Film review (C) 1997 by Kevin Patterson
Contact (PG, 1997) Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Skerritt.
Contact is a film that tries to do several different things. It is intended to present a realistic picture of what alien contact might be like, to restore a sense of wonder and mystery to the issue of extraterrestrial life, to raise questions about science and faith and how they would be relevant in such a situation, and to tell a personal story of a romance between the astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) and the religious spokesman Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey).
The film succeeds wonderfully at its first two goals. The portrayal of the communication from an alien world is much more reasonable (albeit less immediately engaging) than, say, the cold-blooded destructiveness of the invaders in Independence Day or even the complex process of abductions and genetic hybridization that forms the ongoing plot line of TV's The X-Files. The aliens in Contact seem to be like us-they are more curious than anything else. They know we exist, they want us to know that they exist, and they would like to make the next step and communicate in person. The film wisely refrains from showing us the aliens directly, and between the characters' ongoing speculation about the extraterrestrials and the outstanding visuals in the climactic yet enigmatic scene when Arroway arrives on the alien world, that sense of wonder and mystery comes through with a force rarely seen since Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Most of the film, however, takes place on Earth, where there is an extended public debate on how to respond to these aliens. Scientists are enthusiastic, ultraconservative religious leaders are wary, and government officials are caught somewhere in between. The debate is fueled largely by Dr. Arroway's atheism; she seems the obvious choice to pilot the spacecraft for which the aliens have provided blueprints, but many are wary of sending an atheist as humankind's representative to another species. The film is partly successful in raising and exploring these questions, especially when it reaches a conclusion that suggests that the two approaches - science and faith - could be viewed as complementary rather than diametrically opposed.
Still, the film falls a little short in its representation of this conflict as it exists in American society. The two "sides" are represented primarily by Arroway and by far-right fundamentalists, but in reality probably 80% of Americans are neither atheists nor far-right fundamentalists. Palmer Joss occupies something of a middle ground, but he ultimately becomes distracted by personal motives and comes across as a less-than-ideal spokesman for any ideology. Then again, the film does concentrate mostly on public debate, which does, after all, tend to be dominated by extremists, rather than on dinner-table or college-dormitory discussions. Contact is accurate in its portrayal of these issues, then, but only within the narrow scope to which it confines itself.
The film's one clear failure is in the portrayal of the romance between Arroway and Joss. For one thing, it resorts to the tired movie clich* that two attractive people will immediately fall in love as soon as they appear on the screen together, as there does not seem to be any other reason for their instant mutual attraction. The romance rarely, if ever, sheds any light on the characters, although it occasionally tries and fails - Joss's explanation that he quit the priesthood because of the celibacy requirement ("I guess you could say I'm a man of the cloth, but without the cloth"), for example, is more like a punchline to a joke than character development. Instead, the romance mostly seems to exist for the sake of later plot developments. Granted, this is a plot- and idea-driven film and the characters are secondary, but this just seemed like laziness on the writers' part more than anything else.
The successes of Contact, however, far outweigh its failures. Even if the social commentary had fizzled altogether (which it didn't), the simple yet mysterious story of alien communication still would have made it a memorable film. Contact doesn't quite cover all the bases, but it covers about as much as one could hope for in a two-hour film, and its rejection of big-budget theatrics for a more realistic story is certainly admirable. And I would not be surprised if, ten years from now, Contact is mentioned in the same breath as 2001 and Blade Runner as one of the finest examples of sophisticated and intellectually relevant science fiction. Grade: A
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