Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay Acclaimed sci-fi adventure director Robert Zemeckis adapted Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel into the 1997 drama Contact. Starring Jodie Foster, the film grossed over 170 million dollars during its theatrical run and received largely positive reviews from critics at the time despite some negative feedback about the third act. With Zemeckis’s direction and Foster’s performance, it would be understandable for the film to go down in history as one of the best science-fiction flicks ever made.
But I have to ask…why isn’t Contact great? [NOTE: This blog will contain spoilers for “Contact.” You have been warned.] What’s It About Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway (Jodie Foster), a communications analyst with the SETI program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, fights back against funding for the program being pulled by the White House science advisor David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt). After securing funding from by private billionaire industrialist S.R. Hadden (John Hurt), Ellie relocates to New Mexico. But, four years later, Drumlin tries to end SETI once again until Ellie discovers a signal repeating a sequence of prime numbers which she believes was sent from the Vega star system approximately 26 light-years away. While Drumlin, leading the National Security Council, readies to shut down SETI, Ellie and her team discover a video of Adolf Hitler’s opening address at the Berlin Summer Olympics in 1936 and they believe this broadcast would have been the first signal strong enough to leave Earth, reach Vega, and be transmitted back. Once word gets out, SETI is tightly secured and progress on its findings are tracked across the world. After Ellie discovers that the signal contains tens of thousands of pages of illegible data, Hadden enters the public sphere to meet with her and help her decode the data which reveals schematics for a transportation machine designed for one person. Many nations of the world come together to fund the construction of the machine in Cape Canaveral, and an international panel is formed to choose who should go in the transport. Despite Ellies being a frontrunner, Christian philosopher Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) highlights her atheism as a point against her. Thus, Drumlin is ultimately chosen as a better representative for humanity. However, during the machine’s test a terrorist destroys the machine and Drumlin is killed as a result. While speaking to Hadden, who is dying of cancer, Ellie learns that his company and the U.S. government built a second prototype of the machine in Japan and that she has been selected to go. Shortly after entering the pod, Ellie travels through a series of wormholes and spots a radio array-like structure at Vega (hinting at signs of an advanced civilization there). She finally lands on a beach that is eerily similar to her childhood drawing of Pensacola, Florida. While on the beach, a figure approaches her and it shows up as her father, but they are actually an alien taking her father’s form. The alien explains that the familiar landscape was created to make first contact with Ellie easier on her, and that her journey is the first step for humanity joining other species in space travel. Ellie travels back through a wormhole, and wakes up on the floor of the machine with members of missions control trying to get her attention. Despite Ellie insisting that she was gone for eighteen hours, the recording devices strapped to her body show only noise. During a Congressional testimony, Ellie insists that the government and the world accept her account of her journey on faith alone (despite the government insisting that the signal was simply a hoax by Hadden). However, in a private conversation not involving Ellie, it is revealed that Ellie’s recording devices did capture 18 hours of static. In the end, Ellie reunites with Joss (with whom she previously had a romantic relationship) and she continues her work in New Mexico. What’s Good About It To be clear, Contact is by no means a bad movie. In fact, it has some of my favorite elements of modern sci-fi cinematic storytelling. Notably, a strong lead performance of a character whose story and personality feel grounded in a narrative about the surreal and (almost) unbelievable. Without question, I think that the strongest aspect of Contact is Jodie Foster’s presence. Her take on Ellie as someone incredibly devoted to her work which also works against her in some ways feels relatable without coming off as too romantic or too gritty. Furthermore, Foster handles her character’s backstory involving her relationship with her father well enough that the third-act reveal works in the sense that Ellie gains some kind of closure with him (even though it’s not really him). But perhaps my favorite part of Foster’s take on Ellie is how she is able to humanize the day-to-day grunt work that scientists do to make the kinds of discoveries that should matter to humanity. In all these respects, the movie does a great job at investing the audience in its protagonist irrespective of the overall narrative that she’s the focus of. Besides the central performance, I think Zemeckis was somewhat ahead of his time in terms of crafting a “hard sci-fi” flick that takes questions like “How would human beings respond to potential contact from extraterrestrial life?” seriously. One of the only other movies that, in my humble opinion, does this well is Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival which came out in 2016 (nearly twenty years after Contact). What both movies do well is believably wrestle with the diverse array of responses that people would have to learning about aliens trying to get in contact with Earth. Furthermore, films like Contact and Arrival seem to ignore the pressures of modern sci-fi flicks to be action-packed (or at least rely on more kinetic, intense scenes to engage an audience). Instead, they represent some of the greatest aspirations of the genre as movies that explore ideas (in this case, the existential crisis that humanity faces when learning that we’re not the only sentient life forms in existence). This alone deserves praise. That being said, does Arrival handle its concept better than Contact? I think it does, which gets to the reasons why I don’t think Contact, despite its strengths, is not a great movie. What’s Holding It Back For me, what holds Contact back from greatness is Zemeckis focusing too much of the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime on a subplot about humanity’s “crisis of faith” involving Ellie’s scientific atheism and Palmer’s Christian philosophy. Diametrically opposed to each other ideologically, these two characters are meant to represent the “science/faith” conflict in human society as it relates to the discovery of extraterrestrial life. While I understand why Zemeckis felt it important to include this aspect of the story, I just think it’s not given enough time to breathe and ultimately feels halfhearted and ineffective. Ultimately, this is due to the fact that the final message from the filmmaker and his team about rationality and faith’s relationship to each other feels muddled. There’s no clear answer given as to what humanity should prioritize in the search for knowledge, nor if there even should be a choice. In essence, I think this plot strand should’ve been left as a subtextual backdrop to the core narrative rather than force-fed to the audience. One of the other major problems with Contact comes from how it handles the third-act “twist” of Ellie traveling many light-years into space and meeting the aliens for the first time. Is it emotionally poignant for her to see her father again? Sure, but it’s not a very visually or thematically satisfying approach to showing us what extraterrestrial life could be. Nor do I think that it’s an interesting point to make about how humanity will only see itself in any other life form. At least not for a sci-fi movie like this (I refer people to Arrival if you want to see an exciting yet narratively relevant depiction of alien life). Admittedly, I do find it difficult to sufficiently explain why Contact ultimately doesn’t reach the level of great cinema that it should for me. While it works more often than not, I found myself somewhat underwhelmed by the end. But maybe I’m wrong, and Contact is truly a cinematic masterpiece. I suppose you’ll have to convince me otherwise. 😊 What am I missing about the sci-fi thought piece Contact? Do you think it’s a great movie or do you agree that something’s holding it back from greatness? What opinions of mine do you find absolutely ridiculous? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time, this has been… Yours Truly, Amateur Analyst
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Austin McManusI have no academic or professional background in film production or criticism; I simply love watching and talking about movies. Archives
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