When scrolling through Amazon Prime's Video Service looking for some brain rot to entertain me for a few hours, I stumbled across Stargate Origins: Catherine, ... which I had never heard of before. Having grown up watching Richard Dean Anderson in the original series, and adoring the original movie and all the subsequent spin off shows, I thought I was in for a treat.
But I treat I did not get. Instead, I got what the kids these days would call "Temu Stargate".
Narrow sets, average acting, awful writing, and a plot that decided to involve the 1930s and Nazis for ... no really good explainable reason. Then there's the costumes. Some of them are period accurate, and the Egyptian stuff is enpointe; but there's just so many slips where clothing is just too contemporary for the period.
But, please don't get me started on the writing. There's no suspense and I found it too difficult to relate to any of the characters, as none of them were particularly likeable. Sure, there was some backstory if you're familiar with the Stargate material from the 1990s and beyond; but for an audience that would have first seen this in 2018 - there's no real context.
It's clearly made for fans, as opposed to being made for a new audience, which is what i think they were attempting to do. The fact that I watched this a "movie" and not the mini series it was originally, probably meant that my expectations were significantly higher than the production goals.
It felt like a poorly put together 2 part story arc. The mysteries ... were too easily solved, an there was no big turmoil. Everything fell into place. There's nothing here that once had me sitting on the edge of my seat or thinking that the characters wouldn't get out of the situations that they found themselves in.
One thing is for sure, it should have been cheap to produce the show. There were only three warehouses, a temple, a gate, a stargate room, and a tent city. Clever camera angles in these sets probably made them look like three or four different scenes. It was definitely written down to cost.
If this is what a present day Stargate reboot would look like, then it is simply something that I don't want to have exist in the universe.
Pun totally intended.