Thank God for 18 hours of static.

Rating: 9/10 (1 October 2003)

This is one of those movies which work on so many levels... let's take the Hollywood level first.
Jodie Foster does an *excellent* job as 'Ellie Arroway'... but she isn't alone in her excellence. James Woods plays the consummate a**hole, a role he plays quite well - in fact, there are points in this movie when you just feel the urge to yell at the screen, most of it unprintable. Matthew McConaughey does quite a good job, and his character is right on the mark... supportive and disbelieving at the same time. Each of them plays their roles in a way that is entirely believable... yet at the same time you want to question the role (not the actor, but the character). Skerrit also does a good job, limited though it is. They are believable *as the characters*... which is exactly what a movie is supposed to do.
The camera work and the F/X are almost unbelievable... they are absolutely spectacular. While at one and the same time they portray the realities of life on Earth (the various satellite arrays, everyday rooms, council chambers), they also portray the wonders of the universe. One day we actually make it out there... only to find that Hollywood has beaten us to the point. Yet the Hollywood F/X don't leave us lost in a realm of... F/X; we can look at this (the star journeys, the systems, the arrays), and it looks real; or at least, real enough to be totally believable, which is the whole point of Hollywood.
Yet as with any good movie, the special effects play second fiddle to the actors and the characters they play. You can have absolutely amazing F/X, and yet have a bland and boring movie (such as "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"). Here, the special effects - as beautiful as they are - definitely play second fiddle to the actors and their characters.
With all of this, we can't forget the man behind the camera... Robert Zemeckis. He's brought us such slapstick broadsides as "Ghostbusters", but at the heart he is a filmmaker, a true director (not that "Ghostbusters" was false), and this movie shows it - he does an astonishing job, getting astounding performances out of his cast.
The characters - based on the novel by scientist and philosopher Carl Sagan - are nothing less that miraculous... and oh-so-human. It's a very big round of applause to the various actors that you look at each of the characters and you can see where each one is coming from; whom they are supposed to be - that's what Hollywood is supposed to be like, and so rarely is. There are no fancy aliens in this; everybody is remarkable human. And very nicely done.
A silly note: during the very beginning of the movie, when the camera view pulls out from Earth and into space, it's highly amusing that the words of (former President) Richard Nixon mix and blend with the theme to the "Twilight Zone"...
If you want to get into the metaphysical parts of the movie, it's solely about faith... faith in all its forms. It doesn't matter what you believe - this movie will probably represent your point of view. At the end, in front of the committee, we have one person asking Arroway (Foster) whether they should take everything on faith... which is especially ironic when you remember that one person (played by Jake Busey) has their own form of faith which destroys and kills... which faith do you believe? Or should we believe all of them? What is faith, other than an extreme belief in something which cannot be proven?
In a final note - yes, this movie will make you think (if you have the brains to see outside your own narrow little world)... but in the end, it's the astonishing performances (mainly by Foster, but also by McConnaughey and Woods) that will pull you in.
If you like anything other than hack-n-slash, then I'd highly recommend this movie to you... see it with an open mind, and perhaps it will make you *think*!
If you've got even a little bit of openness in your mind, if you have ever asked "Are we alone in the universe?", then this movie will be quite satisfying... because it doesn't answer any of those questions; instead, it shows you how people - real people - deal with them. Very, very good.
It's a mark of this movie that after watching it on DVD, you don't really care about all of the extras... the interviews, the director's comments - you've just seen the movie, which speaks for itself in every line; why spoil it with something else? But even as I say that, the director's (and others) comments on the second track are nice - hearing what they thought about this and that is a very interesting extra. Still, the movie itself - and Foster's excellent performance - is the real reason for buying this DVD.