of square tough guys. Yeah.

So maybe that was just his, I don't know, he just sort of like swang that way. Maybe Clinton got elected and it really ground his gears. I don't know, he just sort of swang that way. Maybe Clinton got elected and it really ground his gears. I don't know. Well, it's like the 80s were his John Carpenter run where he did all these sort of, and they're very sly parodies of classic action heroes. And then the 90s, it was like, let's remove the satire from it.

Let's just do the most straight-laced. Straight up. I mean, I think his best movie of the 90s is Breakdown which is an amazing movie but that's a but that's a dramatic movie there's not a lot of fun that's all tension and then like occasionally he would do like your 3000

miles to Graceland like he would be weird but Tango and Cash you're leaving off well that's 89 oh fuck I thought it was a long time ago. I thought... Look, I was wrong. I was very wrong.

I was very wrong. Please arrest me. Go ahead, Ben. I would like to say something right now. Okay, here we go. You know, you gave me... You gave me the opportunity to pick this episode. We gave it the choice.

You gave me the choice. It's great. I love doing this. It's fun. John Carpenter. Come on. When are we going to do him? pick this episode. We gave it the choice. Give me the choice. It's great. I love doing this. It's fun. John Carpenter. Come on. When are we going to do him? Guys.

He came close. He fucking rules. He came close to, what was it? You could do this all day. 2019. I know. Did he make the finals or was it the last? No, he made the semis. The final four? Oh, okay think he made the final four. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

The final four, yeah. It got close. It was definitely boosted by your sort of campaigning for him. I've been thinking about it more and more lately. Can I throw out a thing? Because on the fifth anniversary... Throw out that thing.

I'm going to throw out the thing. On the fifth anniversary episode, we teased the idea of doing a loser's bracket for next year's March Madness where every contestant was someone who had never made it past the first round. There is another idea that has gained some popularity on the Reddit, which is each of us picks eight directors. Sure, we have four quadrants. It's like a division thing. four quadrants it's like a division thing so there's like a

Ben division, Ange division, Dave division Griff division and essentially each one of us gets to have one of our picks go to the final four the final four would be each of our champions okay alright I'm just throwing that out there

alright I like that I think that's cool John Carpenter lost to George Miller by like 30 votes he's really jason and penny marshall yeah yeah like ben who else would you have like let's say you have car harmony karen i will say it is very hard to jinink someone over zoom yeah we did just say that perfectly synced up you really did you really did uh okay all right carpenter harmony korean it would be we would have eight each right that would be the we would get to pick eight guys each i will say i i would like started drafting this like i was like who would my eight guys be and i'm not gonna read who my eight would be but i did griff division and then i did ben division and division david

division and i never got around to filling out the rest of them except for ben where i just wrote carpenter kareem i wrote those two and then forgot about it i'm trying to think who the other like ben champs would be yeah i mean because like I have like the obvious people I just like, but we wouldn't do because it's like territory that's already been covered. You know, like an Anderson, a Tarantino.

But I mean, this is, you know, this bracket would be the time to make your case. I know, but I would want to curate more like like outsider-y kind of choices because I feel like that's just my vibe. I think you would have recourse to pick David S. Ward. but I would want to curate more like, like, uh, outsidery kind of choices. Cause like,

I feel like that's just my body. I think you would have recourse to pick David S. Ward. Wow. He directed major league, King Ralph, major league two and down Periscope, which I'm just going to assume you've seen.

Fuck. Yes, I have. I mean, a miracle run, an absolute miracle run. He only has six movies, but four of them are Ben's Ben's pigs. Definitely. I mean, a miracle run. An absolute miracle run. He only has six movies, but four of them are Ben's picks.

Definitely. Major League makes me cry so hard every time I see it. But David, you are leaving out the most incongruous thing about David S. Ward. Go ahead. His only four films are the four films you just mentioned. No, he made six films. Okay, I'm sorry.

He made six films that are very much of a piece with what you just said, No, he made six films. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. He made six films that are very much off a piece with what you just said. But his breakthrough was that he won an Academy Award for writing The Sting. He did write The Sting.

He also wrote Sleepless in Seattle. He, great writer, I guess. But you would not expect that the man who wrote The Sting would go on to direct

Major League Two. And I say that go on to direct Major League 2. And I say that with no disrespect to Major League 2. Look, the guy's an auteur. He wrote Major League. Yeah. He didn't write Down Periscope. Who wrote that? Looks like that was written by Lucifer. He also was one of the writers on Flyboys, which was Dean Devlin's first post-Roland Emmerich movie, Full Circle.

That's the one with James Franco, right? That's the World War I movie? Yeah. Yes. what's his name? Ellison, pre-Anna Perna, because his son loved airplanes and he wanted to make a movie for his son. And his son, David Ellison, who now finances pretty much every Tom Cruise movie,

is like the fifth lead in it, despite having no history as an actor. Wanted to be a flyboy. He said, I have a nice handsome son and he likes to be in a plane. I'm making him a movie for his birthday now i want larry allison sorry david i mean ben you got to pick your eight i'm gonna figure out who my we're doing that later let's finish up our stargate episode i know i mean i

mean later i mean like yeah we'll we'll we'll revisit because i definitely i want to i want to think on it i just want to tease the idea for later, but I like that a lot. All right, fun idea. Let's get through the plot though. I mean, I'm trying to think of like what else there is to kind of guys went off with a portal right? I know I know

but leading up to sort of our end of you know, the end fight. I mean, there's not really anything that's sticking out to me that I want to really go over. Kurt Russell wants to commit suicide, wants to let James Spader go back, but then they end up realizing

the right thing for them to do is to switch positions. Kurt Russell needs to go back home with his newly invigorated sense of life. And James Spader needs to stay there and study this civilization and also settle down become an honest man and bang a lady

in the desert he needs to have some desert sex he definitely needs to have some dry sex I would just like to point out a better version of this but extremely I realized halfway through this movie that I was watching Atlantis the Lost Empire

yeah very similar you're right dorks with like floppy bangs that I was watching Atlantis the Lost Empire. Bam! Yeah. Very similar. You're right. Dorks with like floppy bangs and round glasses that are like scrambling with all their maps

and papers and shit. And everyone's like, look at this fucking dork. And then a rich benefactor shows up and is like, come into my car. You're right. Everyone else is wrong.

Don't tell anybody. Right. And then there's like a hot sexy lady that's like, oh, I actually can help you. Except in Atlantis, it's Cree Summer playing Keeta, who's a great character and actually has like more

agency and is more interesting. Ben, have you ever seen Atlantis, The Lost Empire? I have not. You would fucking love it. Yeah. It's a joint, for sure. It's a Disney hand-drawn animated film in which they were like we're done with princess musicals we want to make action movies for boys the entire film is designed by mike mignola who is the artist who created hellboy so the whole movie it's a

disney movie that looks like a hellboy comic and and just correct it is almost exactly stargate except with atlantis to the point where he like stays behind and he's like, I want to learn more about this culture. And they're like, all right, bye nerd. But also like a ragtag crew where you have like the sardonic like explosives expert and like the mining guy, the French guy named Moyer who looks like a rat and has goggles.

Cool. It's a pretty like diverse crew too. You'll fucking love it. Alright. I wrote it down. I just want to say though if I was ever on a crew I definitely would be the explosive. No question. No question. Yeah. Like that rules to me

because that guy you're like alright whoa what's up with him? The character looks. His thing is explosives. Yeah. That's what's up with him. He is a French... No, he's not French, but he's played by Father Guido Sarducci, and he is an explosive expert

who wears medieval armor. He's got a mustache and a bowl cut, and he wears, like, a fucking armor plate like a knight. Dude. Yeah. That's a good look. And Michael J. Fox is the lead.

He looks like James Spader in this movie. And he's like, you're telling me there's an Atlantis under the water? Yeah. All right, so this is what I'll say to get us through. Okay. I just wanted to point out, and we've already, I think, talked about it, but there's that dumb scene with Spader where he's just, like,

translating their language, right? Which is, like, they're going to incite them to be able to now go to the Stargate, get out of there. And then I also want to mention when the kids take it upon themselves with the guns and they're like going to go lead the fight back at like the entrance to the Stargate, right? Where the alien ship is parked. I really thought it was cool as a kid to see that they're like,

like he's like telling his dad, like, no, I'm going to fight. And that is like, I think powerful storytelling for a young Ben to be like, I know what's right. I know what we need to do. We can't just be weak.

We got to go and bring it to him. So this movie really changed your life. Yeah, man. Definitely. I've been trying to find a stargate ever since okay so uh there is just the fighting that's going on outside with some of the military men and the kids and i just think that's it's like a insane right because it is children who are

being put in harm's way but it it also is cool, like I said. Yeah. And then inside you got Russell and Spader, and they, I guess, have some kind of then extended scene again with the prince. Do they fight? I don't even remember. Yeah, how does he... I'm trying to remember how they end up killing Ra

I think they fight they cut one of his soldiers head off and they fight him and I think he runs away to his ship and they portal the bomb because they realize he tries to disarm the bomb and he's like I can't oh they must

have rigged it did we talk through the whole execution and all we did all that right the whole yeah we talk through the whole execution and all? We did all that, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. James Spader turns the gun on him, all that stuff. They portal the bomb. And then in the final moment before Ra explodes, you see the alien face.

Which is pretty cool. Yeah. You see the alien. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's such a funny hijink to like, you know, when the bad guy drives away and then he doesn't realize that the bomb is in the back. Yeah. I mean, you talk about ding-dong ditch. What's funnier than placing a bomb

in someone's vehicle and leaving? So they do in Birds of Prey. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, good moment in Birds of Prey. So yeah, that's it. Also, the people rise up. That was a cool scene.

I like seeing all those people running in the desert. That was a striking scene. And they reveal the guards to be false gods. They take the helmet off. Kurt Russell pushes the button. False gods. Great name for a metal band. Sure.

But yeah, I mean, the movie ends very abruptly. It's like they realize they gotta switch places. Russell should go back home and learn to love life again. And James Spader should stay there. And the movie ends with one final journey through the Stargate portal, which is how all movies should end. Well, it should keep going.

Yeah, first-person POV. I mean, I wish the Stargate graphics had lasted throughout the entire end credits. Yes, that would be cool. That'd be really fucking cool. That would've ruled. But that's Stargate, man was fun i i uh i love this movie it's so like to try and frame it a little bit of why i feel like there's this some kind of like aesthetic or vibe that i can't necessarily pin down to it

where i was joking before it's like i'd like like got this light touch. It's so thin. It's like kind of how I feel. It's so thin. But at the same time, when you were talking about Spielberg, it made me think this is like a bad version of Spielberg. It's thin storytelling, but you feel safe. It feels comforting to me in some weird way other than it. Obviously I have a connection to it because I was nostalgic and watched it as a kid, but I feel like there's something from maybe movies of this time. I don't something off, rip off the best. Like, there's something comforting about trashy blockbuster movies aiming to be Steven Spielberg rather than aiming to be whatever they aim to be now. Okay, so can I do my little corner here? Yeah. The score for this movie was by David Arnold, who went on to become a very successful composer, including many of Roland Emmerich's biggest films.

Independence Day. Also did four James Bonds in a row. I think he did the last two Brosnans and the first two Daniel Craig's. Uh, maybe, you know, he's, you know, he's a guy, he's a journeyman. This was his first real movie. I think only second job ever.

He was still working, I believe, at a video store when he was composing this film. And Roland Emmerich credits him with making the film feel a lot bigger in sort of scale and scope. But there's the one cue that isn't the main theme, although I guess it kind of is, but the very high jinx-y version of it when James Spader is being dragged by the Star Horse, right? And I was like, I've never seen this movie before. Why does this sound so familiar? And then I found out,

I did some digging, that musical cue is one of the most used cues in the history of movie trailers. Because I was like, where do I know this from? And I was like, I have this image in my head

of hearing this score and i was like i just i i have this image in my head of hearing this score and seeing a title card say an adventure 10 000 years in the making you know like something like that so then i looked it up can i just speed around some of the trailers that use the stargate score okay i'm gonna just read these off as quick as i can the time machine dungeons and dragons water world warriors of virtue volcano the mummy mighty jo The Mummy, Mighty Joe Young, The Man in the Iron Mask, Lost in Space, Jumanji, Dragonheart, NIMS Island, Chicken Little, The Polar Express, Independence Day, Sky Captain, The World is Tomorrow, Deep Rising, Titan A.E., Mission to Mars, Spirit, Stallion of the Samaritan. It is one of, according to a website that I use as a database to try to identify music from trailers, it is the sixth most used trailer cue of all time in terms of instrumental, not song.

Right. digging into this further. And three of the five results above it were all credited to the same artist, not a composer name that I recognized or a score from another movie, but something called Immediate Music. And then I went down this rabbit hole and there was a company called Immediate Music that exists just to create very cheap to license trailer music. So they create scores that sound like scores you've heard in movies to help establish the tone in a trailer, but they have never actually been from a film. And they got popular enough

that now Immediate Music has like 30 different albums on iTunes and they are incredibly bizarre. I will not list them. I implore all of our listeners to do this search themselves. Immediate Music, they have albums where every album title and every track title is like a sound alike to a type of movie you've seen or heard before. And then the tracks are just like tempo for slightly offbeat comedy. And that's like one album's name. And then the tracks are different.

Like this is the track for if a slob meets a snob. This is a track for someone meeting their lover's parents for the first time. Crazy, crazy, crazy. So anyway, that's the rabbit hole I went down the track in the Stargate soundtrack that is used so much in trailers is called Mastradge drag. Mastradge drag. I assume that's the name of the creature. Yeah. Look that up.

And then also look up immediate music on iTunes. That's the end of my corner. All right. Well, I think that's the end of this episode as well Wow Wow did it we did another bench choice thank you guys this was fun well I look forward to maybe getting to pick another one down the line yeah what would the part from

Ralph what do you got hmm I think I pitched one time the Simpsons movie and we didn't hate that idea oh I don't hate that idea at all I'm also just looking at our schedule here right now there is

in between our next miniseries and the miniseries after that which I think it's been announced at this point Nora Ephron is starting next week. We're starting with When Harry Met Sally, even though she did not direct it because it feels important to the canon. So next week will be When Harry Met Sally, and then we're running through the proper Nora Ephron filmography.

But in between Nora Ephron and March Madness winner Robert Zemeckis, we currently have slotted Wonder Woman 1984. That's assuming that it ends up coming out then which is this point is a big question mark so i'd say there's a 50 50 chance that we need a ben's choice on august 16th hey another thing we haven't done though the box office game thank you oh. Oh, sorry, David. Come on. Let's do it quickly. Let's do it quickly.

Quickly? My computer's dying, and I'm feeling too lazy to get my adapter. I want to see if I can get all the answers before my computer's battery dies. All right. I'm turning my brightness all the way down. Okay. This movie opened in October, October 94. It opened to $16 million and was a sort of surprise.

It held really well. I think it was the biggest October opening of all time. October used to be a dead spot. Totally, total dead zone. So it made 71 and 200 worldwide, which was a nice, you know, four times its budget worldwide. Big honking hit. Created a whole media franchise.

So it opens number one. Number two at the box office is it's only in its third week. One of the big surprise hits of the year. It's going to go on to get nominated for Best Picture. It has already won the Cannes Palme d'Or. What is the movie?

The Piano? Nope, that's 93. Oh fiction i'm sorry pulp fiction pulp fiction which like miramax successfully spins out of a can win into a hundred million dollar grocer absolutely insane absolutely insane that movie made 107 million dollars all, number three is an action movie with a sort of slightly fading star, I would say. Big female lead and a male lead whose best days are behind him. This is a really crappy movie. Is it the one with Stallone and Sharon Stone? Yes, but what's it called?

It's Stallone and Stone, and it's called, oh, fuck. It's one of those titles that the studio just had in a bucket. It could be anything. It's the something. It's the something? Where they're like, ah, take this one. It's not,

it's not the getaway. It's not the runaway. No. Am I close? No, it's like, what if something was, someone was good at something? Oh, the specialist?

What would you call him? He's a bit of a specialist. Yeah. Or maybe she's a specialist. I don know i've never seen it um number four is a movie that i offhand don't really remember at all so let's see oh oh right this is um it's a remake it's two big stars who are married oh is it the Marrying Man? No, I don't even know what that is. That's a great title, though.

Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger? Sure, but no, it's not that, but similar, like big celebrity couple. Oh, is it the Warren Beatty and Annette Bening one? Yes, and it's a remake of a Delmar Dawes movie, Delmar Daves movie, I think. It's not called Love Story. It's called Love Affair. Love Affair. love story it's called love affair love affair what if they had a love affair yeah isn't it also like one of katherine hepburn's last movies katherine hepburn is in it yeah i think it might be her very last film and i'm at five percent battery i'm at five percent battery i have one more movie number five number five at the box office is a a really weird movie that is in my memory

kind of interesting was a huge bomb uh scooby-doo two monsters unleashed no um about it's a biopic about a really weird guy i have no idea how to explain this it's not no no uh big stars uh big actors it's an alan parker movie oh fuck uh oh god in between his hits the commitments in evita he takes this big swing here and it it mostly just baffled people it's a weird biopic with a big star that baffled big star big star although not like a you know you know like a respected actor type star you know not like a marquee idol yeah i'm at four percent battery um gonna guess no i will not i found though an old list of movies i had put together for bench choices so we'll get into it we'll get into it 4% battery what kind of figure

what world did this figure it's based on exist in oh boy he well he was let me tell you the guy was a doctor the guy was also he had something to do with cereal the road to Wellville

and he really hated masturbation I got it from doctor guy was a doctor the guy was also he had something to do with cereal the road to wellville yeah thank you and he really hated masturbation i got it from doctor i got it from doctor i'm a doctor i invented cornflakes and if you jerk off that's bad so i'm gonna invent all kind of things that'll stop you from doing it ben have you ever seen the road to wellville i have not but i know i know it's so like i know about it because i heard um some podcasts about the history of kellogg's and how insane it actually is was it right yeah that sounds i think i heard on the dollop but yeah i feel like it's been a discussed thing um yeah ben if you had seen the road to wellville on a porch, we already would have done it as a Ben's Choice. It is such a Ben's Choice movie, and it is a movie that I would see.

It would always play on Comedy Central when I was homesick from school because I was a sickly child. I'd get sick like twice a month, and it's very uncomfortable and bizarre, and it probably would be one of your 10 favorite movies of all time. Right. It must have been one of those movies that the cable channels just got for like 12 bucks. You burn it off on Comedy Central at 11 a.m. Exactly. This is just, it's just ballast for the schedule. It's just, you could fill two hours.

Okay, Ben, we're at 3% battery. Wrap us up and take us home. Okay. So here are some of the other movies that i've pitched to you guys oh my god just sort of leave it at that yeah all right here's the list tank girl yes yeah that's a good one joe dirt joe dirt fuck these are this is gold oh my god or airplane sure sure yeah they're a little more of a blank check candidate

but we never do oh okay I wasn't sure how long is their filmography well it's it's weird it branches into

three there's a way we could structure that as a mini series and maybe do it I would say leave it off the list the rest of the

contenders are really good the other one you've mentioned in the past is Don't Look Back the dylan documentary i love that too you know yes yes but what about masked and anonymous man he should do masked and anonymous do you like that movie though no you don't it's too bad i don't i don't know it it's the weird written by bob dylan and directed by larry charles co-creat of Seinfeld and director of Borat.

Yeah. And it's right. It stars, well, Bob Dylan, among other people. It's just a weird Bob Dylan movie from like when he was sort of back when he was kind of in Victoria's Secret mode. Yes. Okay. Yeah. No, I've never seen any Dylan movies.

That's something I should like where he's like Pat and Garrity kid or something. That movie's not bad. Huh, I don't know. Maybe I'll do that. I'm going to check out Dylan movies. But alright, we got to go. His computer's going to die. Yeah, I mean, I've become the let's wrap it up guys, come on, let's end the episode. I know, right?

This is literally like the only time this has happened. Okay. I just don't want to have to get out of this chair. I don't want to fuck my computer. No, I know. It's like, okay, thanks to Andrew Sparagudo. Yes.

Who's here. Nailed it. Thanks to Lane Montgomery for the theme song. Thanks to Joe Bowen and Pat Reynolds for the artwork. for the theme song. Mm-hmm. Thanks to Joe Bowen and Pat Reynolds for the artwork.

Mm-hmm. Check out our Patreon called Blank Check Special Features. You can go to reddit.com for some real nerdy shit. And as always, put more Stargates in your movies.

2% battery. Nailed it. Cool.