Review #16: Contact
If we were not alone…
“If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” -Like 3 characters
Synopsis
Jodie Foster is a science-abiding astronomer working on a team dedicated to capturing signals from extra-terrestrials. One day, her project is cut and she is forced to seek funding from an independent source. Fortunately, an eccentric rich guy who has been stalking Jodie her whole life anonymously offers her the funds to rent out one Very Large Array in New Mexico… that’s not a joke btw, that’s the array’s real name. Look it up. Anyways, on one of her final days at the array, all the computers start to go off and, after an envoy of sciencey terms and space lingo, she and her team confirm the existence of an alien signal emanating from Vega. The signal carries an encrypted message which none of the thousands of brilliant minds working on it across the globe can seem to figure out. Of course, the eccentric rich stalker is also really smart, and gives Jodie the key to interpreting the signal. The message contains blueprints for an alien machine, creatively dubbed “The Machine”, that couldn’t possibly be built with 20th century technology, but they build it anyways cause there wouldn’t be a movie without it.
A few years later, NASA (and some others I guess) have followed the blueprints and built The Machine, and are prepared to test it for the first time to confirm that it does exactly what they think it’s going to do… oh wait, they don’t know? Who is running this operation?! Doesn’t matter; religious terrorists blow it up. Luckily the rich eccentric guy (yeah, him again) built a second, identical machine in Japan, based on the notion that the first rule of politics is “why have one when you can have 2 for twice the price?”, which is literally one of the dumbest things anyone says in this movie. Of course, Jodie gets to ride The Machine even though she’s just an astronomer and most certainly wouldn’t qualify as a candidate for an alien first contact mission. She is whisked off on an incredible adventure to an alien planet that looks kinda like Florida, but without people beating alligators with shopping carts. When she returns, she is shocked to find that all the scientific equipment shows that she never left the capsule, and that The Machine was only active for a few seconds. She is forced to confront her faith or something, and then she runs off with Matthew McConaughey. Icky. I guess aliens are willing to give us blueprints to a freakin teleporter, but won’t just tell us how to solve global warming.
Review
Based on that synopsis, one might be lead to believe that I’m not a huge fan of this movie. Quite to the contrary, I think Contact is one of the most realistic and inspiring first contact movies to date. Not only does it star a 1997 Jodie Foster (which is a win for everyone), but it wrestles with a variety of large questions and unique themes like the divide between religion and science, the power of modern politics, and our place in the universe. I’d like to think that the first half of this movie right up to the decryption of the signal is the single most accurate portrayal of how humanity would handle the discovery of an interstellar alien message, from the global social and political responses, right down to the individual reactions. This level of predictive understanding went debatably unmatched in science fiction until the release of Arrival in 2016, clearly inspired by Contact. But I also love this movie because it takes place in the 90’s. Man, I love the 90's.
Contact is based on a novel by Carl Sagan of the same name and, while I have never read the book, I can tell that director Robert Zemeckis paid due respect to Sagan’s work. There’s very little pseudoscience in this film. Every little term and piece of space lingo you hear is, in fact, mostly true to real science and astronomy. Though I’ll admit that this makes the movie a fuller experience for a space dweeb such as myself, I am forced to look at the film’s 2 hour and 32 minute run time and ask myself whether all of those scenes and lines were really necessary. When Jodie discovers the signal, there is about 10 minutes of screen time devoted to her and the astronomers coordinating the data collection process and, while I believe that it is a very accurate representation of how a such an event would be handled, it perhaps doesn’t fare as well on the big screen… it pains me to say that. There’s also a lot of time devoted to the political, social, and religious responses of the message that again, while realistic, swing the viewer away from the core point of the film. A few scenes of riots and president Clinton speaking would have maybe sufficed.
Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie, is an inspiration to anyone who has ever looked up to the stars and wondered about our place in the universe. Her backstory, though somewhat cliche, is powerful enough to be both believable and relatable. Overall, her presence in Contact really brings this film together. And then there’s Matthew McConaughey, who plays a weird religious political adviser who Ellie butts heads with, but ultimately falls in love with. Why, why, WHY must he even be in this movie? He’s literally always out of place in this film. Go ahead. Zip to any scene with him. Isn’t it just awkward?! This film is so smart in almost every other way, and yet this strange relationship between Jodie and Matt persists throughout the film like trans fat in a McDonalds salad. They could have salvaged the whole faith/religion subplot by having it be an internal struggle with her father as the focal point, or literally anything else. I just think that this otherwise very intelligent movie is bogged down by this mostly useless side story.
Another thing I can’t get over with this movie is the vast array of unlikely coincidences. Jodie meets Matthew in Puerto Rico as an aspiring writer, but then they just so happen to cross paths again after Matthew has obtained great success as a writer and has become the president’s adviser? Really? And the religious extremist at the anti-science rally who points at Jodie and asks if scientists should be talking to “their God” just so happens to be the actual bomber that destroys the first Machine? Right. And then, after all this happens, there just so happens to be another Machine built by the eccentric rich guy because… what… he knew that would happen? What if the first Machine wasn’t bombed? What was he planning on doing with the second Machine?! I get that it’s just a movie, and that it has a lot of themes relying on faith and “the big picture”, but come on.
Contact grapples with a *ton* of different plot lines. While they kind of hit the screen like a saucy bowl of spaghetti, this tangled mess of subplots and side stories surprisingly does tie together fairly well in the ending. The movie doesn’t leave the viewer with enough information to know the truth, but it does leave them with enough information to draw their own conclusions, which I like. It also leaves the viewer with a sense of wonder about the vastness of space and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life, and if that doesn’t constitute a good sci-fi movie, I don’t know what does. I guess the biggest fish I have to fry with this ending is the same thing that the panel grills Jodie about at the end of the film; why would aliens initiate first contact like this and give humanity nothing more? If they really did want us to one day join them in this vast network of aliens, wouldn’t they want to, I don’t know, make sure we don’t blow ourselves up with nukes or bake our planet with greenhouse gasses? And yeah, maybe there’s a whole “growing up and learning for yourself” theme in there somewhere too, but I just think if aliens were really that interested in us, they would have given Jodie the secret to interstellar travel, or at least laser arms...
Conclusion
The wonder and awe of Carl Sagan’s interpretation of first contact is depicted adequately on screen thanks largely to director Robert Zemeckis and actress Jodie Foster. Though the story line is impactful and no doubt incredibly scientifically sound, there’s still a lot of extra baggage in this two-and-a-half hour flight to another world. Combined with a hodge-podge of half-related themes and subplots, this baggage is enough to remind an astute viewer that, for this film, the sky is indeed still the limit.
