Contact (Snap Case)
The opening and closing moments of Robert (Forrest Gump) Zemeckis'sContactastonish viewers with the sort of breathtaking conceptual imagery one hardly ever sees in movies these days--each is an expression of the heroine's lifelong quest (both spiritual and scientific) to explore the meaning of human existence through contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie begins by soaring far out into space, then returns dizzyingly to earth until all the stars in the heavens condense into the sparkle in one little girl's eye. It ends with that same girl as an adult (Jodie Foster)--her search having taken her to places beyond her imagination--turning her gaze inward and seeing the universe in a handful of sand.Contacttraces the journey between those two visual epiphanies. Based on Carl Sagan's novel,Contactis exceptionally thoughtful and provocative for a big-budget Hollywood science fiction picture, with elements that recall everything from2001toThe Right Stuff. Foster's solid performance (and some really incredible alien hardware) keep viewers interested, even when the story skips and meanders, or when the halo around the golden locks of rising-star-of-a-different-kind Matthew McConaughey (as the pure-Hollywood-hokum love interest) reaches Milky Way-level wattage. Ambitious, ambiguous, pretentious, unpredictable--Contactis all of these things and more. Much of it remains open to speculation and interpretation, but whatever conclusions one eventually draws,Contactdeserves recognition as a rare piece of big-budget studio filmmaking on a personal scale.--Jim Emerson