Maybe I just can't be objective about this movie. Is that such a terrible thing? The best movies are supposed to trigger strong emotions. Using that criteria, Contact must top my personal best movies list. Yet it somehow managed to be a blip in the pantheon of movies, a movie released then quickly forgotten.

How could such a travesty happen? I don't know for sure, but allow me to speculate for a moment. Maybe the general public wasn't ready for such an intelligent movie. Maybe it was the stigma of being based on a well-liked book. We all know that movies are never as good as the books they are based on. Perhaps the movie was hurt mightily by not really fitting cleanly into one genre. Dismissed as science fiction by the general public and as a sociological drama by the science fiction crowd, everyone avoided it.

I don't know. Perhaps I delude myself. Perhaps it really isn't that good. Maybe I am allowing myself to be blinded by my strong identification with Ellie the child science prodigy, with Ellie the outsider even among those who should be her peers, with Ellie who constantly struggles to keep her dream alive. I certainly identified with Kent the blind astronomer, having had a glimpse of what such a life is like. Yes, dear reader, Contact certainly hit a lot of hot points with me, struck a chord deep inside me.

But even without such personal association with the movie and its characters there is a lot to like about Contact. It's one of the most well-written movies I've ever seen. It's dramatic and realistic without feeling forced. It manages to highlight many of today's hot issues without feeling heavy or moralistic. It offers a glimpse into the worlds of science and politics and how they collide. Highlighting the debate between science and religion, dealing with issues of faith as it pertains to both, this movie is a modern epic and it all hinges on Dr. Eleanor Arroway. I can't think of anyone who could bring such intelligence and grace, stubbornness and subtle humor to the role than Jodie Foster. She carries the weight of the movie on her back and not only holds up but flourishes.

The Basic Story

Dr. Eleanor Arroway, known as Ellie, spends her life searching for proof that intelligent life exists on other planets. Ridiculed by the serious scientists, Ellie persists as her funding dwindles. Then one day there was a signal.

False alarms are commonplace, part of life as a SETI scientist, but finally this was the real thing. Caught in a web of politics, both in the world of science and of government, Ellie and her colleagues continue decoding the incoming message. Eventually they discover the plans to build some type of machine, a machine obviously meant to hold a single person. What is the machine? Should it be built? What is Ellie's role now that the message has been decoded? How does the discovery of the signal affect religion and society as a whole? Watch the movie to find out.

The Characters and Actors

Contact is replete with interesting, well developed characters. Foremost is Ellie, described in some detail above. I cannot express how strongly I identified with Ellie, with her views on the interactions of politics and science, with her antagonistic relationship with her former professor, with her quirky sense of humor that perfectly matched her extreme intelligence. Foster made her truly live as a scientist and as a person.

Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) is the religious icon with an open mind, the regularly televised author and presidential advisor who seems to have a gift for seeing all sides of an issue and giving everyone a fair chance to present their views. Like Foster, McConaughey oozed intelligence and comfort in this role, one he excelled in.

Tom Skerritt played David Drumlin, Ellie's former professor who thinks this SETI stuff is a joke and wants Ellie to come back to doing real research. A bigwig in the world of astronomy, Drumlin exudes pomposity and knows exactly how to play the games needed to be successful in the political science world.

Kent Clarke (William Fichtner) supervises the VLA radio telescope facilities in New Mexico where Ellie works for most of the movie. He is a capable scientist, good friend, and someone Ellie respects greatly. He also happens to be blind. As someone who was starting to struggle with lessening visual capacity as I started college and beyond into graduate school, I also greatly identified with Kent. What was particularly impressive was that Kent was a scientist who just happened to be blind just like he happened to have brown hair and that was never lost at all throughout the movie.

John Hurt plays S.R. Haddon, a super-rich, super-intelligent man who funds Ellie's research and seems excited by the enigma of deciphering the message. With a hand in every pot and, more importantly, every computer, Haddon often finds information unavailable to Ellie. I enjoyed this character immensely even though he was a bit unrealistic (he had too much information at his fingertips, too much clout, and too much of a role in determining what the message meant). He was eccentric, intelligent, charming, obnoxious, and predatory at the same time.

James Woods plays Michael Kitz, the National Security Advisor and plays him well. He is officious and overly concerned that no information pass from the United States to other countries without thought of the possible security and political implications. His arguments with Ellie lead to some of the best lines in the movie.

There are many many other interesting and important characters in the movie but I'm not going to bore you with details about any of the others. I will mention that Zemeckis again used archival footage of real people to great advantage in this movie (as he did in Forrest Gump) as well as utilized several prominent journalists and political figures playing themselves. For instance, Larry King interviews Palmer Joss and President Clinton is, in fact, the president in the movie.

The Dialogue

The screenplay is extremely well written, bringing to light many issues and relationships inherent in the potential discovery of the existence of life on other planets. Much of the dialogue is snappy, witty, filled with life. The movie runs for over 2.5 hours yet never drags. That is a pretty impressive feat for a movie based on ideas not action.

As I mentioned above, some of the best dialogue in the movie comes in the form of arguments between Ellie and Michael Kitz. Perhaps my favorite passage in the entire movie comes when Kitz criticizes Ellie for releasing her initial finding that the message contains a string of prime numbers:

Kitz: Your having sent this announcement all over the world may well constitute a breach of national security.
Ellie: This isn't a person-to-person call. You can't possibly think that a civilization sending this kind of message would intend it just for Americans.
Kitz: I'm saying you might have consulted us; obviously, the contents of this message could be extremely sensitive.
Ellie: You want to classify prime numbers?

This exchange perfectly expresses the views of most scientists that scientific information should be open to the entire scientific community.

Ellie and Palmer have some wonderful exchanges too, often on issues of faith or surrounding the interactions of science and religion. However, my favorite tidbit is just a throwaway line when they meet:

Palmer: What are you studying up there?
Ellie: Oh, the usual. Nebulae, quasars, pulsars, stuff like that. What are you writing?
Palmer: The usual. Nouns, adverbs, adjective here and there.

This exemplified the easy going attitude Palmer has toward life while gently teasing Ellie. I just loved the exchange.

There are many many more quotes worthy of highlighting but I think those two give a good sense of the way the dialogue can truly sparkle.

The Science

Contact is based on a book by astronomer Carl Sagan who certainly has the credentials to write a plausible scientific story. Sagan (until he died) and his wife Anne Druyan were very involved in the making of the movie as well and it shows. The equipment used is realistic, the procedures used to zone in on the signal are realistic, the constant checking and double checking standard procedure.

So too does Sagan capture the life of a scientist. The relationships between Ellie and the other scientists feel realistic, especially the one with Dr. Drummond as former professor. The frustration with beaurocratic red tape, the constant fight to share scientific information between countries without interference, and particularly the battle to eke out funding are, alas, all to realistic.

The Politics

From the moment the signal was discovered, presidential scientific advisors, military personnel, and a whole slew of politically motivated people descended on Ellie's laboratory. From indignant views that any information discovered by a US citizen belongs solely to the US (despite being a signal from space and despite needing global tracking to keep the signal in view 24 hours a day) to the need to play the game and tell the bigwigs what they want to hear to the cover-ups and decisions to hold information back from the public, in many ways politicians control the course of action. Many of the demands go against the principles of open information flow ingrained into scientists and the desire to get the best people working on deciphering the signal (the best people are fine as long as they are our people). Sagan also takes this opportunity to examine the lack of scientific funding in the US and explore its effects on various aspects of research, and how the money and prestige gets distributed by a select few scientists who have their own power and politics.

The story was modernized a bit, with extensive time spent on political press conferences and government hearings. Actual press clippings of President Clinton were used to make the movie feel more realistic, give it almost a documentary feel in places. I am not as well versed in politics as I am in science, so I can't tell you with confidence that these were accurate portrayals of how people in these roles could act in the situations they found themselves, but it felt real to me and certainly incorporated many of the arguments and issues surrounding science and the government I'd seen in the science world.

The Religion

If science and government have been at loggerheads, then science and religion have been engaged in an out-and-out war for centuries. From the persecution of anyone who dared differ from the accepted beliefs that the Earth is the center of the Universe to those who adopted Darwin's belief in evolution and many in between, scientists who stretch beyond the boundaries of accepted beliefs or who propose anything that might cast doubt on the bible have been at odds with formal religious leaders and strongly religious people.

The battle isn't just between religious leaders and "renegade" scientists. The principle of science to look for proof, to examine every detail of a situation before sizing it up is in direct conflict with one of the prime directives of religion: to take the existence of G-d on faith without attempt to prove this existence (see below for an in-depth discussion of faith).

There is some attempt to separate religion and faith in the movie, as well as an attempt to look at different types of religious beliefs and leaders. Central to the story is Palmer Joss, a popular religious advisor to the president. He firmly believes in G-d yet he is willing to engage in discussion concerning faith, look at science as an attempt to understand how things work. Intelligent, he presents a good case for the belief in G-d and very much exhibits a live and let live mentality missing from many powerful religious figures. The movie also has some extremely right-wing religious figures, people who look at the attempt to determine the source of the signal as an attempt to uncover G-d. They oppose scientific inquiry into the signal and any attempts to built the machine as sacrilegious activity.

There are also cult leaders, people who have created their own religious based on the receipt of the signal based on the culture and assumed/created knowledge about its source. Sagan and Zemekis make a conscious effort to try to create a picture of the various levels and types of religious activity common in the United States and how they would react to the advent of a signal from space.

The Faith

One of my favorite elements of this movie is the frank discussion and illustration of faith. You'll notice I separated faith from religion. That's because although faith is an element of every religion, faith is a more general, wider principle with tendrils in so many aspects of life. Faith is quite simply the firm belief in something that cannot be proven. Contact debates the existence of G-d, faith in love, faith that certain people will never let us down, and ingrained faith in scientific "facts".

I found this last part particularly interesting for it is something I have thought about at great length. Today we generally consider the scientific beliefs commonly held 2000 years ago misguided, but then they were held forth as truth. Probably many of the things we today consider undeniable truth will be proven wrong in the future. Yet right now most of us have faith in their validity. Every one makes assumptions, and those things we consider facts are merely an intricate web of carefully tailored conclusions drawn from those assumptions. Give me a different set of assumptions and I will most likely come to different conclusions. We cannot prove anything at a fundamental level. All we have is faith.

Now most of us look at the world at such a high level that we never brush across these assumptions. And some form of belief is needed or we'd never be able to function. People need to believe that one is greater than zero. I had to prove this "fact" in college assuming only that the 16 axioms of real numbers were true. Most people were mentally incapable of digging down to that level. They had so much faith in their fundamental belief that one is greater than zero they couldn't move beyond that. Although scientific beliefs may ultimately require faith in some set of assumptions, it is at such a low level that even most scientists never brush up against it, feeling that they have some handle on a few fundamental truths or facts about the world we live in. They are not generally asked to test that faith or even acknowledge its existence and can happily deal in "facts" and "proven truths". They make every attempt to justify their conclusions based on research rather than just accepting what they are told they should accept (see religion section above).

That said, every so often it's a good thing to shake the foundation of our beliefs, to toss out some of the things we assume to be true and see how that changes our view of the world. In Contact Ellie was asked to do just that in speculating what the machine did. In order to attempt to understand what alien life forms could want with humans she removed some of the layers of assumptions and tried to think differently. She had to let go of some of her faith in the scientific facts she held as true and try to imagine the types of assumptions others would make to form their fundamental beliefs. Ironically, it is her faith in the scientific process that not only made this possible but made it necessary.

All of this is there, in the movie, at least to me, but you aren't hit over the head with it if it isn't something that interests you or something you want to think about. I'm sure many people who haven't thought much about the basis of science or who haven't had training in theoretical physics or mathematics could quite happily miss many of these elements without even making a conscious choice to ignore them. Perhaps they aren't even there. Perhaps I am merely seeing what I want to see, imposing my beliefs on the movie, exposing my own faith in Sagan's ability to explore the tough issues of science onto the screen, but even if that's the case, the movie drew it out of me, made me expand my thoughts in this area.

The Romance

At her first research post at Aricebo Ellie encounters and is drawn to a mysterious American writer. She has a brief affair with Palmer Joss then loses his phone number. Later, after the signal begins, they meet again and are again drawn to each other. Their romance gives us the opportunity to engage in the battle between science and religion and investigations into just what faith is at a more personal and less antagonistic way than is the norm, facilitating a deeper more intricate discussion than we would normally see on the issue. Their relationship also leads to the opportunity to examine the balance between professionalism and personal relationships, the balance between your own beliefs and forwarding the goals of someone you care about, and several other interesting battles many of us brush up against at some level on a daily basis.

The Special Effects

The special effects in this movie were quite good. There weren't a lot of really large effects scenes, but the two big ones were well staged and amazing to look at. There were more minor effects throughout the movie, mostly integrated into the story and not outlandish. They made sense in context of what was going on and didn't distract from the main point (the story) by looking wrong.

The Movie vs. the Book

Unlike most book adaptation, the movie version doesn't suffer in comparison to the book it came from. I'm not willing to say the movie is better than the book either; they are both exceptional works. Although the movie follows the basic premise of the book there are a lot of differences between the two.

The movie focuses a lot on the political aspects of contact. It spends quite a lot of time dealing with the the reactions of the NSA and the president and in hearings and press conferences concerning the signal. The book does deal with some of these issues, but it concentrates much more on the politics as they relate specifically to science, particularly the difficulties of working with Russian scientists during the cold war. Although the movie discusses open communication between scientists the book focuses on the issue to a much larger extent.

The relationships between some of the characters is also a bit different. Palmer is a much more important character in the movie than in the book. There is no romantic involvement between Palmer and Ellie. I thought the romance crystallized many of the science vs. religion issues under examination and furthered the story in the shortened timeframe allowed in a movie, so I am not at all opposed to this change. Ellie's relationship with some of the other characters is a bit different as well, particularly with other scientists who never made it into the movie version. I miss the relationship Ellie had with the Russian scientist Lunacharsky in the book and wish it could have been reproduced in the movie.

The introduction of cults was new to the movie, and the role of Dr. David Drumlin was greatly enhanced. I loved the fact that Kent was blind and that it was just a character trait. That wasn't in the book. Quite a few of the details of the machine were changed a bit to prevent having a four hour movie and so the machine could be practically built. All in all, the changes did nothing to alter the spirit of the story or to detract from the extreme intelligence and introspection it demands.

Why Foster Deserved an Oscar

In case you haven't figured it out yet, Contact is an extremely sweeping complex movie that addresses a lot of very difficult issues. Ellie is the catalyst for everything that happens and all of the relationships in the movie. Without a strong intelligent Ellie the movie would fall flat.

Jodie Foster became Eleanor Arroway. She lived and breathed the capable curious scientist. She exuded the determination and commitment required to succeed as a SETI scientist among the "serious" astronomers. She was focused but not one-dimensional. She never breaks out of character. I honestly cannot think of another actress who could have successfully played Ellie.

If I had to pick the single best acting performance of the 1990s I would pick Jodie Foster in this role. I probably would pick it as the best performance of my lifetime. I feel it was by far her best performance ever, better than her rape victim in The Accused and better than Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, both roles for which she did win Oscars. I liked Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets who won the award that year, but that role was insignificant compared to Foster's. I still feel outraged that Foster wasn't even nominated let alone that she didn't win.

DVD Extras

The DVD is packed with extras. Most notably, it has three separate audio commentary tracks: one by Jodie Foster, one by Robert Zemeckis and Steve Starkey, and one by Ken Ralston and Steven Rosenbaum (the special effects guys). I must admit the day I got the DVD I sat down and watched the movie, then watched with Foster's commentary track, then with Zemeckis and Starkeys, and finally with Ralston and Rosenbaums back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Without any onset of boredom. All three tracks were interesting, especially Foster's track. She presented a combination of anecdotes about what was happening on the set and insight into the film and the issues it presents. I really enjoyed her well thought out comments. The other tracks were much more technical, concerned with the way the film was made or why certain decisions were made more than providing commentary on the issues raised in the film or stories about the filming not directly related to the shot.

Final Thoughts

I connected with Contact in a way I have connected with very few movies. I'm sure some of that was because of my personal identification with both Ellie and Kent, but I also honestly feel it is a great movie. The first time I saw it I was alone at the theater. My dad was visiting, and I broke tradition by telling him I wanted to see it even though he had already. He dropped me off and I saw it alone. I left the theater crying. I didn't stop for at least 20 minutes. I was so emotionally involved with the story that I had to have that release. I was on shaky ground for the rest of the evening. I honestly can't rememeber ever having such an emotional reaction to a movie or such a need for release after the fact. I've cried at a lot of movies but that was in the movie in immediate reaction to a specific event. This was a general emotional overflow from the movie as a whole.

If you haven't yet seen Contact I urge you to see it. Bring your thinking cap

He or She Should Have Won an Oscar Writeoff

This is my late entry into the He or She Should Have Won an Oscar Writeoff hosted by Diversity646. If you have a chance, read the entries by:

AnderClayton
Barnz
Dani257
Deaser26
Donnie013
Diversity646
LorinSilver
Mike_Bracken
MrSocko316
Quasar
Sunkah
Toby_Baldwin


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up Ages 8