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Rating: 5/10 (11 May 2007)

There are many people that say this is a crap film, including South Park who revealed the plot twist, I can agree it is not fantastic, but it is still an interesting film from director Robert Zemeckis (The Back to the Future Trilogy, Forrest Gump). The film starts off with young Ellie (Donnie Darko's Jena Malone) and her Dad Theodore "Ted" Arroway (The Green Mile's David Morse) having their fun astronomy chats, until his death. Years later, Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway (Golden Globe nominated Jodie Foster) is still a free thinking radio astronomer who has got permission to build huge radio satellites, and three years later are built and in use. One day, Ellie receives an unknown radio signal broadcast from deep space. When she and her fellow scientists are able to decipher the Message, they discover detailed instructions for building a mysterious Machine. This machine looks like a transportation device, with circling rings. The first attempt goes wrong because of a guy with a bomb on him, but they find another somewhere in China. When Ellie volunteers herself to go through with it, and the countdown ends, she is transported through a number of wormholes, and sees galaxies and solar systems, till she ends up on a beach meeting her "alien" Dad. When she gets back, they believe that she never went through and that she just dropped, who knows? Also starring Edtv's Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss, Alien's Tom Skerritt as Dr. David Drumlin, Boyz n the Hood's Angela Bassett as Rachel Constantine, Alien's John Hurt as S.R. Hadden, Rob Lowe as Richard Rank, Prison Break's William Fichtner as Kent, James Woods as Michael Kitz, Larry King, Jay Leno, Starship Troopers' Jake Busey as Joseph, and archive footage from The Spice Girls, Neil Armstrong, Bill Clinton and an unexplained Adolf Hitler. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Sound. Worth watching, at least once!