Review of Stargate: The Ark of Truth (2008) by Steve M — 14 Mar 2008

The evil Ascended Ones known as the Ori have been destroyed, but their armies of starfaring fanatatics continue to wreck havoc in the galaxy. The US Air Force's premiere team of interplanetary explorers--SG-1 (Black, Browder, Judge, Shanks, and Tapping)--travel to the Ori home galaxy in order to find an Ancient artifact that will break the power of the Ori Priors. But first they most overcome enemies they'd never expected to see again--half-Ori Adria (Baccarin) and the mechanical menace of the Replicators.

"Stargate: The Ark of Truth" plays like an extra-long episode of the long-running "Stargate: SG-1" series as it had evolved following the departure of Richard Dean Anderson. It wraps up all the loose ends of the epic, galaxies- and realities-spanning "Ori Invasion" storyline and even manages to open a few new mysteries that could be explored in a future movie if this direct-to-DVD effort proves successful enough to warrent a follow-up. (Just who WAS the mysterious programmer behind the rebirth of the Replicators?).

As a period at the end of the "Stargate SG-1" series, this movie is amost every thing a dedicated fan could ask for. Almost all the show's major villains make an appearance (except for Ba'al, the coolest and most evil of the G'uhls), the major storythreads of two seasons are brought to a close, and, instead of what is done in so many "endings", this one leaves Stargate Command and all its maor players alive and well and on their way to new adventures. It's upbeat, mostly happy, and it's exactly the finale I had hoped for. (The victory of SG-1 is a tiny bit tainted, but that makes the ending even better in my eyes.).

However, the movie is really only for hardcore fans of the series. There IS a "prelude" that presents clips from the final two-three seasons to bring newcomers somewhat up to speed, but the movie really relies upon a deep, ubergeek-level of knowledge of the Stargate Universe to work. (There are even some gratuitious references to the Pegasus Galaxy and Mr. Woolsey.) The movie also doesn't bother introducing the main characters properly, assuming that the viewer knows who they all are already.

A strike against the film can also be found in the nature of its script. There really is almost too much material to cover in the running time of the film. Basically, we get what would have been three or four episodes of the TV show in less than 90 minutes. This doesn't give room for any of the character bits that made the series so much fun for so many years, and it also leads to sloppy storytelling. Ori servants torture Daniel and Tomin are tortured to near-breaking, Teal'c manages to climb a mountain, climb down a mountian, cross hundreds of miles of muddy plains in what is less than two or three hours as Carter and Mitchell battle Replicators and IOC interference on the [i]Oddesey[/i]. The two story threads were working at extreme cross-purposes during this portion of the movie, and there was enough discordance to make me like the film a little less. The film would have been far stronger if the Replicator bit had been dumped, as exciting as it was, and time had been spent on characters and exploration. (Tomin and his joining the "dark side" deserved a little more screentime than it got.).

A lack of characterization and sloppy storytelling make "The Ark of Truth" fall a little short of what it could be, but I still enjoyed it. Fans of the show should definately check it out.

Stargate: The Ark of Truth.

Starring: Ben Browder, Christopher Judge, Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping, Claudia Black, Tim Guinee, Currie Graham, Morena Baccarin, and Beau Bridges.

Director: Robert C. Cooper.