MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Contact [de])

USA 1997
d: Robert Zemeckis
Warner Home Video (Region 1 us)

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Ellie Arroway (Foster) has devoted her scientific career to scanning the cosmos for signs of life. One day she's rewarded with a radio transmission from a distant galaxy, and the world is transfixed. It's clear that the aliens have plans for us, but whether for good or ill defies human understanding. An intergalactic ambassador is called for, and Ellie wants the job. Zemeckis aims for spiritual reverence reminiscent of "Close Encounters": the scope and scale of his picture are established by the first shot with a brilliantly sustained zoom through space and time. There are two more virtuoso sequences: a climactic space trip and a breathtakingly outrageous piece of post-modern appropriation with the first images broadcast from outer space. Regrettably, these visual coups only point up the inadequacy of a screenplay (from Carl Sagan's novel) which marries profound philosophical questions with hokey melodramatics, shallow characters and infantile conclusions. It's not just that it resorts to an albino Adventist to inject spurious suspense, nor that it foists McConaughey on us as a randy Luddite priest who is, coincidentally, the love interest (the pillow talk is physics vs metaphysics). It also features heavy-handed exposition, repetitive, maudlin flashbacks, uneven performances and endless sermonising.
— TCh, Time Out Film Guide
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Beautifully crafted and legitimately involving once it locks onto a dramatic track, film benefits from remaining mysterious about how far it intends to go in pursuing its themes, but also suffers from long-windedness and preachy final-reel explicitness as to its message.
— Variety Todd McCarthy
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Contact is so burdened with social, political, and religious issues that they infect and ultimately overwhelm much of the philosophical content. ... The clearest stretch of Zemeckis satire in Contact--a survey of the crackpot carnival that's gathered around the earthlings' construction of a Vega-designed spacecraft--is on all counts the weakest, both as an unimaginative rip-off of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole and as a belaboring of the obvious.
This doesn't mean that Contact absolutely capsizes. The alien spacecraft itself superbly combines speculative design and sheer folly, recalling some of the best moments in Metropolis and Things to Come, and some of the high-tech human equipment is almost as much fun. The space journey itself may culminate in a vision of paradise that's strictly southern California, but there are plenty of excitements along the way and a fair number of entertaining ambiguities to mull over afterward (not all of them plausible). And though Contact is at least an hour longer than Men in Black, Zemeckis tells a skillful, streamlined story right to the end. But when it comes to contemplating the implications of mankind not being alone in the universe, he's clearly bitten off a lot more than he can chew. I'd recommend Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker instead: it tackles the same theme with simultaneous modesty and majesty, throwing in a stirring account of the creation of the universe as a bonus, bountifully extending ideas that this movie barely begins to sketch. It isn't much of a page-turner but it's a formidable mind-expander; at the very least it doesn't scramble for celebrity endorsements--the Forrest Gump Seal of Approval--while trying to explain the cosmos.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum