It will take you a million light years from home. But will it bring you back?

When a mysterious woman makes Professor Daniel Jackson (James Spader) an offer he can't refuse, he ends up in a secret Air Force military base. His mission: to decode an ancient Egyptian artifact known as the Stargate.

The mission leader, Colonel Jack O'Neil (Kurt Russeell), a tough military man with nerves of steel, commandeers their trip through the Stargate to an ancient civilization on the other side of the universe. But once there, they must battle the astoundingly powerful Sun God, Ra (Jaye Davidson), before they can find their way back home.

Amazon.com: Before they unleashed the idiotic mayhem of Independence Day and Godzilla, the idea-stealing team of director Roland Emmerich and producer-screenwriter Dean Devlin concocted this hokey hit about the discovery of an ancient portal capable of zipping travelers to "the other side of the known universe." James Spader plays the Egyptologist who successfully translates the Stargate's hieroglyphic code, and then joins a hawkish military unit (led by Kurt Russell) on a reconnaissance mission to see what's on the other side. They arrive on a desert world with cultural (and apparently supernatural) ties to Earth's ancient Egypt, where the sun god Ra (played by Jaye Davidson from The Crying Game) rules a population of slaves with armored minions and startlingly advanced technology. After being warmly welcomed into the slave camp, the earthlings encourage and support a rebellion, and while Russell threatens to blow up the Stargate to prevent its use by enemy forces, the movie collapses into a senseless series of action scenes and grandiose explosions. It's all pretty ridiculous, but Stargate found a large and appreciative audience, spawned a cable-TV series, and continues to attract science fiction fans who are more than willing to forgive its considerable faults. --Jeff Shannon