Ellie Returns To Pensacola, Florida

Rating: 5/10 (15 May 2015)

For me - Contact was definitely one of those pseudo-renegade, Sci-Fi pictures that, when I carefully weighed it pluses and minuses, got itself split right down the middle, for the most part.
Here are 2 things that lost Contact some very serious points -
(1) Ellie's super-nauseating, on/off relationship with the 2-faced man-of-the-cloth, Palmer Joss (and, yes, that included the whole recycled business of his gift to Ellie of a cheap, toy compass from a box of Cracker Jack).
(2) The images that were used in the film which placed the then-US President, Bill Clinton, right into the story. I can't believe that this would be allowed.
I clearly see these images of Clinton as being something of a conflict of interest, especially since it not only gave me the indication that Clinton was fully endorsing Contact on the side of the Christians, but it got me to wondering whether he might have received monetary payment for permitting his images to be used this way.
On the other hand - Besides Contact delivering some acceptably impressive visual effects and its story holding up fairly well in the intelligence department - I also liked some of the questions that it raised, such as -
(1) Is the world really a better place because of science and technology? (This question, of course, goes double for whether the world is a better place because of religion)
(2) Does science really reveal that "God" never existed? - If the answer to this is "Yes", then, that means that close to 95% of the world's population is made up of people who suffer from a mass delusion.