A Life-Affirming Epic Imagining Universal Concerns We All Have

Rating: 9/10 (16 February 2009)

Contact is a $90 million outer space film made by Hollywood with major stars from the director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future trilogy, and yet has a profound effect that no viewer can escape, a universal concern that we all have. Is it not probable that intelligent life exists somewhere else in the universe? And, what would have to happen for people to reject belief in a god?
There is a fascinating point at which the story becomes ambiguous. After two hours of watching Jodie Foster's earnest, ambitious and brilliant heroine fight to discover life beyond earth, she has an experience that cannot be explained with full certainty, neither by the filmmakers or the audience, yet it affirms our life and our existence, that even if we ever make contact with alien life, we may only find that sharing existence with them is all that makes it feel significant. The film is a spectacle, yes, but there is so much surrounding that spectacle, the explosions, whorls of light, and tragic and infuriating midpoint of the story. It is a narrative expression, and incidental elegy, of Carl Sagan's work and ideas, urging human beings to realize that we are not core essence of existence, that we are an infinitesimal fraction. It is a deeply upsetting thought to many people, but it only makes our millions of years of survival and persistence unthinkable and dear.
Robert Zemeckis's often under-appreciated philosophical epic clearly pivots the question of whether intelligent life exists on other planets, but it also explores how belief is proved. And regardless of the build-up to its cataclysmal climax, it doggedly hinges upon that theme. Foster and the character of Matthew McConaughey's function as counterpoints to each other, seeming at first to be a token subplot concerning badly gratuitous love interests, but their relationship develops far, far beyond that. They are an important dynamic that balances her striving for palpable evidence and unrelenting intellectualizing with his dogmatic point of view through faith and personal feelings. The movie is honest and loyal to what is historically proved to be realistic in its view of religion and science clashing constantly throughout the story, with some surprisingly rough consequences.
Foster's methodical crusade is lonely, just like we are all alone. She just happens to be more in touch with this formidable feeling. Her boss, a corporate attention whore played by Tom Skerritt, tells her the field of search for extraterrestrial life is professional suicide. But that's the only reason she's in this profession. She's made fun of, but her consumption sits complicated with personal obsessions. With her father, played with very real vibes by David Morse, she shared the enthusiasm of picking up obscure station signals on their amateur radio apparatus. He died while she was still young, and she became unflappable that by some means, sooner or later, she could contact him. This belief is at issue with the certitude that she does not believe in God or the paranormal. Her search for extraterrestrial life is her interpretation of that childhood right. Contemplating the infinity and inscrutability of the universe, you're inclined to clarify it with a supposition like God, but one doubts that a God isn't a redaction that fosters our self-worth in the face of something around which we cannot get our mind.
Movies like Contact clarify why most sci-fi blockbusters and other humanistically solipsistic space films relinquish me with dry and unfulfilled feelings. When I look up at the sky at night, when I see footage of the arrival of the research vehicles on Mars or the moon, when I read about astronomy and its variants that deal with its overall configuration and evolution, I graze a mental phoenix. Space and time are so immeasurable in all respects, and our existence is so momentary, that all we know is like one infinitesimal clue in an unimaginably colossal black, well, space. Has another life-sustaining world existed and determined more? We've only been listening for roughly forty years. A beacon's probability of getting to us at the fitting time are so far flung. Can one really allow their preexisting faiths obstruct them from the natural curiosity and inconceivable astonishment?
Zemeckis fills his movie with formulaically defined but nonetheless interesting characters, played by particularly good actors. There is John Hurt's enigmatic billionaire who spends his life in the skies within his jet, landing only sparingly. He follows Foster's search and beckons his own boundless assets. And there are two presidential advisers, James Woods and Angela Bassett, who, in the ritual of American alien movies, see the signals as a likely menace to earth. But the film's honest depiction of the world's most influential ideologies in the chasm of its own, their consideration of an alien threat seems more of a real-life likelihood than that of Hollywood.