A good realization of Sagan's sole work of fiction

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2005)

There's little doubt that fans of Carl Sagan were apprehensive yet hopeful over the prospect of Dr. Sagan's only work of fiction, Contact, being made into a movie. In the science community, the expectations were so high that the movie never really had a fair chance, and the average movie-goer might not buy everything that Sagan provides us in his story. Though flawed, Contact is a great sci-fi movie, and good science movie, and a loving enactment of Sagan's optimistic vision of the future.
The premise of the movie is based in one of Sagan's own initiatives, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The possibility of life on other planets and elsewhere in space was an obsession of Sagan's. He privately wished that we in fact had been visited by extraterrestrials, but was enough of a true scientist to reject the UFO enthusiast community wholesale. In Contact, Sagan spun a story about what would happen if we indeed received a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, what form it would take, and how we would react to it.
Jodie Foster is an excellent choice for Ellie Arroway, the optimistic radio astronomer who isn't far from a female analog of Sagan himself. Though Arroway runs into occasional ridicule, she is fortunate to spend much more of her time with supportive mentors. When the fateful day comes and a message is received from afar, she's there to make sense of it. The nature of that first message shakes everyone to their foundations -- was it a hoax? If not a hoax, why *this* message? Under the message is another message: instructions for how to build a device that will allow us to do....what? Travel there? Communicate with them? Nothing? Provide an entrÃ©e for a recipe from "To Serve Man"? (If you don't get the reference, check out the episode of The Twilight Zone of the same name.) Two groups rush to build the device, and Arroway's team falls behind. The rival group's contraption self-destructs, so only Arroway's project remains to see if the end product actually does something.
The movie's climax is 100 percent unadulterated eye candy. But ultimately, I was left unsatisfied by the movie's ending. Not only that, but the movie decides to take a pass on the mystical, numerological ending of the book. After all, Ellie is a scientist, not a trailer-park redneck. Her word should have meant a little more.
Contact is a good movie, and an important movie, and by science fiction standards, it's a great movie (a sad commentary on the effort put into sci-fi movies in general). It's not perfect, and it may leave you feeling a bit empty at the end, but it's still a worthwhile movie to see and a must-buy for Sagan devotees.