Contact

Rating: 8/10 (5 July 2020)

What could've been a four-star film, instead devolves into a unexpected character reversal and placating of religious and secular viewer both ("We're not alone") in a misguided attempt to please everyone but should please no one.
For nearly its entirety (150m), Contact is a bold, engaging tale of interstellar messaging (Vega) with its protagonist, Dr Ellie Arroway (Foster), giving one of filmdom's great speeches in her passion plea for "just the slightest bit of vision" from would-be sponsor, HR-Hadden, a John Hurt performance that should've nabbed him an Oscar (one nom: Best Sound). But in the final ten climactic minutes as Ellie testifies about her space trip in front of a hostile Senate which seems beset with a collective amnesia, forgetting the tsunami in science-bending advances that enabled construction of her machine, one riding on existitng Einsteinian theory (worm-holes), its "10,000" Alien-provided blueprints no Earthling, not even a filthy rich one, could've forged in secret, yet, our heroine completely unravels under what should've been easily handled, cynical questions (most from Sen James Woods who might've received a nom himself) in an over-done show of emotion that completely conflicts with the strong-willed, spirited scientist-turned-space-traveler we'd come to cheer ("No evidence!" As if the Greys are handing out souvenir key-chains and moon-rocks to their Contactees) (oy). When your boyfriend (McConaughey), as cool a dude as he be, becomes your only booster, someone in the script department surely lost their writing compass.
I like a good love story. Contact has a good love story. But the central topic (planetary coupling) is too big for producers to've projected in half-measure. Director Zemeckis and the WB Suits & Skirts erred in what appears a cave to fears of a status-quo backlash when they seriously deviated from Sagan's novel by dumbing-it-down to implausibility (Senate snobs), maybe to intensify the love (Ellie & Palmer), most likely to placate inter-galactic isolationists, i.e., god-fearing folk who worship for many reasons, though, the "pursuit of truth" could hardly be called one of them, Mr.Joss (3.5/4).
For a film which projects much better the hope that religion ("faith") and science can, not only co-exist but work in harmony, watch Paramount's 1953 Technicolor adaptation of H. G. Wells 1898 novel, The-War-of-the-Worlds (4/4).