A sad travesty of a great novel

Rating: 3/10 (9 October 1998)

I don't know whether this signifies a fundamental cultural difference between the British and the Americans, but I hated this movie. It transformed an intelligent, sophisticated novel into a simplistic if not ridiculous film. Ellie's motivation to be an astronomer is trivialized into a Hollywood cliche (she wants to search for her lost father), instead of being rational and about the pursuit of knowledge. Her relationship with the preacher is ridiculously transformed into a love affair (good grief, the guy is a fundamentalist preacher, not a sex starved student). So instead of an intelligent mediation on religious versus scientific knowledge, we get cheap sentimentalism.