A very nice distillation of Carl Sagan's novel

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2014)

I don't usually think much of screen adaptations of novels; they often come out being very different stories, and seldom better than the novels.
Contact is a pleasant surprise. It's a very extensive rework of the story told by astrophysicist and science writer Carl Sagan, and for a wonder, every change is for the better. Partly, I suspect that this is because the screenwriters who did the adaptation are simply better writers than Dr. Sagan was.
While Contact is a great story about how contact with a civilization from another star system might actually occur, Sagan didn't tell it as well as other writers might have. He spent a lot of time grinding his ideological axes from cover to cover.
Sagan's points were almost all well-taken, but for someone who likes to throw the term "chiliast" (another word for "extremist" which sounds like it refers to molesting little kids with Southwestern cooking) around in his prose, Sagan gets a little chiliastic in Contact himself. The screenwriters dialed that back a LOT from the novel while still making Sagan's points for him. They probably made his points BETTER than he did by not being as intense about it.
Jodie Foster is probably the very best cast for Ellen Arroway available, having had the requisite brains to get into Yale in real life, she makes a very convincing scientist, very much like the brilliant women I've known in science and medicine over my career. She's also got acting tools too well-praised to need further praise from me.
Matthew McConaughey did yeoman work with that the screenwriters gave him to work with, the extensively re-written character "Palmer Joss."
It's not his fault that while this character's much more believable than the original from the novel (Sagan's Palmer Joss was almost a caricature as originally written, and seldom more than two-dimensional), there are still difficult things to believe about how the movie's Palmer Joss behaves. But McConaughey did his usual great work with what he had.
I'm not going into plot development further than that because Contact's so well-written, directed and performed that you deserve to experience every single part of it for the first time.
Contact's not just a great movie. It tells the story Carl Sagan intended to write the way he should have.