Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey grapple with issues of science vs. faith in Contact (Movie Review)

When most of us talk about the genre labeled "science fiction"  or "sci-fi," we often associate it with such movies or franchises as Independence Day, Star Trek and/or Star Wars, with perhaps a nod to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind thrown in almost as a distracted coda.

Star Wars, of course, isn't true science fiction; George Lucas's multimedia franchise is better described as "space-fantasy" or "space opera" and is instead a high tech update of the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s and early 1940s.  

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek (and its various spin-offs) is closer to true science fiction but it's still more of an action-adventure tale gussied up with plausible but still fantastical advanced technology (warp drive, subspace communications and transporters) which is designed to get around the limits of physics and the laws of relativity for dramatic purposes.

And Independence Day?  The 1996 blockbuster straddles the no-man's-land between space opera, Trek-like action-adventure and tip-toes, if only a few inches, into what purists consider to be true science fiction or "speculative fiction" based on real science.

Director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit) - who replaced Aussie filmmaker George Miller in mid-shoot - teamed up with screenwriters James V. Hart (Bram Stoker's Dracula, Hook, August Rush) and Michael Goldenberg (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Green Lantern) to adapt Carl Sagan's 1985 novel Contact as one of Hollywood's rare sallies into the realm of sci-fi.

Starring Jodie Foster as astronomer Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway (who is also played as a young girl by Jena Malone) and Matthew McConaughey as religious scholar Joss Parker, Contact is a rarity in American cinema - a movie that asks such questions as "Is there intelligent life on other worlds in the Milky Way?" and "Can science and religion coexist, or do the two have to always clash?"

If you've read any of the late Cornell University astronomer/writer/educator's non-fiction works or watched his landmark PBS series Cosmos, you are aware that he believed that there is a credible chance that extraterrestrial life exists.  

This theme, of course, is at the core of Contact, which started out - ironically - as a screen story written by Sagan and his future wife Ann Druyan in 1980 but was turned into a novel after several years of "development" in the Hollywood system, then was finally bought as a "property" by Warner Bros. in the 1990s.

After a cool main title sequence in which we hear fragments of Earth-origin radio signals crossing the vast expanses of the galaxy, Contact begins in the early 1960s with a sequence which introduces Ellie as a precocious nine-year-old who is fascinated by her father Ted's (David Morse) ham radio and its ability to link people from all over the U.S. and the world.

Ellie asks her father - who has raised his daughter as a single parent since his wife's death - if Earth radios can receive signals from nearby planets; Ted says that with a big enough antenna, they can.  Then, setting up the movie's main theme, she asks him a deeper question:

Young Ellie: Dad, do you think there's people on other planets? 

Ted Arroway: I don't know, Sparks. But I guess I'd say if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space.

30 years later, we see the now-adult Ellie as a full-fledged astronomer, recently assigned to the Arecibo radio telescope observatory in Puerto Rico, where, with her blind colleague Kent Clark (William Fichtner) and others, she is working on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project and listening for radio signals from other stars in the galaxy that will prove, once and for all, that we are not alone in the Universe.

While in Puerto Rico, Ellie meets and "hooks up" with Joss Parker (McConaughey), a handsome, witty and deeply religious man who describes himself as a "man of the cloth - without the cloth."  They have a civil discussion which touches the film's secondary theme (the debate between science's need for proof and religion's reliance on faith.)  

During the post-coital sequence in which Ellie and Joss exchange their views on God Versus Science, we learn that Ted passed away when Ellie was nine and that she blames herself for his death.  (In a touching if somber scene, we see the younger Ellie attempting to reach her father via their ham radio set.)

Joss is smitten by Ellie even though she is a woman of science and he is a man of faith, but she is more committed to her quest for other life in other worlds and pretty much ditches him (she doesn't even pick up a piece of paper with his phone number that he left in her bungalow).

But Ellie's quest runs into a snag of the bureaucratic kind when her boss (and chief nemesis) David Drumlin (Tom Skerrit) cuts funding for the SETI program and tells her that she's ruining her career and life by pursuing this academic wild goose chase.

Executive: We must confess that your proposal seems less like science and more like science fiction.

 Ellie Arroway: Science fiction. Well you're right, it's crazy. In fact, it's even worse than that, nuts.

 [angrily slams down her briefcase and marches up to the desk] 

Ellie Arroway: You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an "airplane," you know you get people to go in, and fly around like birds, it's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history... of history.
Furious and determined, Ellie decides to strike out on her own with the help of Kent and a few other fellow scientists.  She spends months seeking a sponsor with deep pockets and a visionary mind without much success - until her presentation impresses the reclusive and eccentric S.R. Hadden (John Hurt), a cross between Bill Gates, Howard Hughes and George Soros. 

With Hadden's generous grants and the aid of her motley crew of techies and astronomers, Ellie gets access to the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes in New Mexico to search the skies for those elusive alien radio signals.  And for four years - presumably during the first Clinton Administration - the results are negligible and Durbin persuades the government to get the SETI team out of the VLA.

Under the gun of a three-month deadline before she must leave the VLA looming, Ellie goes out at night to listen to the stars - and finally, as she always dreamed she would, she hears something that is clearly not mere galactic background radiation or static.

My Take:  Contact is one of those movies that, like Kubrick's 2001 and Spielberg's Close Encounters, asks cosmic questions, stirs up some debates, provides audiences with spectacular vistas and serves as an antidote to big budget space adventures which depend on noisy battles, screaming spaceships and simple storylines along the lines of Independence Day.

If you watch Contact, you'll notice that Zemeckis and his crew were deeply influenced by 2001 (indeed, the cast and crew watched the 1968 classic in pre-production).  It tackles - with far more dialogue and many more characters - some of 2001's nuances and much of its pacing.  Even when Earth follows up on Ellie's discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence and sends out an emissary to seek it out, Contact steers clear of "full disclosure" about how and why some races managed to discover faster-than-light travel and what happens after the movie fades to black.

Contact also borrows several pages from 2001 and Close Encounters when it highlights the tensions between scientists' need for openness and the government's near-manic concern for national security.  This is personalized by the conflict between Ellie, Hadden and her colleagues with National Security Adviser Michael Kitz (James Woods), who wants to keep a lid on Ellie's discovery and all its consequences lest the aliens pose a threat to the United States.

Where Contact sometimes gets a bit bogged down is when it delves into its other Big Theme, the Fact Versus Faith Debate.

Though by and large the opposite ends of the spectrum are represented in a rational manner by the relationship between the agnostic Ellie and the Christian Joss, the film's one violent villain is a cartoonishly-exaggerated "religious nutcase" played by Jake Busey without any nuances beyond being a more-Fundamentalist-than-Jerry Falwell type.  One look at this man's wild stare and predatory grin marks him an American Osama Bin Laden type, which is a bit offputting (even though there are people with this world view in the U.S. and elsewhere.)

Contact is also leisurely paced, with a running time of 149 minutes. It doesn't seem as glacially slow as some parts of 2001, but it requires tolerance for a complex plot and lots of character development that a film such as Star Trek would eschew in lieu of action sequences and space battles. 

Contact was the source of some controversy when (a) it tweaked footage of then-President  Bill Clinton's speech about a Mars rock found on Earth back in the mid-1990s to make it look as though he is talking about the alien radio signal, and (b) when several CNN reporters and anchorpersons appeared as themselves but as part of the movie's scenario.  The White House attempted to take some form of legal action but nothing came of it.  

However, after Contact, CNN stopped allowing its reporting staff from moonlighting in feature films as themselves in their company roles and limited Hollywood studios' use of its well-known logo because the Atlanta cable news organization feared that people would perceive it was actively sponsoring a commercial product. 

Despite its weak points and sometimes all-too-leisurely pace, Contact is a well-done and interesting science fiction film.  It features good special effects supervised by Ken Ralston (who worked on several of George Lucas'sStar Wars movies), including a magnificent opening sequence which makes good use of early CGI techniques.

As for the acting in Contact,  Foster, McConaughey, Fichtner, Skerrit, Morse, Woods, Angela Bassett and the rest of the cast - except Jake Busey - turn in good, solid performances and give their characters emotional and intellectual depth.

The film also features a nifty score by long-time Zemeckis collaborator Alan Silvestri, who has also composed music for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump and the Back to the Future trilogy.  Though not as operatic as John Williams' scores for Star Wars or Close Encounters, Silvestri's themes and cues convey the beauty and vastness of space and the grandeur of the human adventure to explore the unknown.   

This movie sometimes can get pretentious and bogged down by its Cosmic Questions themes, but on the whole,Contact is an effective, intriguing and mind-expanding science fiction film that speaks to viewers who want to watch a "space movie" that is not about evil aliens, battling starships or big, loud explosions.

Recommended: Yes