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Poster (c) Warner Bros.
Robert Zemeckis is one of the most versatile directors of our time. He’s directed fantasy (Back to the Future), horror (What Lies Beneath), comedy (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), drama (Forrest Gump), and now science-fiction in Contact. It’s quite obvious that Zemeckis is a Spielberg protégé, because, like Speilberg, Zemeckis has distinguishable features. While Spielberg has precocious children and endings that go on twenty minutes too long, Zemeckis has that Gump-ish music, precocious children, and endings that go on too long. What Zemeckis creates is very uneven: at one part it’s exciting and unpredictable, and then the next it’s as boring as watching snails race.
Based on the best-selling book by Carl Sagan (to whom this movie is dedicated), Contact basically revolves around Ellie (Jodie Foster), who has dedicated her life to finding life out there (“If there’s no one else out there, it seems like an awful waste of space”). She hears radio signals from the star Vega, and after long deductions, it turns out that they are blueprints to build a gigantic machine. Undeveloped characters and media buzz ensues.
Possibly the best, and only remarkable part of Contact are the spectacular special effects. Zemeckis always directs great camera movements, and the opening few minutes really show that. Not only does it move with great grace, but also it’s amazing to look at. It’s breathtaking. The only other technically supreme scene was at the end, but I don’t wish to give anything else away. While those two scenes excel in their technology, the rest of the movie isn’t as marvelous. Although Zemeckis could have gone the easy way out and made it just eye candy (which would have made the movie a lot more interesting), he decided to throw in one-dimensional characters here and there (I didn’t even know that a character was blind until I read about it online) and throw in a weak romance between Ellie and Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey). I don’t really see how Ellie could go from rejecting Palmer to making out with him a few scenes later (it seems like a few scenes were taken out here and there to make the runtime shorter). It’s not to say that most of the middle is boring, it’s just not exciting. Also, was I supposed to have an epiphany or something? I see how this could convince an atheist, but I already believe in God, and the whole “spirituality” thing, although it adds to the characters, seems unnecessary.
Jodie Foster, due to the birth of her baby, hasn’t been in that many movies, so she must choose the ones that she can act the best in, and it seems like she does. Although most of her scenes involve yelling at someone, she conveyed the right amount of both skepticism and firmness. McConaughey is wasted, as is James Woods and Tom Skerritt. However, David Morse, as Ellie’s father in flashback scenes, does an amazingly good job, conveying everything that I know David Morse to not be.
If Hollywood produced more movies like Contact, then our movie supply would be better. However, if they were all exactly like it, then it would be no more than the onslaught of mediocre movies we’ve been having recently.
Rated PG for some intense action, mild language and a scene of sensuality.
Review Date: September 2, 2003