Warning: This review will contain major spoilers beyond section 1. Section 1 may contain minor spoilers. This review is more for those who have already seen the movie or don't mind hearing details of the plot beforehand.





Synopsis and Introduction
Season 9 and 10 saw the introduction of the Ori, a new, very powerful, adversary. By the end of the last TV episode we are left wandering if Daniel's plan to destroy the Ori had succeeded and, in either case, how the armies of the Ori would be stopped. This movie explores those questions and ties up some loose ends, but I felt that the execution left a bit to be desired. They seemed to rush through everything, and the solutions were overly convenient and did not seem, in my opinion, very well thought out. Probably the result of going to such a compressed format when another season or two would have been better. It's too bad; many of the scenes could have been much more powerful had they just taken a little more time to show the weight of what just happened or was said.

The general synopsis is that one of the ancients had created a device called the Ark of Truth around the time of the Ori/Alteran split. While it isn't confirmed until late in the movie, it's painfully obvious from the start that the purpose of this device is to force anyone viewing it to see and believe the truth. However, since it supposedly usurps the viewer's free will, the ancients decided it was not worth using. SG1 decides to go after said device and use it to show the Ori followers the error of their ways, so to speak.





Abbreviated Plot (Begin Serious Spoilers)
The opening scene shows the ancients, far in the past, deciding to break from the Ori and leave their homeworld. They speak of their beliefs in science and rationality, and espouse a worldview that I can only hope many in our society will learn to embrace someday. They lift off in a ship which I was disappointed to see was not Atlantis, but I suppose this was supposed to take place even before that was built.

Cut to SG1 at the ruins of Dakara, searching for the ark. Daniel has had visions, thought to have been left from Merlin's consciousness, leading him to believe the ark is here. They find what they believe to be it, but when they open it, just as Ori troops arrive, it's just an old scroll lost to the ages. However, as they have an anti-prior device buried nearby, they manage to kill the prior and sow doubts in the minds of the troops. I thought it would have been a decent idea to say, in the end, that this really was the ark, as shortly after opening it is when the first seeds of doubt were sown. As is it seems a little strange that the troops would turn as quickly as they did at this point; Tomin, maybe, but not the troops.

But alas, that was not to be. They finally realize that the ark is in the Ori galaxy and get the go-ahead to use the supergate for a go at it. Cameron takes command for the mission, but the IOA butts in and sends their new rep along for the ride. They make it through, contact someone in the underground, and determine the location of the Ark to be next to the Plains of Celestis. They cloak the ship, beam down a search party, and life is good.

The IOA clown actually had orders to Nuke the supergate from this side. But since he couldn't he went with plan B, brought the Asgard core online, created a replicator, and planned to use them to overrun the Ori galaxy. They're forced to jump to hyperspace to stay away from the Ori and fight the replicators. Meanwhile, the search team is captured, with the exception of Teal'C who is shot and presumed dead.

Teal'C, wounded, undertakes the perilous journey to the City of the Gods on foot and, with a little healing help from Morgan LeFay on the Plains of Celestis, when he collapses from his wound, makes it to the dungeon to free Daniel. Meanwhile, Vala has a spat with Adria, who has assumed the power of the Ori, and is for some reason given the ability to move freely about. She steals some keys and gets Tomin out of jail just as Daniel and Teal'C show up.

Cameron and the crew fight replicators on the ship. The ship drops out of hyperspace. Four Ori ships open fire.

SG1 heads back to the room with the ark, as Daniel has been told by Morgan that the priors have a subspace psychic link, and showing even one prior the truth would sow doubt in them all. Adria confronts the team in the ark room, but Vala distracts her while Daniel gets the ark turned on and opened. They show the Doci the truth and it gets automatically communicated to all the priors.

The Ori ships stop their attack just after Sam figures out the self destruct code the IOA nitwits put into the replicator code.

Adria has lost all the power she was seeping from her followers, and in her weakened state is challenged by Morgan. We're not privy to the results of that attack, but the implication is that either Morgan won, they destroyed one another, or they are locked in an eternal battle.

Some loose ends get tied up. Vala decides to stay separated from Tomin, who is now in a position of leadership for his people. Sam bakes Cameron macaroons. Daniel broods. Life is good. The team struts off through the old orifice yet one more time.





Plot Holes
This section is the main weakness of the movie, in my opinion. SG1, as a series, has mostly been intelligently written and internally consistent. They stay within the confines of the technology they created, and don't force it to do what they said it could not do (usually). They stay within the confines of basic logic and reality (usually). The joy of watching the show is partly in that you know there won't be a clean easy answer, because the characters need to muddle through the gray area of real life (usually). I like to see the creative solutions they're forced to come up with, instead of relying on plot devices and dumb luck. Unfortunately, the movie deviates from that several times in my opinion. I'll notate the main offenders below:



The Ori are, for all intents and purposes, gods in their own galaxy. The ancients certainly seem to know every details of what's occurring in our galaxy. One would think the Ori could do the same. Sure, an underground resistance in their billions upon billions of followers may be a bit complicated to track down, but a lone Earth ship that just jumped through their supergate, now beyond the protection of the ancients? SG1 should've been smited the moment they emerged without some kind of protection from ascended beings. This would be irrelevant if the Ori were really gone, of course, but they knew this wasn't the case. They watched Adria ascend themselves. Sure, they could hide technologically in their own galaxy where no ascended beings could take action, but in the Ori realm? Why they were allowed to continue unobstructed was a major plot hole I had trouble getting past.



The replicator plan makes no sense, especially when the IOA clowns made them immune to the only weapon Earth has against them. First, the Ori have free reign in their own galaxy, so if the replicators looks like they may be a problem, your friendly neighborhood Ori can just swoop down and eliminate them without a concern. We've seen the ancients do similar things, and the Ori have the extra power from their followers. Even if they couldn't, the Asgard were able to win by using the knowledge of the Ancients (through Jack), implying that the Ancients could have easily wiped them out technologically if they desired. And the Ori are ascended, which we've been led to believe means that they have access to knowledge of, well, everything; just plain everything. Far more than the pre-ascended Ancients did anyway. So they would be able to easily create an effective weapon against any mere physical threat.

Even if the plan does work, that leaves the replicators with a working supergate back to our galaxy. And what moron thinks a self-destruct script will work? The whole problem with the replicators from Pegasus is that they got around such a script, but that was just written by the most advanced race to ever inhabit the known universe; I'm sure Earth can do much better. The IOA needs to read the evil overlord list and hire a five year old to review their plans. Any reasonably intelligent child could tell you this was a bad idea. Though the IOA have acted selfishly and short-sightedly before, they're rarely outright irrationally moronic, making this a rather jarring plot point. I sighed when this whole issue started in the movie, because I knew it would subtract time from more interesting story elements while adding nothing but mindless action.

Of course, the situation is bogus anyway as the premise is faulty. They have the replicator under control and in a force field when it's created. If the plan is to infect the Ori galaxy, why did the IOA dufus not just beam it to the City of the Gods? What possible good would it do to let it cannibalize the ship first? Yet that's exactly what the IOA nut lets it do.



Speaking of boneheaded plans, what good would nuking the supergate do? The Ori followers can obviously just build another, and then Earth wouldn't know where it was. That would just make things worse. Again, the IOA may be shortsighted and selfish, but they were never made out to be truly stupid.



Now let's talk a bit about power. Ascension gives you a fair deal of power. We've seen this from the ancients time and again, destroying ships, killing people, and affecting the physical universe in major ways, and they did not have the advantage of billions of followers. Human devotion may add to that power, but how much? Orlin even said that the addition was relatively minor, even with a whole galaxy on their knees. Even if it increased Adria's power tenfold, that still means that twenty ancients could take her out. She is no longer a threat to them. So why did everyone act that Adria taking over the Ori's leech-power made her as powerful as them. It didn't; it made her as powerful as them minus every single Ori but one. In other words, where N is the number of Ori, A is the power of an ascended being, and L is the (limited) power leeched from followers, P, the total power of 'The Ori', could be expressed as:

P = (N * A) + L

Assuming there were 200 ascended Ancients and 200 ascended Ori, and the leech power was equal to another 100 ascended beings, it was no wonder the ancients were concerned; the Ori were 50% more powerful. But using the formula above that leaves Adria with a power rating of 101, against the 200 rating of the Ancients, suddenly leaving the Ancients with almost double the strength. This certainly may be an oversimplification, but I think the drama could have been maintained without trying to imply that Adria was now equally as powerful as the Ori were. Even if she was no longer a threat to the Ancients as a whole, that still made her plenty powerful to mere mortals.

And how does that power transfer work anyway? Why does it get transferred to Adria? Just because she calls herself an Ori? Then why couldn't an ancient have stepped in and called themselves an Ori; wouldn't they have then received half of the power? The followers don't know who they're surrendering their will to. In fact, they know very little about ascended beings by necessity, so how does that power get directed? It just seems a little convenient that Adria can just take over after the Ori are gone and assume all of their followers' devotion, despite not being one of the original goddesses being worshiped. You would think it would at least take a few years of work to get everything redirecting her way.

Also, power is said to be measured in the quantity (no mentioned of quality) of wills being surrendered. As such, to even cut her power in half, they would need to convince half of the entire Ori galaxy to stop believing. That's billions of people. But they didn't; they convinced the priors, a drop in a galaxy of oceans. Sure, the priors might have started a chain reaction, spreading the word and undermining Adria's power, but it would've taken months just to begin to get the word out. Even then, as shown (extremely well and realistically) with the Goa'uld arc, many will cling to their fanaticism even when face with obvious naked truth. It could take years just to diminish her power to the point of your average ascended being. Sure, that would still save our valiant crew from the Ori ships, but certainly wouldn't bode well for Morgan LeFay. Attacking when she did would pit her against Adria while still at 99.9999% of her power.

Sure, there's probably some convoluted treknobabble that will explain all this away, but I enjoy SG1 because it's above that. It doesn't usually use such technobabble as a cover for sloppy writing. This time it did.



Tomin, it was implied at the end, becomes the leader of his people. Why? He was a commander, yes, but just one of many. Also remember that only the priors were turned. So I envision this would have went one of two ways:

1) The priors tell the truth to all, and use their position, knowledge, and powers to create a new political hierarchy with themselves at the top. Even in a best case scenario, Tomin would remain little more than a 'middle manager'. However, much more likely is...

2) The priors, having already shown they are mostly complicit with the Ori and were only mislead about the 'ascending the priors' part, would now take it upon themselves to fill the void left by the Ori. After all, they are highly evolved, with much of the knowledge of the ancients, and it would only be a matter of time before one learned to ascend. From there the others would follow, and the state of things would be not much changed from before. Even without ascension, there would be no reason not to use their position and power to maintain the existing hierarchy with themselves at the top.



This one is more minor, so maybe I should skip it, but what's with the newly reinforced shields? The ship was almost taken out in Unending by two Ori vessels. You can count a total of less than 10 Ori weapon blasts being enough to take out the shields entirely. Yet in the movie they can magically deflect 20 or 30 attacks, many at nearly the same time (hopefully there's no synergetic effect or shield recharge time), while taking only minor internal damage? These were the same weapons, mind you, that took out entire Goa'uld motherships (and I think an Asgard ship) in a single shot. Maybe I'm a little oversensitive to this from playing 4X video games where you're constantly comparing shield points against incoming damage, but this major inconsistency draws me out of the SG1 universe. It reminds me it's only a movie, and that takes away the magic and enjoyment of watching.



Internal consistency can make or break a movie.





Ethics
Now let's talk about ethics. Not in general, just in relation to the Ark. The ancients are painted as libertarians of sorts. Above all else they believe in free will. However, nearly as strong as that belief, is one in truth and openness, and using your intellect and rationality to explore and understand the universe as it is, and not how one might want it to be. In short, they're scientists who hold truth above all else, while the Ori are painted as fundamentalists who have no problem trouncing all over the truth if it makes them feel warm and squishy inside.

This makes the Ark a non issue. The presentation makes it out as though there are pros and cons of this technology per the previous paragraph. The pro is obvious: the ark will impart the truth to the viewer, and will somehow assure them that such is the truth. It's even stated at one point that it can only show truth, not just anything that the programmer wishes, and there's no way to change that (otherwise an all-knowing ascended being, like Adria, would have known how and done it). The con presented is that it usurps free will, it is even called brainwashing, and that trumps the good that it can accomplish.

However, this is untrue if it really works as presented in the movie. The ark does not force a decision. It imparts knowledge. What one does with that knowledge, and what decisions they make, are the real component of free will. The ark does not usurp free will any more than a college class does. It spreads knowledge that is guaranteed not to be false. This is at the core of what the Alterans stand for. Should someone wish to surrender their will to the Ori anyway, that's still their choice. Knowledge does, of course, restrict what one might see as reasonable decisions, but again, that does not usurp free will any more than a college class. Are we to believe that the ancients never taught one another; that all of science had to be rediscovered by every individual? The ethical objections are not rational.





Special Effects
Let's move on to a more positive category: special effects and camerawork. The series has done a fantastic job with the limited budget they had, and the movie is no exception to that rule. At $7 million, this group had about 1/10 what your average blockbuster has to work with, and yet made something that could've probably held its own in a theater.

Many familiar effects had additional touches added that gave them that extra weight one expects from a movie, which was a nice touch. Some additional scenes were shot that would never have been possible in the show, such as the mountains Teal'c journeys through, which added a certain majesty and awe that wouldn't otherwise exist. And the Alteran ship rising out of the mountain was beautiful. The crew certainly did a great job.

I'm not so sure about a few scenes though. For instance, I loved the Plains of Celestis in the series. It had a mystical feel, and I think much of that was due to the fact that the ground was so supernaturally flat that as far as the eye could see was covered in barely an inch of water. So much area, with a surface of rock and earth, with variation in height of less than an inch really would be an amazing feat. In the movie, however, when Teal'c approaches the City of the Gods, he falls into what appears to be a mishmash of mud and water. The edge of the plains, where he is standing, is painted more as a marsh or wetland. I think this really detracted from the magical feel of the place.

I do need to fault the director for forcing some effects where they act more as distractions too. For instance, when Adria appears for the first time she could have been her calm collected self as originally planned, and new weight would have been added to her threats with the knowledge of what she was. Unfortunately, they decided afterwards to encase her body in flames, I guess to make her appear more ascendedy. They also flanged her voice to make her sound like the Ori did when talking through the Doci.

I think this detracted from the scene. The flames served as a distraction, and words and ideas can always present more confidence and strength, and impart more fear and concern, than effects will ever be able to do. Said flames might have worked on their own, but the voice alteration pushed things over the top. That particular sound worked in the series because it implied that many (the Ori) were talking through one. In fact, it underscored the difference between the ancients, who believe in diversity and free will, and the Ori, who believe in conformity, when so many uttered the same words in unison through the Doci. While Adria may have shared that mindset, and from her personality shown in the series she didn't, she was still only one. Again, I think big effects can often detract from big ideas if not done right, and here I don't think they were done right.





Ideology and Controversy
The movie format allows a writer to do things that may not be allowed on network TV. They can push the envelope and present 'dangerous' ideas, whether it's just some words that many people find uncivilized, or unpopular ideas that may be feared. This movie was the perfect potential vehicle for the latter.

Remember the basis of this entire show. The Goa'uld were very symbolic of many faiths in general. Time and again the show stressed that one had to be careful and evaluate claims based on evidence instead of relying on blind acceptance. And many of the wars, and much of the death and suffering, shown in the show paled in comparison to those experienced in our own history for reasons of faith. But the Goa'uld were vague nameless symbols that bore little resemblance to reality.

Then season 9 comes along and the show steps it up a notch. Time and again, far to often and obvious to be anything other than on purpose, the parallel is drawn between the Ori and Christianity. While the stories, names, and prayers differed greatly, the basics of the religions were very similar. The Alterans, on the other hand, were fleshed out as atheist and scientific in nature, believing in personal growth, free will, and that we create purpose for our lives ourselves. I often wonder if this isn't why the show was cancelled despite it's extremely high viewership numbers; it would be a rather ironic explanation.

So when the movie was announced I hoped that this same thread would be picked up and used to weave us a more intricate and meaningful tapestry than would ever have been allowed on mainstream TV in the one hour time format. Instead of delving more deeply into the intellectual quagmire, however, they movie speeds the other way. There were no deep meanings and no real overarching moral that I could see. Instead it seemed more of a mindless action flick designed to tie up the existing storylines cleanly in purely physical terms, but completely unsatisfying on any deeper level.





Conclusion
Despite my complaints it certainly wasn't a bad movie; at least by comparison. It holds its own against what comes out of Hollywood these days, and that's saying something for a $7M direct-to-DVD movie. But from such an amazing series, spanning an entire decade of shows, I expected more. In fairness, though, my expectations were probably impossibly high and would have required a 4.5 hour, Lord of the Rings style production, to meet.

Though at the very least we could have finally met the Furlings...


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12