Butt News Movie Club #3: Stargate

Kurt Russell's Haircut Is the Real War Crime

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We open at an archaeological dig in Egypt where this bullshit little girl just walks up to a table and STEALS a GOLDEN NECKLACE that belongs to the history of this nation????? Literally a priceless artifact!?!?!!?!? SHE IS NEVER PUNISHED.

Why do we even have cursed tombs if no one is going to enforce them????

They also find a big circle with weird markings on it and their first instinct is to, like, erect it. Stand it on its edge like a big doorway. Why would you do that? You don’t know it’s a Stargate yet! James Spader hasn’t even been born! Remember how we all just learned how to use a can opener properly like six months ago—so that it makes the folded-over edge instead of the raggedy sharp edge? You’re telling me your crane operator just intuited the correct orientation of the Stargate within 30 seconds in 1919?? Yeah right!

Cut to, I don’t know, 70 years later? James Spader is giving a boring lecture about the pyramids and hey! There’s the fucking bitch thief, and she’s still wearing the necklace! I’m glad she’s old now! I hope her bones hurt!

James Spader is raising what seem to be perfectly legit scientific questions about the origins of the pyramids (“I don’t have any idea who built them—the question is when they were built”), but his lecture is a flop. The audience hates it and walks out, brutally razzing him on the way. (To be fair, it was mis-advertised as a K-pop concert!)

A strange man tells James Spader to get into a car and he’s like, “sure, okay,” and then OF COURSE it’s that old lady and of course she’s still wearing the necklace, which she looted, whitely.

Seriously, WHY WOULD YOU THINK YOU COULD TAKE THAT?? And your parents never noticed? You’ve just been wearing it for 70 years??? Letting your oily neck skin fold over this sacred piece of somebody else’s history? Just out in the rain????

The lady asks James Spader if he’s interested in a job.

Spader: “What kind of a job?”

Horrible Old Woman Whom I Hate: “Translation. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Interested?”

Spader: “I’m gonna go now.”

I’m going to say that everyone has a share in the blame for this conversation going south.

1.     James Spader, you are being weird. Why don’t you want this job? You just failed at your pyramid lecture, nobody in archaeology likes you, and you love hieroglyphs! Why you gonna go now??

2.     Old lady, this is not how you offer someone a job. How about start with a phone call? Or a letter? “Dear James Spader, let’s set up a meeting.” Then just do a regular job offer. Why does it have to be mysterious?? Is this what it was like before e-mail? All our information was delivered by a guy in a black suit in the rain forcing you to hop into a strange car with a cryptic woman?? Not bani wei!

Cut to suburbia, where a strained wife is smoking in her kitchen. Nobody just smokes in their kitchen anymore! Very spicy! Bani wei!!! Two military guys show up to bother the wife. They want to talk to husband. “You can try.”

Kurt Russell is in his dead son’s bedroom being sad with a gun. He has a long, flowing grief bob, which I think is supposed to look nasty but is SO MUCH BETTER than the hair he ends up with! Get excited about that!

The military guys tell Kurt Russell that he’s “reactivated,” then they leave.

Military guy 1: “How’d he get like that?”

Military guy 2: “His kid died.”

Hey, should we maybe tell someone that this guy isn’t really in a good emotional space to go on this super secret sensitive mission? Since when we got here he was crouched in his son’s bedroom with a zombie-like affect playing with a gun?

I know that’s probably WHY they wanted him—because he doesn’t have familial attachments and he has nothing to live for and therefore he’s the only one who can go through the Stargate to certain doom, but WTF! What about his pinched wife!?!?!?!? Does she not even exist? You know it: Not bani wei!

James Spader arrives at the secret underground military base and reveals his biggest weakness: allergies. This motherfucker is a full-on Walter piece of shit, and of course the military hates that. Did you know that allergies are the #1 symptom of being a weenie? We knew it in the ‘90s!

They show James Spader the big circle artifact from the beginning of the movie, and he immediately rubs his snot-covered hands all over it. Then he starts erasing their chalkboard to fix their incompetent translation (probably written by some chad with no allergies AT ALL), and Richard Kind is stressed. Yeah, maybe stop keeping your important military records on a chalkboard, Richard Kind!

Spader changes “door to heaven” to “stargate,” which kind of seems more like branding than a fundamental shift in meaning, but that’s fine. Just then—bing bang bong!

Kurt Russell shows up looking like a toaster strudel!

Is there a more square haircut than this!?!? Show me a Stargate I could jump through that would take me anywhere in the universe to any object more square than Kurt Russell’s four-cornered cube-dome here. It doesn’t exist.

And don’t tell me he has to have that cereal box of a melon because he’s in the army! He is literally surrounded by other army guys right now! We can see there are other haircut options! Gaslighting is not bani wei!

Kurt! Go back and ask for the Kawalski!!!!

Anyway, James Spader is like “Why is the military so interested in 5000-year-old Egyptian stuff?” and Kurt Russell is like “my report says 10,000” and James Spader goes “Pfffffft, Egypt did not even exist then, idiot [SNEEZE],” and everyone looks at each other like it’s SO EMBARRASSING that James Spader doesn’t know about the report. But, like, YOU made the report! Then you decided to give it to Toaster Strudel, but you didn’t want to give it to the guy you’re bringing in to explain everything? That sucks!

Toaster Strudel is like, “This information has become classified. From now on no information is to be passed on to non-military personnel without my permission,” and the old lady, who I guess owns the Stargate because her shitty family THIEVED IT FROM THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE, steps in like, “You owe me an explanation. I was told I had complete autonomy!”

Kurt Russell, ominously: “I’m here in case you succeed.”

Old Lady: “No, I meant I was told I had complete autonomy over how I applied your icing!!!!!!!”

James Spader is all fucked up from staying up all night doing hieroglyphs, but suddenly he has a breakthrough. The symbols on the Stargate—they’re not letters! They’re constellations!

I’m sorry. You’ve had this thing since 1929 and nobody noticed it was constellations? There are so many 17-year-olds on Instagram who would have noticed that in five seconds.

Pausing to say: WHAT A CAST. Bani wei casting for sure! We don’t really do this anymore, praise Ra, where we just have two white guys carry an entire movie, especially a movie about Egypt (sob), but if you have to have two white guys, these are really good ones! That said, CAN I tell you in good faith that it wouldn’t have been better with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence? Not really! (I guess Martin Lawrence would be the scientist? Pop off in comments!)

James Spader calls a meeting to show the team his discovery. He has like 17 giant pieces of paper and a chalkboard and a whiteboard and, like, GOD computers are better! He draws a diagram to show how you need six points to mark a location in 3-dimensional space and a seventh to plot a course and WHY IS HE EXPLAINING SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS TO THE AIR FORCE? Surely you guys cover this at TOPGUN?

A lot of sci-fi movies spend a lot of time on tedious exposition about how things work, and this movie is just not on that level AT ALL. We are only like four minutes in at this point and my guys are already cannonballing through the Stargate. Which is kind of fun? Although I gotta says you do notice when it’s gone. Bani wei? Not bani wei? Sound off in comments!

James Spader figures out how to program the Stargate and now we’re cooking with gas! They turn it on and the Stargate absolutely FLIPS OUT and extrudes a big weird water finger. (Guys! Who prolapsed the Stargate again!?)

They send a robot through the Stargate and this machine shows them on a star map that the robot is suddenly “on the other side of the known universe,” and I’m sorry, but you can’t have a MAP OF ALL SPACE with VISIBLE DOTS. The whole universe is so big! How is the probe even sending this information back across THE KNOWN UNIVERSE in 1994?? I couldn’t even get cell service to call my dog from Nebraska six weeks ago!

James Spader insists that he can figure out how to work the Stargate on the other side, so they all decide to go through. The old lady gives James Spader her pilfered necklace for good luck, and the biggest sci-fi mystery in this whole movie is why he does not SLAP HER FACE. He’s an archaeologist! “You took this from the dig site!!??!?!?!”

The team makes sure to bring along a saxophone for morale.

Kurt Russell is sneaking a secret missile through the Stargate and, doesn’t Congress have to approve this or something? We’re going to wage an unprovoked war on another planet?

Then they bloop through the Stargate and I’m gonna say these special effects hold up! It’s pretty!

Then it’s through the circuits of time and the Stargate poops them out into a sort of dark temple and French Stewart famously says, “What a rush,” which is not cool enough to be a famous catchphrase, sorry. Counterpoint: Is French Stewart…. hot?

They step outside and they’re in a desert and they turn around and look and it’s a pyramid!!!!! And James Spader is like, “Yeah! I knew Black people didn’t do it!!!!!!”

Uuuuuuugh, this is making me feel so guilty for never finishing Assassin’s Creed: Origins. I just got so stressed out by those bounty hunter cops! I’m sorry to everyone who got eaten by a hippo in my absence!

Now all of a sudden James Spader is telling them he actually CAN’T get them back through the Stargate, because he doesn’t have the tablet that says all the symbols.  

Kurt: “You lying son of a bitch! You didn’t say a word about finding anything!”

Fair complaint! You shouldn’t say “I can definitely figure it out when we get there” if you don’t know whether that’s true or not and the stakes are as high as “turning your body to electricity so you can zap through a demonic tube to the other side of the universe where an evil god wants to gnaw your bones.” You could easily have just added “AS LONG AS THERE’S TABLETS!”

French Stewart gets mad at James Spader for digging in his bag for sunscreen instead of finding the tablets, and throws the saxophone at him.

WHOA WATCH OUT, THAT’S A SELMER MARK VI!!!! (My husband told me to say that.)

Meanwhile, Kurt Russell is back in the temple arming the secret nuclear missile. I feel like the government should have to disclose that nuclear missiles have a red dog’s penis!!!!!!!

James Spader is out in the sand picking up his reeds when he finds some footprints and follows them to a big elephant dog that looks like Fred Thompson.

He gives Fred Thompson a bite of his Snickers, which is a nice thing to do considering you’re stranded in an alien desert with no discernible way to restock your food and water supplies, but like, you shouldn’t even give that to an earth dog! They don’t have cacao on this planet! Fred Thompson is going to die! Also, no one suggested bringing more than just a linguist and 17 war boys on this trip? Maybe Dr. Alan Grant and his associate Dr. Ellie Sattler were free???? To make sure that we don’t wipe out all the endemic flora and fauna with our pestilential foreign microbiomes?

James Spader’s foot gets tangled in the reins and Fred Thompson drags him across the desert to a horrible mine where people are toiling to dig up a mystery space mineral. Kurt Russell tells James Spader that it’s time for him to talk to the space people: “You’re the linguist.” Yeah, linguist doesn’t mean you can just guess any language! Please temper your expectations, sir!

The people spot Spader’s golden necklace and they all bow down to him like he’s a god. Then the local priest shows up riding on another one of those elephant things and—is that Richard Belzer??

Okay, again, this place would be crawling with alien bacteria to which the Americans have evolved zero immunity. THESE EARTH PEOPLE WOULD JUST DROP DEAD!

Spader gives the priest a Snickers (HE WOULD DROP DEAD!) and the priest fucking loves it. He declares the Snickers to be bani wei. (Three Musketeers? NOT BANI WEI.)

Kurt: “What’s that mean?”

Spader: “I have no idea.”

YOU HAVE “NO IDEA”? You should definitely have an IDEA. IT OBVIOUSLY MEANS “GOOD” OR “YUMMY.”

You are not a very bani wei linguist.

Turns out, these guys all think that their god, who also happens to be the Egyptian sun god Ra (small world!), sent James Spader there to give them a Snickers.

GOD I KNOW NOBODY CARES ABOUT THIS BUT THEN A HORN SOUNDS AND IT’S THE EXACT SAME SOUND AS WHEN ONE OF THOSE FUCKING BOUNTY HUNTERS IS NEARBY IN AC: ORIGINS AND I AM TRIGGERED!

But it’s just the sandstorm alarm. Everybody runs and hides. They bring out a big lizard to eat for dinner and Kawalski acts like it’s gross, but that big lizard looks hella delicious to me! Sorry, Kawalski!

James Spader tries to explain to the villagers that the lizard tastes good by saying it “tastes like chicken” and doing an impression of a chicken, when HE COULD HAVE JUST SAID “BANI WEI.” They don’t know what a chicken is, fuckface! You only know one word of their language and it happens to apply here and you’re not even grateful!?

The priest sends this hot chick over to have ritual sex with James Spader but James Spader is like WHOA NO THANK YOU GET OUT OF HERE so the priest is like “Oh you don’t like her? We’re so sorry, we’ll slaughter her right away!” so Spader pretends to want to fuck her except instead of fucking they actually HAVE A CONVERSATION. EVER HEARD OF IT, MEN?????????

Meanwhile, the army dudes are still chilling in the pyramid waiting out the sandstorm, when a spaceship lands on top of the pyramid! It’s the pyramid’s bra. Where was spaceship before? Just flying around? Where? Why?

Some alien jackal men come down and start picking off the army guys.

Kurt Russell gives a child a cigarette. They’re really just running fucking roughshod over this vulnerable population, huh.

James Spader’s girlfriend shows him some hieroglyphics on a wall and he can instantly speak hieroglyphics very bani wei.

Kurt: “I thought you couldn’t speak their language”

Spader: “It’s an ancient Egyptian dialect.”

Ok but HOW WOULD YOU KNOW HOW TO PRONOUNCE AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN DIALECT!?

James Spader explains what it says on the wall: An ancient alien was about to die, so he bopped around the universe looking for somebody’s body to steal so he could live forever. He came to earth and ran into Jaye Davidson, which, magnificent choice, if you have to pick one! He possessed Jaye Davidson’s body and named himself Ra and then invented the Stargate so he could bring human slaves to this other planet and make them mine the magic mineral that would keep Jaye Davidson’s body alive forever (I wish!). Why couldn’t it keep the alien’s original body alive forever? No idea! The movie says something about human bodies being “easy to repair.” Sure!! Or maybe the alien being just wanted to disrupt the gender binary? If so, you know what I’m going to say! B A N I W E I. We stan a bani wei soft but fierce gorgeous alien king.

But then there was an uprising on earth and the people buried the Stargate so the alien was trapped on this other planet with just the slaves and the pit mine, and I don’t totally understand why he needed/wanted BOTH planets (“They must have hidden [the tablet] here in hopes that someday the gate on earth could be reopened”—WHY THOUGH?), but, again, sure! Now he just hangs out and eats minerals all day and it is extremely bani wei.

Kurt Russell is fed up for some reason, so they bail on Spader’s gf and run back to the pyramid where they find all their guys absolutely douched by the aliens. Hey if that thing looks like some kind of big battle station, maybe don’t run toward it?? Kurt discovers that Ra has yoinked the missile. THAT’S not gonna be good! A guy beams down from this big butthole in the ceiling and takes them prisoner.

Here comes Ra! It’s amazing that we don’t even really see Ra until 2/3 of the way through the movie, but still, such an impact. I feel like Jaye Davidson is most of what people remember from Stargate! And they are correct!

James Spader catches a glimpse of the nuclear missile and is like, “What is that? It’s a dog-dick bomb, isn’t it?”

The alien guards take off their fancy masks and it’s just Djimon Hounsou and another guy! Then Ra takes off his mask and it’s Jaye Davidson! Everyone is looking incredible! I love this movie! Make Jaye Davidson as Ra the MANDATORY signature vibe of 2022! Please! (And, wait, sorry, not in the apocalyptic dictator way. Just in the eyeliner way!)

Kurt Russell, master tactician, tries to fight back and gets himself AND Spader zapped by the guards in two seconds. Meanwhile at the village, Ra is absolutely hosing these nerds with his Cylon Raiders as punishment for being friends with the terrible Americans (not bani wei, but I can see their point). It’s rude and it sucks. Everyone is so sad. The priest is like, “We should not have helped the strangers.” Yeah, probably not, tbh!

Spader wakes up in some sort of sarcophagus boudoir, magically healed from his blast wound via the mineral. He and Ra have a casual chit-chat, because Spader is positively 100% FLUENT in alien ancient Egyptian now. Ra says he’s going to send the nuke back to earth with a shipment of the mineral that will make it 100 times more powerful, because “I created your civilization. Now I will destroy it!” I could have used 100 times more words of exposition to justify this character’s motivation on this, but why not?

Ra takes his necklace back (GOOD), then he organizes a big party to execute the earth army, which, honestly, is probably also correct, from a national security perspective.

Spader’s ex-wife, Sha’uri, tells all the village boys the forbidden story of where they came from and how Ra looks pretty but actually has a shitty little gray alien body underneath and that’s why they can no longer live as slaves. It’s uprising time! The mob rescues Spader and Kurt from their execution and they regroup at the village. All the boys are excited to revolt against Ra and stop being child slaves in the mineral mine! But Kurt angrily sends the kids home. He doesn’t want the boys to get killed because they are all his sons now. Then he reveals that his son on earth was ALSO killed in a slave revolt against a non-binary alien dictator! Some guys can’t catch a break! RIP, Tyler!

Sha’uri and James Spader have a quiet moment and she’s like “I told everyone we fucked, sorry,” and he’s like “No, you don’t understand, on my planet you would never even look at me because you are a hot model and I am a linguist with allergies.” Then they do fuck.

Then he figures out the symbol for this planet, which is the thing they need to go home. He just figures it out. Using his brain. JESUS CHRIST, YOU SHOULD HAVE PUT IT ON THE NECKLACE. THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH BETTER. WHY WASN’T IT ON THE NECKLACE. THAT WOULD HAVE JUSTIFIED THE ENTIRE NECKLACE. THIS IS BAD WRITING. I FORGIVE IT BUT IT HURTS.

Then there’s finally a real uprising at the mine! Kurt Russell blasts the guard to death (there was only one guard for the entire mine?), and then Spader pushes a button on the guard’s helmet and reveals that their “god” is just Djimon Hounsou! (Same.) And Sha’uri is like “omg is he still dating Kimora Lee Simmons??” and Spader is like “lol wow you DO live on another planet!”

James Spader and Kurt Russell sneak back into the pyramid disguised as slaves carrying the shipment of mineral that Ra is going to use to nuke earth. Then the rest of the army guys try to rush the door but it closes before they can get in. Question: Why didn’t you just have all the slaves that went in be army guys in disguise? Now Kawalski is stuck outside trying to lead these children in a war against several planes!

Ra is in his bedroom playing a boardgame against a child (insecure much????) and he loses so he decides to bomb earth NOW.

Strudel tells Spader to go through the Stargate with Sha’uri, but that he’s going to stay there to make sure that Ra gets blown up by the nuke. But then Sha’uri gets shot! She gone! Spader takes Sha’uri back upstairs on the elevator to put the pussy in the sarcophagus. But Kurt already hit start on the nuke timer! Outside, the children fight the planes. Teach the children how to do war, that’s good. Sha’uri is healed by the mineral. Ra is no longer amused. He microwaves Spader’s brain with his ancient Egyptian Nintendo Power Glove.

Kurt gets the upper hand on the guard he’s fighting and says, “Give my regards to King Tut, asshole” (now THAT is a classic ‘90s line!!!!!) and squishes the dude’s head with the elevator, which is delivering Spader, who managed to beam down right before Ra finished microwaving him.

Kurt tries to turn off the nuke, but Ra made it so it won’t turn off. If you were thinking that this was bani wei, you are incorrect. It is not bani wei.

Outside, just when the army men and the slave boys are about to get pulverized, the whole slave uprising shows up!!! They’ve got hammers! They’ve got shovels! The guards blow hella of them up but they have something the guards don’t have. Spirit. And ten million guys. How come Ra only thought he needed four loyal henchmen? And then 15 bald boys to play boardgames with?

Ra starts blasting off into space, so at the last second they shove the nuke into the elevator and beam it back up into the spaceship like an atomic butt tampon. Ra is vaporized and shows his ugly alien face for a second. It’s sad when a beautiful person is ugly inside!

For some reason all the slave kids salute Kurt Russell, who hasn’t done anything except yell at them and make them feel bad for touching his guns. You guys should salute Kawalski!

Then James Spader and Sha’uri kiss! The priest declares their nasty wet French to be BANI WEI!!!!!! Spader decides to stay on this planet and move into the village and be a miner, I guess.

Kurt Russell decides he’s gonna be all right; he’s totally over his dead son now.

And that’s the end. They just let James Spader stay there? Like, you gotta go make a report, dude! None of those guys can explain any of the stuff!!

THE END??

WHAT DO THEY DO WITH THE STARGATE????

DOES IT JUST STAY OPEN?¹

THEN WHY CAN’T JAMES SPADER GO BACK AND TYPE UP HIS FUCKING REPORT??

NOT

BANI

WEI

RICHARD

KIND

IS

STRESSED

1. Is this what the Stargate TV show is about? Should I watch it? Go off in comments, please and thank you!