Contact

With Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaghey
Written by James V. Hart and Michael Goldberg
From the book by Carl Sagan
Directed by Robert Zemeckis (Warner Bros.)
by Lex Marburger

Carl Sagan’s slowly rotting bones are smarter than I am. But that doesn’t mean you can get Jodie Foster to pull off a psychological sci-fi flick. Granted, Hollywood is as much to blame, but that’s just pointing fingers. When all is said and done, Contact isn’t about aliens; it’s about faith, a neo-new age treatise on religion. From the very first time we find out that Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) is a priest, it’s like a big neon sign pops up “ATTENTION – IT’S NOT ABOUT ALIENS ANYMORE. THAT’S JUST A VEHICLE FOR THE SCIENCE VS. RELIGION DEBATE THAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN.” Which is fine, if anyone had any sense. Instead, they pander to the lowest common denominator and make it an Aristotelian either/or question. In Contact, you either believe in God or you don’t. The myriad manners of belief are ignored, with Christianity being the driving force behind the plot. I mean, if Palmer was a Buddhist, there wouldn’t be a conflict. To portray Ellie Arroway (Foster) as a robotic scientist who searches the skies for aliens with no thought at all towards spirituality is silly, at best. Faith isn’t a yes or no question. Well, it is to the fans of Christ, and the other members of the Big Three (Islam and Judaism), but they have a skewed sense of reality as it is (rather than offend the majority of the population at this point, I shall cease my digression).

The makers of Contact came so close to a decent, thought-provoking movie and flubbed it, and I think that’s what pissed me off so much. First, good old scientific method: The experiment (the big old machine-thing) happened once, and only once. The damn thing is built, it worked, nothing is damaged, Arroway is unhurt. Why doesn’t someone else use it? Verify the experiment, or at least have a dual hallucination. And while we’re at it, why not have everyone go through it? It’s like the spinning contraption doesn’t even exist anymore. Hell, it took an international agreement to make the damn thing, why is it the Americans who make all the decisions?

And it was all too cut and dried. I thought they were going to give us all a monumental mind fuck by introducing the possibility that this entire thing was a prank, or that Arroway really was insane, or a thousand other possibilities. But no, we had to be reassured that it all happened, the 18 hours of (blank) video tape reassuring us that we don’t have to think too hard.

But it wasn’t all bad. Here are the good parts: The longest opening tracking shot in history (yeah, let’s see Hitchcock or Altman go for 40 or so light years), John Hurt as the Tim Leary gone bad wacked-out billionaire, the special effects in the wormhole, Gary Busey’s son as the too convincing creepy insane evangelist, and the entirely too true, and too telling, fact that the first image another planet will receive from us is Hitler. Other than that, Contact basically sucks. So close, and yet so far away.