Contact Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (syegul AT ix DOT netcom DOT com)August 2nd, 1997
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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