Jodie Foster IS a sci-fi Joan of Arc

Rating: Null/10 (6 November 2003)

Contact only looks like a science fiction film because most of the time the screen is packed with NASA-inspired computers, spacey hardware and displays. But there are no visitors in UFOs, no aliens in latex masks or monsters, and no battle with laser guns to save mankind. Instead this film uses just enough science to make work its story that taps into the nature of our belief about our place in the universe, in short for many people, their religion. Some TV episodes of Star Trek have tapped into the same source (and been criticised for doing so).
The story is a revealing one about loneliness, initially the personal loneliness of a driven radio astronomer Ellie (Jodie Foster) but Jodie's impressive acting of this part involves us with the larger issues of loneliness of being opposing parts in any confrontation, whether it be between the pure scientist and the funding politician, the agnostic and the deist, the living and the dead, or the human and the unknown extraterrestrial.
This is the second sci-fi film where I want to comment on an amazing over-the-top introduction sequence set in space (the other film was Lost in Space, which otherwise has no comparison with Contact). I am sure it is not a "spoiler" to prepare you for that sequence which shows how we earthlings have been radiating our noises for nearly a century. I at least enjoyed being prepared both to watch and listen intently to that introduction the second time I viewed Contact, and would gladly do so again.
At this point I warn that I DO have spoilers ahead.
Briefly put, the story is that funding is about to be pulled from Ellie's work in SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) at the Arecibo radio-telescope in Puerto Rico. She goes to private industry to raise funds to continue, and is given money by a millionaire recluse Hatton to continue the SETI at a radio telescope array in Arizona. Just as it looks as though this work must also end, something IS received from space. They don't know what the signal means, but it is confirmed by other radio observatories and Ellie goes public with the discovery. This brings the government, the NSA, the army and religious vested interests to interfere in the work. Ellie manages to keep half a step ahead of these tamperers, partly through her commitment to discovering the secret in the alien message and partly by the help of her patron Hatton - whose immense wealth cannot cure his terminal cancer, and who lives in a satellite to prolong his life.
In the story as told so far, we see Ellie as a little girl, already enthusiastic about ham radio and encouraged by her father in this radio interest which later will become her profession. I liked this characterisation very much; as a side thought it seems very uncommon for a girl to take up ham radio at a time which could have been roughly 1970 but I can believe that; today with Internet and cell phones everywhere it would be less plausible. Unfortunately the script is marred by a maudlin part after the funeral of Ellie's father. Firstly Ellie, 10 years old, is established as dry-eyed about her father's death and unresponsive to the well-meaning priest who tries to comfort her. Her tears, but certainly not mine, come when she leaves the funeral wake to turn on her radio transmitter and asks into the microphone "Pappa can you hear me? Please come back!".
Jodie Foster acts well the adult Ellie, and our focus is on her throughout the film. There is some disparity between Jodie's beauty and the tomboy role she plays, and her portrayal of anger when she fails to convince a funding committee is not convincing. Never does Jodie exploit her uniquely feminine talents (except for briefly looking good in a gown bought for a function at the White House). For this reason it is hard to believe or care much about Ellie's romance with an unlikely "new age" Father Palmer Joss (Mathew McConaughey) which boils down to a quick mechanical pick-up (did a couple undressed in bed together ever look so bored with the situation?) followed by them having opposing interests every time they meet. It is a pity that their relationship is so poorly sketched because their eventual rapprochement is supposed to round off the plot.
Getting back to the story, the alien signal turns out to contain plans to build a machine, but no one is sure what the machine will do once it is built. That is a hoary old sci-fi plot which I remember from A For Andromeda by John Wyndham and many other stories. I don't intend to spoil your finding out what the machine does, and I just hint that it is a matter of what or whom you choose to believe.
At some point watching Contact for the second time this evening I realized what the prototype of the story is: Joan of Arc. Ellie is of course the "Joan" part, the boyish girl inspired by receiving unearthly messages and competing in a (mostly) man's world. Any doubt about this comparison disappeared at the scene where Ellie marches "into the fray" while suited up in armour, practically like a Joan of Arc, with two helmeted soldiers in attendance! Later a hostile investigating committee treat Ellie and her testimony only slightly better than the inquisition treated Joan.
I think it is fair to comment that this film WORKS as a sustained, absorbing, entertaining, stimulating and thoughtful sci-fi film, worthy of the tradition set long ago by Things To Come. The length of my own review and the large number of others here seem to go to prove that the film makers set themselves a realistic goal, and achieved it with some distinction if not acclaim.