Bloated and incomprehensible

Rating: 3/10 (12 June 2020)

I always dislike it when I have to go to Wikipedia to read the plot of a film so I can make sense of what I'm seeing.
I did that early on with "Contact," a supercilious tale about brilliant scientist Ellie (Jodie Foster) and her quest to "listen for" life beyond Earth. Once she finds it -- in the form of a 1930's broadcast of Hitler that has been beamed back to Earth from a star called Vega -- the film gets way too complicated and bogged-down to care about. I bailed out of this turkey once Ellie lands on some space body -- can you land on a star? -- and meets a wraith, or something, of her long-departed father. And this was supposed to have come from the erudite mind of Carl Sagan?
The movie is strongest at its beginning, where we meet the younger, beyond-precocious version of Ellie (Jena Malone) and her widowed dad (Tom Morse), who encourages her love of ham radio and the stars. Aside from older Ellie's time at a lab in the Puerto Rican rain forest, I found older Ellie to be annoyingly one-note and shrill. in a movie that is three hours long, way too much is asked of the audience, with far too little payback.
I'll admit the movie has a few good lines in its first third. "If it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space," Dad tells younger Ellie. And how!
"I think it's great that you listen," a colleague in PR tells older Ellie. "Most people don't do that anymore."
I'll admit the film has a couple interesting things to say about paternalism, pessimism, and mathematics -- "the only universal language." There is also an amazing bit of film editing that seems to show Bill Clinton, president when this movie was released, commenting on Ellie's discovery.