8 Sci-Fi Movies To Watch If You Loved Stargate

Published Sep 29, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT

Sky Blanton is a Movie Contributor at ScreenRant with professional experience covering movies, television, and pop culture. Her published work spans news, interviews, features, and opinion pieces, with a focus on film, franchise storytelling, and the entertainment industry.

She earned her bachelor's degree in Communications with a concentration in Professional Writing and a minor in Business Writing from Southern New Hampshire University.

Stargate takes ideas that sound like they belong in completely different movies and somehow makes them part of the same adventure. A set of symbols that looks like an archaeological puzzle turns out to be a map of coordinates. Ancient Egyptian lore becomes part of a much larger extraterrestrial history, and a discovery buried at Giza leads to people walking onto a planet on the other side of the universe.

The movie doesn't leave archaeology behind once the science fiction starts, either. Translation, hieroglyphs, ruins, and old beliefs continue to matter even after spaceships and alien technology enter the picture.

That's what makes Stargate more than a movie about traveling through a portal. There is a real pleasure in watching something strange slowly become understandable. A symbol has to mean something. A structure was built for a reason. What initially looks supernatural might have an explanation that is much stranger than magic. Even the Stargate itself isn't treated like a convenient doorway that everyone immediately knows how to use. Figuring out where it goes and how to get back is part of the adventure.

That's a major part of the Stargate movie's appeal, but that side of it isn't necessarily unique to the film. Other sci-fi movies have managed to deliver a similar feel. They may not all look like Stargate or any of its TV shows, but they share its interest in what happens when people discover something that makes the universe much bigger than they thought it was.

8 The Mummy (1999)

Evelyn spends years studying ancient Egypt only to discover that some of the things she read about probably should have stayed buried. After she reads from the Book of the Dead in Hamunaptra, The Mummy's Imhotep wakes up after 3,000 years and the expedition suddenly has to take curses, plagues, and resurrection very seriously.

That should feel similar after Stargate, where translating ancient Egyptian writing also leads to a discovery much bigger than anyone expected. Evelyn's knowledge keeps mattering once things go wrong, whether she's translating hieroglyphs or figuring out how Imhotep can be stopped. The Mummy replaces the aliens and advanced technology with scarabs, mummies, and actual magic, but it has the same fun with the idea that Ancient Egypt still has a few enormous secrets left to uncover.

Contact makes reaching another part of the universe much harder than walking through the Stargate. Ellie Arroway first has to notice a radio signal coming from Vega, recognize prime numbers buried inside it, and help unravel the enormous amount of information being transmitted with it. Hidden in that signal are instructions for building a machine, although nobody actually knows what will happen when someone uses it.

Humanity builds it anyway. Scientists can follow the plans closely enough to construct the machine, but that doesn't mean they understand why it was sent or what waits at the other end. Ellie eventually agrees to sit inside it and find out herself. Contact spends much more time getting to that moment, from decoding the plans to debating whether the machine should be used at all. But eventually, someone still has to climb inside technology built from alien instructions and hope there really is something waiting on the other side.

6 The Abyss (1989)

Thousands of feet below the surface, The Abyss might as well be taking place on another planet. A mission to recover a sunken nuclear submarine is strange enough before lights begin moving through the water outside the drilling platform. Lindsey gets the clearest look when one of the glowing creatures comes close enough for her to see it isn't some bizarre deep-sea animal. Whatever is down there is watching them back.

From there, curiosity and paranoia pull everyone in opposite directions. Lindsey wants to know what they've found. Lieutenant Coffey, already unraveling under the pressure, sees a possible enemy and reacts accordingly. Only after Bud descends into the trench does the scale of the discovery become clear, with an enormous civilization hidden on the ocean floor. Stargate sends its expedition across the universe to find intelligent life. Meanwhile, The Abyss goes somewhere people have barely explored on their own planet.

5 Planet of the Apes (1968)

Planet of the Apes drops Taylor somewhere that makes absolutely no sense by the rules he knows. Apes speak, write, practice medicine, hold trials, and argue about science, while humans are treated like animals. Taylor can barely convince anyone that he came from somewhere else, let alone get answers about how this civilization came to exist. Dr. Zaius, meanwhile, clearly knows more about the planet's history than he's willing to admit.

That makes Taylor's situation a reversal of Stargate. Daniel travels to another planet and discovers a human civilization whose history stretches back to ancient Egypt. Taylor believes he has reached another planet, only to discover that the civilization confusing him grew out of Earth's own history. The Statue of Liberty sticking out of the beach finally gives him the answer. He hasn't discovered some distant alien world. He's been walking around the remains of Earth thousands of years after he left it.

4 Pitch Black (2000)

The planet in Pitch Black looks survivable at first. After their transport ship crashes, the survivors find an abandoned settlement and evidence that another group once lived there. Nobody knows where those people went until an eclipse blocks all three suns and creatures begin coming out of the ground. Suddenly, the fact that the planet rarely gets dark becomes very important.

Riddick can see in that darkness because his eyes were surgically altered, so the others have little choice but to keep him around. That doesn't erase the fact that he was being transported back to prison when they crashed. Johns considers him dangerous, Riddick has his own reasons for distrusting Johns, and neither man is particularly honest with the rest of the group. Like the team in Stargate, the survivors have to learn how an unfamiliar planet works before they can leave it. In Pitch Black, they also have to decide which of the people stranded there with them they can trust.

3 The Fifth Element (1997)

It's easy to forget that The Fifth Element starts in an Egyptian temple. Long before the flying taxis, space cruises, and Ruby Rhod, an archaeologist is studying carvings about an evil that returns every 5,000 years. Then the Mondoshawans show up to collect the weapon hidden inside the temple, making it pretty clear that those ancient carvings were describing something much bigger than anyone realized.

That as a whole isn't far off from Stargate. Once again, people have spent centuries looking at pieces of Ancient Egypt without realizing aliens were involved. The Fifth Element just has a lot more fun with what happens after that idea becomes common knowledge. Three hundred years later, humans casually share the universe with dozens of alien species, yet stopping the Great Evil still depends on understanding something carved into the wall of an Egyptian temple.

2 Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets takes the excitement of Stargate discovering one inhabited alien world and imagines humanity centuries after that stopped being unusual. Alpha began as an Earth space station, but after hundreds of years of contact, thousands of species now live there. Humans aren't cautiously meeting an alien civilization anymore. They're sharing hallways with them.

You still get that feeling of stepping somewhere completely unfamiliar. Big Market exists in another dimension, so Valerian can see and interact with an enormous alien marketplace while his body is actually running through an empty desert. The Pearls bring the movie closer to Stargate's interest in learning the history behind an unfamiliar civilization. Their home planet was destroyed decades earlier, and understanding what happened there eventually changes what Valerian and Laureline know about their own government. Valerian just makes alien contact the starting point rather than the big discovery.

1 Starship Troopers (1997)

Starship Troopers takes the military side of Stargate and gets rid of almost everything else. Johnny Rico joins the Mobile Infantry and eventually gets dropped onto Klendathu, where the Federation expects its soldiers to make quick work of the Arachnids. Instead, the first invasion is a disaster. Thousands of soldiers pour onto a planet they barely understand and immediately discover that the Bugs are much harder to kill than anyone told them.

The soldiers in Stargate at least have Daniel around to help make sense of where they've landed. Rico and the Mobile Infantry mostly get orders, guns, and another planet to attack. The Federation keeps promising victory through upbeat news reports and recruitment videos, even as the casualty numbers climb. Stargate wonders what humans might find on another world. Starship Troopers shows what happens when they arrive convinced they already know.