Consistently engaging and thought-provoking

Rating: 9/10 (2 February 2013)

In some indigenous societies, the Milky Way is regarded as the road to the afterworld, the millions of stars in the night sky reflecting the souls of the deceased. Several extinct Native American Indian tribes whose beliefs are preserved in their mythology also imagine the spirits of the dead simply flying up out of their bodies to join other souls in the stars moving across the firmament. In Egypt, by the Middle Kingdom, tomb art began to depict star charts and it was thought that anyone who was given the correct burial rites could become a celestial body upon death.
Though there is much room for interpretation, the association of stars with the deceased is suggested in Robert Zemeckis' ground breaking science-fiction film Contact. Based on the late astronomer Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, Contact is a big-budget film that has all the stunning visual effects (and some Forrest Gump-like gimmicks) one would associate with this kind of project but it also has much more. It is a consistently engaging and thought-provoking film that includes a strong ensemble cast. Two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster brings a ton of passion and conviction to the role of young scientist Ellie Arroway and we are never in doubt that she is the probing, determined seeker after truth that she is portraying.
Other strong performances come from James Woods as the overbearing National Security Adviser Michael Kitz who perhaps has seen too many Hollywood movies about bug-eyed monsters, John Hurt as oddball Billionaire financier S. R. Hadden, and Tom Skerritt as the ego-centered David Drumlin, the President's National Science adviser, who wants a piece of the action and the fame that goes with it. The film begins with a gorgeous sequence allowing us to visualize what it would be like to go on a tour of the universe (minus other tourists, of course). We take one small step for mankind as we visit the Moon, pay our respects to Mars, the Roman God of War, sweep through the asteroid belt, glide past Jupiter, become dazzled by the rings of Saturn, then head for places unknown and undreamt of in our philosophy.
When we come back to Earth, we find ourselves in the 1970s as nine-year-old Ellie Arroway (Jean Malone) eagerly listens for messages on her short-wave radio as her father Ted (David Morse) offers encouragement. After her father's sudden death, Ellie dedicates her life to carry on her father's wish to probe the mysteries that science has not yet explained. Fast forward about fifteen years where a now mature Ellie (Jodie Foster) is a researcher for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, the program where radio signals are sent out to space seeking a coded response from any intelligent life in the universe that happens to have their radios on listening to Beyoncé.
Although philosopher/author Terence McKenna proclaimed that, "To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant," it is during the course of this experiment that a radio signal from a star system 26 light years away provides instructions for building a machine for intergalactic travel, the means to forever end humanity's cosmic isolation. Securing private funding, the machine is built and the era of space exploration begins, though the results are nothing like you imagined.
To its credit, Contact does not limit itself to the scientific aspects of Ellie's voyage to the stars but also focuses on her growth as a person. Although the obligatory romance between Ellie and religious scholar Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) is tacked on unconvincingly, it does not detract from Ellie's ability to transcend the limitations of both science and religion and learn to appreciate, in the words of one African tribe, "the thing that knowledge can't eat." The question of belief in God comes up often in the film and Ellie's "lack of faith" is used to initially prevent her from being selected as the first space traveler but her deeply personal experience in space and her response to the awesome beauty of what she witnesses renders the question of belief irrelevant.
Contact is an intelligent and often moving exploration of subjects Hollywood steers away from ninety percent of the time: Who are we and what is our place in the universe? Are we alone or one species among many? (Sagan said, "If we are alone, it would be an awful waste of space.") What happens when we die? How will people react to contact if and when it occurs? The film, however, does not provide answers or tell us how to think and what to believe. What it asks of us rather is that we awake to the realization that we live in a universe that is full of mystery, one that may be very different from the one in which we have been taught to believe, and that the cosmos may now be beckoning to us to come home.