Contact

National Review, Sept 1, 1997 by John Simon

Contact is science fiction based on a novel by Carl Sagan, no less. It concerns Ellie Arroway, a short-wave ham from childhood, grown into a scientist obsessed with making radio contact with extraterrestrials. The scientific palaver sounds wonderfully abstruse to lay ears, and the rivalries among researchers, problems with funding, and frustrations from governmental interference are well conveyed, especially by Jodie Foster, who brings to Ellie the kind of zeal with which Torquemada burned heretics.

The movie affords her a spectacularly spotty romance with Matthew McConaughey, Hollywood's latest heartthrob, who plays Palmer Joss (some moniker!), a singularly precocious religious advisor to the President -- Clinton, not Marshall. Clinton was sneakily morphed in by the director, Robert Zemeckis, in a way reminiscent of his Forrest Gump. Along with the sci-fi plot, we get something grander: a running debate between science and faith, as, among other things, Ellie refuses to subscribe to religion, thereby seemingly forfeiting her flight to Vega, where life has been discovered. It's all as close to dialectical metaphysics as Hollywood gets: just a bit less than the distance from Earth to Vega.

Contact's technology and space-tripping is awesomely designed and shot, but the screenplay by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg is somewhat plodding, perhaps to confirm the film's contention that human intelligence is less advanced than that of the Vegans. What happens in the latter parts of the movie requires that, in each viewer's bosom, faith win out, as, I'm happy to report, it does in the script. What remains unresolved is why one of Miss Foster's eyes is bloodshot throughout the final reels, but maybe traffic with Vegans does that to you.