....the act of things meeting together.

Rating: Null/10 (4 August 2002)

As many have stated, this is a somewhat slow science fiction movie about receiving a message from aliens and building a device to go visit with them. The struggle of the noble scientist against the Government rounds it out, but that's about as far as most people see.
Carl Sagan was a scientific genius, regardless of whether or not you agree with his religious views (just like Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, or Hawking), and the story is far deeper than this simple fable. The title 'Contact' refers not only to the message from the ET's, but also several other levels; contact between parent and child, between religion and science, between extremists and moderates, between men and women, and between truth and faith.
Arroway's {Foster, Jodie} sole goal in life is seeking contact of one sort while denying herself contact of another. She looks for alien signals and for the most part shuns human contact. She slowly comes to the realization that she prefers both.
The film has also been criticized for being "anti-religious", but I disagree strongly. This is the most balanced film ever made, theologically speaking. It's not the contact between Arroway and Joss {McConaughey, Matthew}, each of them have their extreme examples. Joss is a spiritual man of moderate religious beliefs, Arroway is a scientist of strong scientific beliefs. In contrast, Drumlin {Skerritt, Tom} is the scientist of weak beliefs (willing to compromise anything in order to win something for himself, really more of a politician than a scientist); while Joseph {Busey, Jake} is the contrast of Joss, a religious zealot of extremist beliefs.
There is another significant character pairing, and it represents the two strongest performances of the film; that of Hadden {Hurt, John} versus Kitz {Woods, James}, the wealthy powerful civilian against the powerful corrupt politician (the level of his corruption becomes apparent by the end of the film). Hadden is 'godlike' in his ability to do whatever he wants (you can't get more 'godlike' than hovering freely in space while gleefully pulling the strings on Earth); while Kitz is his evil counterpart, using the law and the media in the most malicious manner at his disposal to deliberately discredit and misinform the public of the truth.
But ultimately it is the contact between science and religion that makes for the most controversy, and this is sad. Far from being 'anti-religious', this film has far more to do with the areas where science and religion come together. It never says religion is wrong or foolish, far from it; it places spirituality as a matter of tremendous importance (witness the candidate selection process) and, at the end, turns the tables completely around by placing science in exactly the same situation and with exactly the same argument (i.e., "Prove it!") In the end, the scientist is forced to ask others to have faith in that which she alone knows (or does she? What's the obvious distinction between a hallucination and reality?) She ends up in the role of the prophet, proving how difficult it is to prove to others that what you see is really what you saw. It answers neither, which is only a spoiler if you were expecting this film to truly explain the meaning of life. ;)
[POTENTIAL SPOILERS] It is interesting, given her views, and I'm sure far from accidental, that the first thing Arroway says when she drops into the wormhole is "Oh my God!", which she repeats a couple of times. It is also interesting, and appropriate for a Sagan piece, that in the end Arroway has only herself to believe in, that 'god' (Hadden) is dead, the ET's she sought are not 'god' (they can't be the Creator if they didn't even create the machine) and seem to have just as many questions as we do. The religious extremist (Joseph) martyrs himself, which conveniently takes the hypocrite (Drumlin) out of the picture with him. In the end, the most open-minded character in the film (and I shudder to suggest this) is Joss; but at the same time he is completely unchanged by this whole experience, his purpose seems to be merely to give Arroway a theological Maypole to dance around, but it works. Arroway isn't really 'converted', in a religious sense, but she is surely changed by the experience. In effect, unjustly 'martyred' for science in spite of of strong, potentially exonerating evidence, deliberately withheld from her (the time that the camcorder was running), but there is nothing at all to suggest that she turns to religion as a result of this.

Sagan was a life-long scientist, and for him that was indeed equivalent to saying that he was not a religious man ("He didn't want to believe, he wanted to know", according to his wife after he died), and I'm certain he would have been delighted with how the film turned out, and I don't think the film-makers could have asked for much more contact than that.

7.5 out of 10