A female astronomer encounters pushback and restrictions in her race to decipher an alleged message from extraterrestrial life, and I’m turn make contact with them.
It’s funny how film can often be the thing that unites us in love. ”Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.” Oh, wait, that’s Interstellar, which is essentially the sister film to Contact. Many people view Contact as the spiritual predecessor to Interstellar. Growing up, my mom absolutely adored Contact. And when I grew up, I fell in love with Interstellar. Where she sees her relationship with her dad through the Alloway family, I see my relationship with her through the Coopers. And thus is the beauty of film. As such, Contact is a staple film for me, and one I will always love, both myself and by proxy on behalf of my mom. It’s a fantastic film that uses realistic commentaries of hypothetical science as a vehicle for the most beautiful thing in the world; love.
Adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan with the help of James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg, Robert Zemeckis gives us exactly what Robert Zemeckis does best; a stellar film of magnanimous proportions. It’s stylish, beautiful, and moving in all the right ways without ever losing sight of its humanity and heart. There’s also that one dizzying scene that everyone knows, involving a mirror and a medicine cabinet, that still stands out as one of the greatest tracking shots of all time. While the film could easily have given up on its roots for the high concept storyline, it holds onto the beauty of its characters so well that you can’t help but get attached to them.
That’s thanks also in huge part to Jodie Foster. She is, without a doubt, my biggest idol. As a child, I wanted to be her. I still kinda do. And her work here is nothing short of what we expect from one of the greatest actors to ever live. She grabs your heart, rips it out of your chest, stomps on it, and we all thank her for it. Alongside her is Matthew McConaughey in a role that now looks reminiscent of Cooper from Interstellar, before Cooper even existed, and he’s just as wonderful here. John Hurt is also spectacular, as well as James Woods, but no one comes close to the resonance of David Morse. He’s just phenomenal.
While the film has plenty of space for out of this world effects, it really excels in how little in the way of CGI it features. What it has, works, and instead of going overboard, it gives us just enough to be memorable. Compounded with superb cinematography from Don Burgess, and a score by the always perfect Alan Silvestri, Contact is one of those films that’s pretty much perfect on every level of production.
Aging like fine wine, Contact still holds strong against the high concept science fiction of modern cinema, thanks almost entirely to the heart of the story, and that’s a heart of familial love, grief, and the beauty of life itself.