From its very first scene–an elaborate backward tracking shot taking us away from Earth into space, as a series of radio messages take us simultaneously backward in time–“Contact” is a film that honestly exercises our sense of wonder. It puts us in touch with vast conceptions, expanding universes. This stunningly produced movie, based on the late Carl Sagan’s novel about Earth’s first encounter with extraterrestrial life, uses its $90 million budget well: not to blow up buildings and crash dozens of cars with high-profile stars inside, but to create a unique adventure of the imagination, something we couldn’t experience with this intensity in any other art form.
At its best, the movie–produced and directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jodie Foster as a would-be space voyager–gives us extraordinary scientific speculation with thrilling immediacy and detail. It’s a piece of science fiction that, thanks largely to Sagan, is robed in the trappings of science fact: a surprisingly scrupulous portrayal of what might happen during first contact beyond our galaxy.
Yet, somehow, in the end, “Contact” doesn’t expand the universe far enough. Despite great scenes, it stays Earth-bound, Hollywood-bound–in ways that great science-fiction movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Solaris” don’t. It needs something more.
That cavil doesn’t necessarily extend to the central character, a woman impatient of limits. The movie’s heroine, astronomer-physicist Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway (Jodie Foster), is a visionary who spends her life trying to detect radio signals from outer space. When she and her team finally find them coming from Vega–and realize that it’s a deliberate transmission designed to establish contact between senders and receivers–she bucks the system and campaigns fiercely for a seat on the first space vehicle to meet the source.
The roadblocks in her way–longtime scientific nemesis and presidential adviser David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt), professionally paranoid National Security Adviser Michael Kitz (James Woods) and even her ambivalent religious leader boyfriend Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey)–only stiffen her resolve. And she gains a potent ally: eccentric billionaire-entrepreneur S.R. Hadden (John Hurt), who is sold on her passion. Finally, the movie takes us right up to its grand climax: the moment of contact between two alien life forms.
Make your childhood dream a lifelong quest and anything is possible: That’s Sagan’s story. And, through all its stages, Zemeckis and his team have realized his vision with fantastic fullness and detail, taking us into the heart of all the intricate technologies and speculations involved.
And through all those stages, Foster keeps pulling out her reserves of emotion, brains and commitment to bring Ellie alive–both as a heroine and a human, large of spirit, steady of purpose yet vulnerable at times as a child. The movie isn’t much like the 1979 “first contact” saga “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” by Zemeckis’ mentor Steven Spielberg. Yet it shares with that movie a delight in the childlike awe that stargazing can instill.
Thanks to its small army of technicians, including special effects experts from Sony Imageworks, Industrial Light and Magic, Warner Digital and other fantasy factories, “Contact” has size and sweep. It’s a minutely rendered portrayal of scientists at work, space technology in gear. And though, unlike the somewhat superior “Apollo 13,” it isn’t based on fact, “Contact” almost manages to convince us of such questionable conceptions as the space-and-time wormhole through which an Earth astronaut can journey to Vega, or a one-man fanatic sabotage of the space program, or the construction of a private starship (an idea that went out with early Robert Heinlein). Or that final, hauntingly unexpected space encounter.
It even manages to convince us that President Bill Clinton, playing himself, is in the movie, interacting with the characters. (Actually, he’s pictured here through the same kind of archival legerdemain Zemeckis used to get John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the frame with Forrest Gump.)
What the movie “Contact” can’t convince us about is something simpler: selling the emotional bond between Foster’s Ellie and McConaughey’s Joss, the charismatic religious revivalist who winds up as “Contact’s” leading man. In Sagan’s book, Joss was different: a renowned star preacher and confidante of presidents, obviously modeled on Billy Graham. His function was to occasionally debate religious issues with Ellie. Here, courtesy of McConaughey’s piercing eyes and looks, he’s pushed to center stage, seemingly modeled on both Graham and a rock heartthrob like Bruce Springsteen.
He becomes, with outrageous improbability, the love of Ellie’s life, trying to prevent her from a space voyage that will separate them, rallying to her side against the bullying of Kitz (Woods, at his nastiest). In the Ellie-Palmer love scenes, through no fault of the actors, the movie strays into a formula silliness it manages to avoid nearly everywhere else.
Why does the movie sink into star-romance triviality? “Contact” actually started life, back in 1981, as a movie treatment, so obviously its author, fresh from triumphs on TV’s “Cosmos,” wasn’t averse to a little commercial compromise.
Sagan, who spent his life as an astronomer searching the heavens and as a popular-science writer teaching the masses, strove in his novel for a mixture of fancy and realism. And, perhaps because of that, it lacks some of the charge and grandeur of great science-fiction novels about space exploration or contact–like Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My Destination,” Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” or Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” (like Sagan, Asimov and Clarke also were professional scientists). “Contact” the movie tries to spice up Sagan’s story. But it also throws away some of his progressive ideas, such as his installation of a woman U.S. president and his international five-person starship crew.
Sagan was a greater scientist-teacher than he was a novelist. But Zemeckis, working from a James V. Hart-Michael Goldenberg script, brings an energy the story needs. Zemeckis, at his top level, is a kind of moviemaking Brueghel. He likes to crowd his canvases with urgent boiling life, painting in the very last inch–and he fills in this one with a master’s hand. Zemeckis is also a robust entertainer with a cheerfully unpretentious sensibility and a deep crush on many aspects of American pop culture. That may be what’s missing here: Zemeckis’ goofy humor. “Contact” is his first predominantly serious feature, and at times you can almost feel him reining himself in.
In “Contact,” he doesn’t seem to be having as much fun as he usually does in his best movies: “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the “Back to the Future” trilogy and “Gump.” Maybe he’s gun-shy after the controversies over his sweet-spirited, middle-of-the-road and deliberately fantastical “Forrest Gump”–which was embraced or denounced by various right or left factions for reasons that often suggested agendas over insight.
In the end, “Contact” may be trapped in the middle: not quite scrupulous enough for Sagan, not quite playful enough for Zemeckis.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Because of its dead-perfect timing (right after the Mars landing and probe) and its sheer technical panache, “Contact” should command large audiences and much affection. It’s a movie with range, spirit, spectacle and an inspiring central performance by Foster–who gives Ellie the brains and determination she needs to battle the odds in a game like this.
What it misses most, of course, is that final exalted sense of transcendence that great science-fiction movies like “2001,” “Blade Runner” or “Solaris” can give you. But you don’t get transcendence with every first contact. Only when the stars are right–or the love scenes are better written.
”CONTACT”
(star) (star) (star) 1/2
Directed by Robert Zemeckis; written by James V. Hart, Michael Goldenberg, based on the novel by Carl Sagan; photographed by Don Burgess; edited by Arthur Schmidt; production designed by Ed Verreaux; music by Alan Silvestri; co-producer and story contributor Ann Druyan; produced by Zemeckis, Steve Starkey. A Warner Bros. release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:30. MPAA rating: PG. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway ……. Jodie Foster
Palmer Joss ……………………. Matthew McConaughey
Michael Kitz …………………… James Woods
S.R. Hadden ……………………. John Hurt
David Drumlin ………………….. Tom Skerritt
Rachel Constantine ……………… Angela Bassett
The President ………………….. Bill Clinton
