Some find it uplifting or inspirational, I found it Boring

Rating: Null/10 (10 October 2001)

I remember seeing this film in the theater. The thing I remember the most is that there were several scenes where the story cuts to a further point in time, and on the bottom of the screen it says something like, "One Year Later...." or "Two months later..." About two thirds of the way through the film I remember leaning over to my friend and saying, "Pretty soon you'll see 'Four Hours Later...' on the screen and it'll be a clip of us finally walking out of the theater." Or maybe they could have had a scene that said, "One Year Earlier..." and it'd be a clip of Robert Zemeckis firing his editor.
The film was too damn long, and too slow-moving. The first 45 minutes could have been deleted and the film would not have suffered. They tried way too hard to be spiritual and meaningful, and to me it came out as the usual melodramatic drivel that often emerges from Hollywood. The righteous scientist who has to fight the good fight just to get her well - deserved fair shake, the few who support her but pail in comparison to her strength so not to upstage her, the skeptical scientists who shun her righteous wisdom, they're all there, playing the role.
---Sopilers---
Then there's the ending. I think that this was best summed up by "South Park's" Mr. Garrison who, upon mention of this film, threw up and then exclaimed, "Aaaugh, that was a terrible film! I waited the whole movie to see the alien and it turned out to be her God damn father." Yep, that pretty much covers it. She almost gets her big chance but is surpassed at the last moment by the evil Christian scientist because he believes in God and out hero does not. But not to worry, our God-fearing foe gets the horrible death he so rightly deserves at the hands of some whacko protester who sets a bomb off and destroys the whole space capsule thingie (I'm not all that religious, but I am cahtolic and I found that this aspect of the movie was a definite attack on Christianity, still the only religion that's somehow PC to mock). So after suffering through even more of this, surprise surprise, there's ANOTHER space capsule thingie built just for Jodie! Great. So, she boards the bomb-free space capsule, and she's off! And what does she see? The alien? A new planet? NO! She seed Pensacola, Florida with a few extra constellations! And her dead father! That's it! And nobody believes her at the end except some insignificant political character who pops in for a couple of minutes.
----End of Spoilers---
Whew. So, to sum up, it was too long, too spiritually ambitious for its own good, and had a very disappointing ending.