For Carl.

Rating: 9/10 (18 February 2018)

As a child Ellie Arroway believed that she would one day contact her father through the stars, and as an adult she's still striving for the same goal, only using logic, reason and evidence as her tools. Does that nine year old girl know that speaking into a HAM radio won't magically connect you to the dead? I think she does, but tries anyway, and that makes it all the more painful. Years later she is a world-renowned scientist, but rejects a prestigious position at Harvard to coordinate the SETI movement. Naive to some, blindly optimistic to others.
Is Contact science-fiction, or just pure science? It was conceived by Carl Sagan, who wanted to produce his screenplay but published the story as a novel when no funding would bite. He would serve as a scientific adviser to Zemeckis, ensuring that much of the scientific terminology and concepts were grounded in reality. Ellie also wrests with the same question; even as an adult, even seeing the world through her intellect and logic, there is still a glimmer of hope for the supernatural, for the chance to speak to the dead. In the pivotal moment in the wormhole, Zemeckis inserts a subtle CGI effect that overlays Jena Malone's features onto Foster's to signal that she has reverted to a childlike state of wonder and amazement. Those daydreams have come true - there is intelligent life out there after all.
One might argue that Foster doesn't even need the assistance of digital effects. She has a remarkable malleable face, and although she must have stopped throwing crying tantrums at a very young age, you can still see worry etched in as an adult. Faced with perhaps the most exciting scientific discovery in human history, her face whips up a storm of anxiety when she realises that all the higher ups in command are more concerned with petty details: war, politics, not upsetting the religious majority. And watch her body language even in the midst of a romance, always turned away and gazing up at the stars above rather than her partner. See the shimmer in her eyes when she talks about the possibility of life out there. Her pillow talk could be a textbook itself.
For decades Robert Zemeckis blended mainstream, eye-popping appeal on the big screen with his more personal ambitions, and broke new digital ground with every directorial effort. There are sublime touches throughout the film that speak to Zemeckis' mastery of effects driven visuals, not as a mere crutch for staging spectacle, but as a way of personal expression. It is how people like Ellie see the world. The opening shot pulls back through the galaxy, jumbling years worth of radio transmission, static and then silence, a testament to the sheer size of complexity of the universe. That it then is captured as part of a young Ellie's eye speaks to her life-long pursuit of meaning and truth beyond our tiny little spot in the Milky Way galaxy. Zemeckis moves his camera with a matured sense of Spielbergian wonder, pulling back to reveal grandeur and shiny monuments to outer space but also to heed a warning to our growing obsession with technology and filtered interactions. The special effects have barely aged a day, because they are capturing the supernatural, so any concerns of realism are irrelevant anyway. Why should an alien wormhole transportation device look 'realistic' to the human eye, when it is like nothing we have ever encountered before? The aliens themselves are not gross tentacled creatures, but beings of intense light. Most sci-fi assumes the arrogant stance that humans are always aesthetically superior to extra terrestrials, but Contact knows to concede that there may be races out there far beyond our comprehension.
Films like Contact humble us, reveal how little of the universe we truly occupy, and how much we still have to learn. The screenplay admits, without damning or condescension, that religion is often not so much a dogma as it is a way of understanding the incomprehensible. What seems like conflict is merely two parties looking at it from the perspective of what reassures them. They both share humanity's most powerful instinct of curiosity. Who are we? Why are we here? Contact urges them to work together, instead of dealing in prejudice. It hopes that we deal more kindly with one another, that we preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.