Kurt Russell and James Spader take to the only Pyramid stage that matters.

Stargate opens with a dig site and closes with a gateway: a film forever poised between discovery and the next destination. Thirty years on, it remains one of science fiction’s more curious anomalies: a blockbuster built like a B-movie, with the aesthetics of a prestige historical epic and the attitude of a pulp serial written by a screenwriter that’s mainlined Chariots of the Gods and Adderall. Yet somehow, it works. More than that, it endures. Not in spite of its rougher edges, but because of them. It’s sincere in a way science fiction rarely tries to be anymore, full of wide-eyed, big idea wonder with no room for nihilism, or pre-apocalyptic pessimism.

By 1994, the big-screen sci-fi landscape was in flux. Jurassic Park had rewritten the effects rulebook. Star Trek was migrating the Next Generation from the small screen to the big screen as the X-Files grabbed hold of the televisual zeitgeist, beguiling audiences with conspiracies and earth-bound intrigue rather than laser beams and technobabble. Into this dialled Stargate, marching with the confidence of an archaeologist convinced they’ve found the missing link between Egyptology and ancient aliens. There’s something almost adorable how firmly it believes in its own nonsense, a shining conviction that’s rarely glimpsed outside of the confines of the old Buster Crabbe serials of the 1930s.

Kurt Russell’s Colonel Jack O’Neil arrives straight from the 1980s action hero warehouse, all square jaw, squared shoulders, and impossibly squared haircut, prepared for a grimmer, sadder world. His haunted intensity feels like it’s wandered in from another movie, but it anchors the plot’s loopier moments with real emotional weight and makes his character’s arc all the more rewarding as it unfolds. James Spader’s Dr Daniel Jackson, meanwhile, is all floppy hair, mumbling intellect, and wide-eyed wonder, a kind of post-Raiders Of The Lost Ark reclamation of the bumbling academic who’s suddenly forced to become the hero. The chemistry between them is awkwardly charismatic – Russell frowning through Spader’s excitement like he’s trying to housebreak a puppy he’s taken along on a trip to the tennis ball factory.

What’s striking on a rewatch is how complete the film’s mythos already is and how committed the film remains to it. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin may not have fully perfected their storytelling tools just yet, but they had something far more potent: enthusiasm bordering on delusion. The idea that Earth’s ancient gods were actually parasitic alien despots using the stargate to enslave humanity takes the kind of speculative shooting the shit of a thousand late-night pub reckonings and gives it a lavish, unironic platform. It doesn’t poke fun at the longstanding theory; it builds a seductively credible civilisation out of it.

The production design does a lot of the heavy lifting. Ra’s guards in their imposing, techno-Egyptian helmets are pure space-opera flair, while the desert backdrop grants everything a gravitas the script can’t always reach. The movie leans hard into its cultural mash-up aesthetic, and while the anthropological accuracy is occasionally questionable, the commitment to spectacle is not. Jaye Davidson’s Ra, too, is a masterstroke without being a statement: a gender-fluid god-king dripping disdain, menace, and an array of gilt-laden outfits offering a kind of cosmic cruelty that’s at once decadent and childlike. It’s a performance that confounds expectations at every turn and remains one of the film’s most compelling aspects.

Perhaps its most remarkable achievement, though, is its longevity. It may not have generated a big screen sequel, but it only took three years for its real legacy to arrive in the form of the television series Stargate SG-1. Premiering in 1997, it took the baton from Stargate and ran with it in an unusually skilful approach to world-building, character-deepening, and lore-layering for a supposed TV-spin off. From relatively humble big screen beginnings, it charted its way to a sprawling franchise that quietly became one of sci-fi TV’s most resilient properties. The fact that the original film has remained tethered to that legacy, rather than eclipsed by it, speaks to the durability of its premise. Few movies survive a better spin-off without becoming obsolete. Stargate somehow became foundational.

Three decades on, its mixture of awe and absurdity still feels oddly refreshing. It predates the glibness that would infect so much post-Independence Day genre fare, and it doesn’t pretend to be smarter than it is. It just wants to tell a story about a broken soldier, a curious linguist, and a very angry alien sun god – and it wants to tell it with all the sincerity of a youngster who’s just discovered the wonders of Ancient Egypt and decided there were definitely inter-dimensional aliens involved. For all its hokey grandeur, Stargate endures because it believes in something – not just the possibility of life among the stars, but the idea that history is full of doors, and sometimes, with enough stubbornness and a truly irresponsible approach to translation, you can prise one open. It might be naïve. It might be daft. But it’s never boring. And that, frankly, is rarer than it should be.