Amazon.com Essentials:
The opening and closing moments of Robert (Forrest
Gump) Zemeckis's Contact astonish viewers with the sort of
breathtaking conceptual imagery one hardly ever sees in movies these
day--each is an expression of the heroine's lifelong quest (both
spiritual and scientific) to explore the meaning of human existence
through contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie begins by
soaring far out into space, then returns dizzyingly to earth until all
the stars in the heavens condense into the sparkle in one little
girl's eye. It ends with that same girl as an adult (Jodie
Foster)--her search having taken her to places beyond her
imagination--turning her gaze inward and seeing the universe in a
handful of sand. Contact traces the journey between those two
visual epiphanies. Based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact is
exceptionally thoughtful and provocative for a big-budget Hollywood
science fiction picture, with elements that recall everything from
2001 to The Right Stuff. Foster's solid performance (and
some really incredible alien hardware) keep viewers interested, even
when the story skips and meanders, or when the halo around the golden
locks of rising-star-of-a-different-kind Matthew McConaughey (as the
pure-Hollywood-hokum love interest) reaches Milky Way-level
wattage. Ambitious, ambiguous, pretentious,
unpredictable--Contact is all of these things and more. Much of
it remains open to speculation and interpretation, but whatever
conclusions one eventually draws, Contact deserves recognition
as a rare piece of big-budget studio filmmaking on a personal
scale. --Jim Emerson
