Subject: Review: Contact (1997)

From: [email-masked] (Serdar Yegulalp)
Date: 2 Aug 1997 15:19:05 GMT

Contact (1997)
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
(C) 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: Intelligent, passionate, and utterly gripping exploration of the
idea of interstellar contact. Makes CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND look
like a very bad episode of STAR TREK.

The opening shots of CONTACT are so audacious that they stun an audience
into complete submission. In a simple, elegant series of images and sounds,
we are shown the vastness of the universe and the tininess of man's earth
against it. By the time the story proper started, the audience was already
reeling under the impact of being SHOWN where they stood, cosmically
speaking. They were all ready.

CONTACT is about that sense of astonishment and wonder -- about emotions as
well as ideas, and about how those emotions are played out in the real
world. It is, next to 2001, the single best movie I've seen that really
conveys a sense of WONDER about the universe: What if there's life out
there? How would we get in touch? What would we say after hello?

Jodie Foster plays a radio astronomer who has always been fascinated by the
lure of such questions. After a series of thankless jobs for SETI, which
apparently is tantamount to professional suicide, she works with her
companions to secure funding from a giant multinational corporation to hunt
for signals from space.The realities of getting corporate funding for
scientific research aren't pretty: you have to basically whore yourself, but
Foster's character, named Arroway, winds up working for a man (played by
John Hurt with a mixture of greasy charm and grandfatherly intelligence) who
seems to be as much in love with the idea of contact as she is.

Then one day everything comes together: they find a signal. A whopping huge
signal. Someone out there has been listening, and sends us back a message
with a format we understand perfectly -- TV transmissions. There is also
something else encoded in the transmissions -- something which requires the
scientists to think non-linearly. And when they do...

I will not go any further into the plot. One of the beauties of the movie is
in the way its surprises unfold, and since I'm hellbent on getting people to
see this one, I won't ruin a thing. What I will say is that the implications
of the signal alone are dealt with intelligence and verve -- much more so
than in many, many other movies. In CE3K, for instance, there was the effect
on one man, and not a very stable man at that; in CONTACT, the social and
moral effects are examined.

The film also touches on the issue of faith versus science, and has enough
courage to suggest that the two are not dichotomous, that we need both to
guide us forward into the universe. Arroway does not think religious people
are deluded, and many of the people of faith in the movie do not think that
science is a sterile inhuman business. But they are surrounded by people who
are more fanatical, and some of their actions have tragic consequences.

CONTACT is a daring movie in many ways. It tells a strong, human story
without violence or easy answers, and tries to get us to see beyond the
provincialism of our lives. To see the cosmic scale of things. The closing
credits dedicate the movie "to Carl", and I think he would have been elated.
For those who knew the man, this is very much an encapsulation of his
aspirations and dreams.

Four out of four shooting stars.
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