Director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devin may have made their most prominent impact crater on the cultural landscape via “Independence Day” in 1996, but they earned their place in many a heart two years earlier via the charmingly goofy “Stargate.”

Primarily remembered today as the mothership that launched 15-plus seasons of television spin-offs, the original movie was itself something of a phenomenon when it was released 25 years ago.

Despite — or perhaps because of — that accrued mythology, “Stargate” makes for a fascinating artifact when viewed with an eye toward separating the film from the franchise. Despite Emmerich’s eventual reputation as the master of computer-generated disaster porn, this is a relatively sedate affair, with a story that foregrounds a slow-burn first half before jumping into (or succumbing to, depending on your perspective) a pyrotechnic-heavy climax.

Devlin and Emmerich take some token cues from author Erich von Däniken’s theories about aliens creating the pyramids, but one imagines this has as much to do with von Däniken as von Däniken has to do with actual science. The setup is mainly an excuse to toss Kurt Russell, as tough-as-nails military man Jack O’Neil, and James Spader, as bookish linguist Daniel Jackson, on another planet, where they encounter an evil alien masquerading as the Egyptian god Ra (played by Jaye Davidson of “The Crying Game”).

The mechanism by which all this happens is a giant circular ring adorned with various glyphs along its edge that we learn are coordinates linked to constellations. Dial up the proper sequence (six points to determine a destination, one point for an origin), and it’ll transport you anywhere in the universe — which in this case means a dust-covered planet called Abydos, approximating ancient Egypt and located on the edge of the known universe.

“Stargate” was absolutely bludgeoned by critics upon its release, but audiences felt otherwise. This is, after all, the kind of flick where Kurt Russell dispatches an Anubis-looking baddie after first telling him, in the kind of bon mot that elevates the thing an entire letter grade, “Give my regards to King Tut, asshole.” Sure, the story is wafer thin, but Emmerich lends the proceedings a scope that belies the relatively meager $55 million budget, with David Arnold’s epic music score adding to the “let’s put on a show” feeling.

It also didn’t hurt that this was pretty much the only game in town if you were looking for big-screen science fiction with some scope and scale that didn’t involve Klingons. (Lest we forget, there was a brief window once upon a time when “Star Wars” was entirely absent from screens — hard to believe, I know.) Despite the aforementioned critical drubbing, the movie — against most expectations — managed a global haul of nearly $200 million by the time it left theaters.

More important, it found a healthy afterlife on cable and home video as exactly the kind of property home studio MGM, always hungry for exploitable intellectual properties, could turn into a money-minting machine, which they did a mere three years later. Premiering on Showtime during the summer of ’97, “Stargate SG-1” replaced Russell and Spader with Richard Dean Anderson (“MacGyver”!) and Michael Shanks and lasted an impressive 10 seasons across two cable networks.

Devlin and Emmerich had moved on to their misbegotten 1998 “Godzilla” remake by then, leaving plans for a “Stargate” trilogy on the shelf, but it didn’t matter. Two more live-action shows plus an animated spin-off arrived over the next 14 years. Not to mention comics, toys, the whole nine. The Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” said that of the four “Star” franchises — Wars, Trek, Gate and Search — “Stargate” is his third favorite, which sure feels like an apt summation of its place in the pop culture pecking order.

And while the majority of the “Stargate” TV catalog holds up quite well for the many ways it wove an elaborate mythology out of the threads the feature left hanging and spun it into something transcending its own roots, the original incarnation stands off to one side of everything that followed — with it, but not of it.

As such, a quarter-century’s worth of hindsight is the perfect context to revisit what was a fun throwback then, and feels like even more of one now. And if you do end up checking it out, make sure to give my regards to King Tut.

“Stargate” can be streamed on Hulu and Amazon Prime.