Caffeinated Clint
A few years back “Stargate” duo Roland Emmerich (director/producer) and Dean Devlin (writer/producer) announced plans to reboot the 1994 science-fiction film. It was on their to-do card…as soon as they’d done with [this year’s] “Independence Day : Resurgence”. As close as they got, seems plans to set up that big spirally time-traveling device thing again have been put on hold.
“It looked good for a couple of months, but now it’s not looking so good”, Devlin tells Empire. “There are just a lot of things that have to fire at the same time, and there was a moment where I thought it was all firing at the same time, and then it all kind of fell apart. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to work independently.”
Personally speaking, there’s two reasons I’m not too choked up about this news. Firstly, Emmerich’s “Independence Day” sequel was a shambles – all style, no substance, with some of the worst dialogue, let alone pacing, this side of a first timer’s speed-dating experiment. One can only imagine the “Stargate” remake wouldn’t be much better – particularly if Emmerich’s still all about playing with his toys, and never doing his homework.
In addition, there’s a lots of folks who’d be burnt by the remake simply because it’d do undo what’s come before – particularly where the extremely popular TV series and it’s spin-offs are concerned. Emmerich and Devlin weren’t involved in those, and have been vocal in their dislike for the shows, but considering how long those things were on the air let alone the huge fan base they still have, it’d seem wrong to simply forget about the peeps that are responsible for helping keep the brand so successful.
Thankfully, Devlin seems to be on the same page as everyone else in that he doesn’t feel that confident that the new “Stargate” would be as good as the old “Stargate” so – and I’m only reading between the lines here – would rather leave the brand dormant than tarnish it.
Says Devlin, “Listen, I think if we did Stargate right, the fans would like it and we could do something really good. But if we screw it up, they’ll reject it. As they should. But I kind of don’t want to do it if I think that we’ll screw it up, and that’s one of the things that’s holding us back. You’d have several studios involved and a lot of voices and, you know, you may make something great, but you also may have something that doesn’t resemble what you wanted to do. That kind of ‘collaboration’ is a terrifying aspect of the whole thing.”
