Contact (1997)

Having quickly lost interest in Cosmos, I'm sure I didn't put this movie on my list for Carl Sagan's writing. Instead, I must have noticed how frequently it came up in discussions -- not to mention IMDb searches. Robert Zemeckis directs, and the cast includes Jodie Foster, Tom Skerritt, Matthew McConaughey (who would go on to the similar Interstellar), David Morse, Angela Bassett, John Hurt, James Woods, and Rob Lowe. We also get a lot of public figures as themselves, including controversially altered footage of Bill Clinton. So I went in, knowing little else of what it would offer.

Ellie (Foster) works for the SETI Institute with unstable funding, because too few people have confidence that we'll connect with aliens. Fortunately, a creepily influential yet reclusive billionaire (Hurt) sponsors her. Finally, she discovers a suspicious space noise. You can imagine many of the various reactions, including legitimate fears of a new Heaven's Gate cult. The next hard part is decoding the message, followed by deciding how much trust to put in it. Just about every step of the way is a struggle for our heroine.

The above summary glosses over the more personal elements regarding Ellie. First we see her at age 9, her widowed dad (Morse) encouraging her pursuit of radio exploration. We later learn that he died that year, which probably hastened her move toward atheism. Despite this, she gets into an unsteady relationship with theologian Palmer (McConaughey), who alternately defends her to the arrogant presidential advisor (Skerritt) and hinders her career progress out of a kind of love.

Ultimately, the moral amounts to "Scientists, don't dismiss the value of faith." Don't get me wrong; Ellie doesn't encounter anything to suggest a divine presence. She just finds herself in a position where her experience cannot readily be replicated and her testimony is the only evidence she can present. It can't help but raise her respect for theists. You might call that uplifting or inanely forced; I choose the former.

You can tell there's a pretty intelligent base to this film. Many factors come into consideration, amd some of the dialog gets a bit jargony. Alas, it's still very much Hollywood, so at other times, it gets dumbed down. Apparently, the filmmakers thought we needed more help with prime numbers than with primers. Actually, they themselves could have used help when Ellie made a big, uncorrected mathematical error, which strikes me as worse than mere bad science. And diligent IMDb users have documented a heck of a lot more inaccuracies.

If Zemeckis stands out in one way overall, it's in his use of cutting-edge technology. No, we never really get to meet the aliens; it's more Interstellar than Close Encounters of the Third Kind, except perhaps in patience. We do get to see some pretty skilled long shots, interesting wormhole effects, and...OK, the CGI of 1997 doesn't hold up very well, but at least it depicts only objects, so you needn't worry about the uncanny valley found in The Polar Express.

The present 7.4 on IMDb is about right for Contact. As late-'90s philosophical sci-fi goes, it's soft-spoken but not too brooding. It has its flaws, but it's not a bad way to spend 150 minutes.