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 a