Subject: Review: Contact (1997)

From: Andrew Hicks <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Jul 1997 23:43:24 GMT

CONTACT
			  A film review by Andrew Hicks
		Copyright 1997 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions

(1997) *** (out of four)

	There have been so many movies in recent years about 
aliens that if any extraterrestrials ever do show up it will certainly be 
an anti-climax. CONTACT seems the exception -- no alien 
intervention could possibly be as anti-climactic as the last half-hour 
of CONTACT, a slow-moving film that builds up to a promising 
close encounter of the third kind and gives us an incredibly hokey 
dream-like sequence instead.

	It's a shame, too, because I really admired CONTACT 
up to that point. It's one of the only intelligent dealings with the 
ramifications of searching for alien life and the inevitable conflicts 
that will arise between the elements of religion and science and the 
representatives thereof. This Carl Sagan adaptation takes the high 
road all through the lengthy setup, providing us with a protagonist 
in which we invest a lot of emotion.

	We meet Ellie Airway, played by Jodie Foster (in her best 
performance since SILENCE OF THE LAMBS), at the tender age of 
8, already initiating contact via short-wave radio with people in far 
off places and looking through telescopes at the stars above. It's the 
nurturing of her loving father that makes it all possible and, like any 
other movie in which one parent figures large, we see the death of 
the father. The young Ellie doesn't buy the priest's explanation that 
it was part of God's undecipherable master plan, setting up a lifetime 
(and a movietime) of conflict between Ellie's rational agnostic mind 
and people of faith.

	The most interesting thing about CONTACT is this 
dichotomy and I'm sure it's by no personal bias of Sagan that the 
agnostic astronomer seems the most moral and emotional person in 
this diegetic universe. With a cast of one-notes like Tom Skeritt (the 
bastard-in-power who first cuts Ellie's funding then takes all the 
credit once contact with aliens is made), Angela Basset (skeptical 
White House female security agent) and James Woods (skeptical 
White House male security agent), that's hardly a surprise.

	Then there's Matthew McConaughey, the sympathetic 
religious figure who also serves as the movie's love interest. The 
word "religious" in CONTACT denotes a person who believes in 
faith over science -- as McConaughey's pontificating hippie points 
out, some people _need_ to believe in God rather than resign 
themselves to the loneliness felt when they realize they're so small 
and minute. Ellie's flip-side view is that science is the universal 
language and the existence of aliens would allow humans to be part 
of a much more unifying cosmic force.

	Lest the movie bog itself down too much beneath these 
sentiments, director Robert Zemeckis intersperses the same kind 
of media tricks that made FORREST GUMP seem in places like an 
important documentary. As Ellie receives a message from the great 
beyond, with visual instructions hidden behind images of Hitler 
(quite a unifying cosmic force his own self), the world takes notice. 
We see every CNN anchor ever hired pondering the ramifications of 
this contact, along with deftly-edited footage of President Clinton 
saying that this ground-breaking new discovery may alter the course 
of history. The real-life speech was about the advent of the Arch 
Deluxe burger, but a snip here and a morph there and suddenly he's 
talking about aliens.

	To which degree you will like CONTACT depends on your 
interest of the topic. We've seen alien intervention treated a hundred 
different ways in the movies, but rarely has it seemed so real and 
possible than in CONTACT. Rarely also has it been flushed down 
the cosmic crapper by such a New Age ending that looks like a 
Shirley MacLaine music video than a Hollywood finale. CONTACT 
is miles removed from MEN IN BLACK but with about 100 extra IQ 
points and a refusal to give the audience what they crave.

--

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