Your responses to them are modulated according to the issues under discussion at each particular point in the story, and though they move in and out of sympathy, they're still not fully credible as people. Yet it is a film of some value, a contribution to the end of millennium angst now plainly visible even to the general public which does not merely exploit it. It attempts to address the fundamental questions facing us as human beings, and brings it all back to the question of what it is that we are rather than what 'they' are. This is not to say, of course, that the matter of 'them' is not addressed, or that it shouldn't be. Its positive religious sub-text should also come as a relief to those disappointed on one hand by the general absence of such discussion in the genre, and on the other, the endless fascination with damnation visible recently in films including Event Horizon and Spawn .
Contact is finally a big Hollywood movie about big human issues.
That very form offends some people, and most Europeans will undoubtedly dismiss it as worthless claptrap. But there is some satisfaction to be derived from viewing it on its own terms, and it might stimulate discussion if the viewer can rouse themselves from the postmodern apathy that is the psychological shield generated to combat end of millennium panic. Wake up and smell the future. It's exactly the same as the present, only with more players. Review by Harvey O'Brien M.A. copyright 1997.