"You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not"

Rating: 7/10 (14 February 2010)

In the late 1990s, Hollywood turned its eye once again to the stars. 'Independence Day (1996)' was a bombastic throwback to popcorn disaster movies, in which an alien civilisation attempts to annihilate the human race in a puff of fiery explosions. 'Deep Impact (1998)' and 'Armageddon (1998)' both entailed meteors on a collision-course with Earth. What was it that made us look up again? It certainly wasn't the threat of nuclear war, or the Space Race, both of which had fuelled the 1950s boom in science-fiction. Perhaps the approaching dawn of a new millennium had evoked in us the sheer insignificance of our own daily situations, casting our minds to previous generations, to an entire race and to other races beyond our terrestrial cradle. It was inevitable that filmmakers would return to Stanley Kubrick's science-fiction masterpiece, '2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),' its titular year – then on the cusp of fruition – signaling a new age for Mankind. You'll forgive me if my review makes frequent allusions to '2001,' for Robert Zemeckis' Contact (1997)' feels, in many ways, like a feeble imitation of Kubrick's film.
In both stories, the human race discovers evidence of a distant extraterrestrial civilisation, and attempts to make contact. Each film creates a sense of awe at the incalculable immensity of the Universe, and Man's own infinitesimal place within it {'Contact' does this via a wonderful computer-generated "zoom-out" through the solar system and the Milky Way}. However, though I admire Zemeckis and Carl Sagan for taking their ideas further than most science-fiction films, I often found the film's approach clumsy and unconvincing. 'Contact' is strongest in its opening half, when SETI astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) discovers what is believed to be radio communication from an interstellar race. The moment of first radio contact is invigoratingly suspenseful, offering some small sense of the excitement that Jerry Ehman must have felt when the "Wow! signal" came through in 1977. Zemeckis, ever the technical wizard, orchestrates a marvellous long-take that follows Foster from her car, through the observatory entrance, and into the laboratory.
As 'Contact' strays farther from contemporary reality, it begins to get bogged-down by tiresome theistic philosophy. '2001' addressed the topic of religion only peripherally, almost dismissively; it was Arthur C. Clarke's stance that any sufficiently-advanced civilisation would be indistinguishable from God (making the notion of God almost redundant). 'Contact' tries to pander to two camps, carefully engineering a scenario by which there is no empirical evidence for Jodie Foster's experience, and then introducing empirical evidence, anyway. The climax, which unfolds following a Douglas Trumbull-inspired wormhole, is interesting, but far too safe: using a human avatar to represent the extraterrestrial race is a clumsy way of avoiding having to show them, and simply reminds the viewer that they're watching a movie. Kubrick did it better thirty years earlier, housing Dave Bowman in a Louis XVI-style enclosure that is familiar yet eerily sterile. In fact, watching 'Contact' has, if nothing else, made me appreciate just how much I love '2001,' forever the pinnacle of science-fiction achievement.