I implore you to indulge in the motion picture Contact

Rating: 10/10 (22 June 2006)

Contact will put your heart through a rusty garbage disposal of truth, then carefully mend the pieces back together with a sewing kit of equal parts wisdom and vision...but only if you allow it to. Let Contact in...don't fight its rich, gooey texture and the commensurate soul searching that awaits you...let it happen and--while you're at it-- learn a little bit about yourself in the process.
The hardest hitting--and perhaps subtlest--theme of Contact lies in the complex parallels that exist within the relationships between 'Jodie Foster' and 'Jodie Foster's Inability To Allow For Things To Exist That She Cannot Entirely Control' and 'Men Jodie Foster Wants To Love But Cannot Because Her Father Died When She Was A Child And It Was Arguably Her Fault' (respectively). It's not that Jodie Foster cannot believe in God, it's that she felt that she was ripped off by God when her father died and the ideologies that one must permit to exist within one's soul if one is to believe in God (i.e. that one is not the center of the universe; that all things are not under one's control; that Matthew McConaughey is a risk worth taking; etc.) became impossible to rationalize due to the pain that was allowed to enter into her delicate heart. When Jodie's father died, her willingness to put herself at the mercy of forces external to her died as well; thus, she did the one thing any one person can do when they want to spite God...she became a research scientist. In this position, she could isolate herself from anything that could break her heart, she could meddle in the affairs of the universe and take notes without becoming emotionally involved, she could play with enormous satellite dishes, and, of course, occasionally make quirky comments that made her somewhat-nerdy-yet-somewhat-attractive male research scientists laugh in a bubbly fashion and look at her in a non-threateningly sexual way that would momentarily quell her desire to feel like a Sexually Enticing Woman, yet never let things get to the point where she would have to deal with the emotional side of things (her voracious-yet-emotionally-void lay with McConaughey touches on similar themes).
In Contact, the mysteries of the heart and the universe hit close enough to home that it leads a majority of viewers to take the easy way out and analyze the more easily accessible and fancy-free SCI-FI Adventure subplots of the film (or "Are we alone" (and so forth)). To truly palpate the chewy nougat of human feeling that lies at the core of this epic film, one must understand the significance of the irony that exists in the very fact that Jodie Foster has been searching in galaxies millions of light years away to find the meaning of her life when all the while it was right inside her, in her heart. At the end of the movie, Jodie Foster still has no hard evidence of the existence of aliens, yet the personal tribulations she endures during the course of the movie allow her to finally understand the power of belief and its very real implications with regard to the state of the human soul in a world where a lack of values and less faith have left most people feeling more alone than anyone ever needs to if they have God in their lives.
In closing, the movie Contact left Jodie Foster with a piece of herself that she had unjustly lost a long time ago; it left us as viewers with the peace of mind that one can only find in the awakening in the human soul that occurs when master film-making seeks to teach us a little bit about ourselves that we (again with the irony) already knew.