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Contact
(****)
Despite popular belief, Contact is not about aliens, space travel, or even necessarily about first contact with a supposedly alien race. Rather, Contact is about faith. Reverend Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) has faith in God. Dr. Drumlin has faith in the practicalities of science. And Contact is the story of how Dr. Ellie Arroway (an ever-talented Jodie Foster) finds her faith.
The story begins with a young Ellie Arroway and her father. Ellie has a small CB radio, and she spends her time contacting people all over. Her goal is to reach further and further away from home, and possibly even to the heavens. An obviously gifted child, her father supports her interests until his death, which provides one of the more disturbing scenes of the movie. What God would take away the only light from her life?
We meet Ellie again some 20 years later, and she's still listening to the sky, but her dish has grown remarkably bigger. Now she's a radio astronomer, part of the SETI project, and she's still searching for something to believe in. She's largely regarded as an eccentric for her obsessive search of the heavens (Drumlin at one point simply says "good morning, Ellie. Still searching for ET?") That "something" emerges one day as a signal from the star system Vega, and soon the entire world is in an uproar over the idea that we are not alone in the universe.
The notion is sound. Why bother zipping all around the stars like Star Trek when it's so much easier to just send out a message with instructions on how to contact them? If you can't follow the instructions in the message, you're not advanced enough to meet them anyway. The signal here is transmitted in mathematics; prime numbers. As a universal, aliens sending it can be sure that any advanced civilization would be proficient in mathematics, the only truly universal language. It's highly unlikely that any alien would tell us "Live long and prosper" when they may not even speak!
Zemeckis has crafted an intriguing picture; something unlike most science fiction films out there. Rather than being about the aliens, it's about the people. I recently complained about Independence Day being too unrealistic because of their actions towards the aliens in the beginning; Contact deals with it much more realistically. Instead of dwelling on the idea that the signal could be instructions to build a big bomb (proposed by Presidential Advisor Michael Kitz, and played by James Woods), the world at large wonders what this means for their religious beliefs. Existential discussions are conducted in various ways here; something that's almost unheard of in science fiction films. Oh sure, the literature has long been about the intelligent search and possibilities of life on other worlds, as well as the status of the human race. But sci-fi films are usually about aliens showing up and blowing things up. From the ludicruous (why contact them? "We don't even know if they believe in God!"), to the profound. Joss and Arroway show a real comradery here, with Ellie constantly asking Palmer how he could believe in some god he has no proof for. More important than the search for aliens is arguable the search for the self. Coincidentally(?), Contact is Ellie's search for herself. If we could just get one more film that has the courage to say "if there's no life on other planets, it'd be an awful waste of space", and then have the aliens *not* try to kill us, the genre could become the staple that the literature has long been.