Ellie's sense of aloneness is part of what drives her ultimately, as a mature woman scientist, into the SETI project. Strangely enough, when the moment of contact arrives, the Vegan who comes to meet Ellie has taken the form of her long-lost father. But it is not, it is simply the Vegan relating to her in a way that will be comprehensible to her. But the alien can only answer that he doesn't know. It seems that the ultimate end of the Contact is the contact itself.
Contact is definitely a message movie.
But I, for one, found that it was not always clear just what point it was trying to make. The emptiness, the vastness, the aloneness of man in the infinite dimensions of the physical universe were all too much to bear. And so, Sagan found solace in the idea that there were other lonely, purposeless beings out there who shared our predicament. Sagan's sawdust seemed to meet the needs of many in the audience who accepted it uncritically, with not a clue of the vast truth they were missing. Instead, they were choosing an anodyne, a godless drug to fill a void.