An intimate journey

Rating: 10/10 (10 March 2011)

Having seen it, honestly, approx. 130 times, all I can say is that Contact is the most profound and meaningful film I have ever watched. Not the disappointing and generalist "one of the most", The Most.
I have been a space enthusiast since I was 4, when I first saw "Cosmos" on TV and marveled at that spacious spaceship and its only passenger, the talented, slow-paced and guttural Carl Sagan, calmly making all the necessary maneuvers in order to take us to infinity and explaining everything that appeared in that huge window as we traveled across countless nebulae at the speed of light. Since then, I have seen many movies regarding the cosmos, life and its meaning, some of them disappointing and a very few overwhelming (i.e. "2001 – A Space Odissey" and, yes, "2010 - The Year We Make Contact" also, because the final scene with the monolith standing still on a primeval shore waiting to experiment on the brains of the next "European guinea pig" specimen that would come out of that ominous forest/ocean is breathtaking), but Contact added the religious and more intimate stuff, such as love and everyday human issues.
I will disregard any technical aspects of the movie, such as goofs and scientific discrepancies because, in my opinion, they don't affect the outcome and its meaning.
As Mr. Sagan always successfully accomplished, Contact takes scientific stuff and transforms it into something graspable, easy to understand, explaining everything as if we were a 4 year-old child.
There's a phrase spoken at the middle of the movie which for me is in itself a complete paradigm and a way of living life:

"Look, all I'm asking, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture"

Look at the big picture. This movie succeeds exactly at that point. The entire movie shows it all from a perspective that lies beyond human eyes. In fact, from an alien vision. Even the "alien" says it when Ellie asks why did they make contact:

"You contacted us. We were just listening."

I found myself looking at all the events that happen during the movie as if I were an alien parked outside the Earth lying down on my spacey couch and eating popcorn made of magnesium. The fact of using such a vision credits the meaning implied in the movie. Putting ourselves in that position strips out (almost) entirely our human aspects and makes us think unbiased about what happens to earthlings when they realized they are not alone in the Universe.
Along those lines, when the "alien" explains Ellie what they think of the human race:

"You are an interesting speciescapable of such beautiful dreams, and such terrible nightmaresyou feel so lost, so cut off, only you're not"

Ellie's face (a magnificent Jodie Foster) turns from a resolute and skeptic scientist into a lost and vulnerable child, partly because she goes back to being the daughter she once was and partly because she represents our frightened, lost and confused race confronted with a more advanced and wise entity.
Apart from the obviously dazzling special effects, the performances are almost perfect, starting with Jodie Foster and James Woods and ending with Angela Bassett, actress that in my opinion, gives out the least credible and most overacted performance of all.
The editing was also superb, with some cuts that add up to the several climaxes that this movie offers (i.e., when the "02-01-00" countdown is heard while the shot of each of the pistons releasing the pod into the wormhole produced by the Machine is being shown)
The Music. Oh the musicit accompanies every shot so intimately that if your home theater happens to produce sounds only through the middle speaker (the "voices" channel), don't even bother watching it YET. Get up immediately, throw that garbage away and go get a new one! :)
In the last scene, while Ellie is sitting down at dusk on the edge of a canyon trying to accommodate in her soul the new meaning and purpose in life given by that experience, a bunch of gentle and delicate sounds drives us to a cross-fade shot of Ellie and thenthe stars, endless, always watching, always shining and an ending film dedication to a man that, from the very beginning, opened my mind and marked my spirit forever.
Goosebumps!