Contact (1997)

This review is an expansion of a piece that was first published in the BFI’s The Sci-fi 60 app first published in 2014 and still available for iOS devices here.

There are echoes of the BBC serial A for Andromeda (1961) in Robert Zemeckis’ thoughtful tale of the first contact between the human race and an alien culture. Like John Elliot and Fred Hoyles’ small screen seven-parter, alien contact is made not via a fleet of gaudily lit spaceships (though at one time in the film’s lengthy development that was considered) or an unfortunate encounter in the backwoods but by a radio signal concealing data that leads to a technological breakthrough.

Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), a SETI program astrophysicist, is facing having her job cut by presidential science adviser David Drumlin who believes that the programme is a waste of time and money. She’s able to secure funding from enigmatic billionaire industrialist S.R. Hadden and after a further four years of work makes a breakthrough – she detects a repeating signal containing a sequence of prime numbers, apparently from the star system Vega. Further analysis reveals plans for a machine that Arroway and her team believe is a single seat travel device. Despite objections and sabotage by religious groups, the machine is constructed and Arroway prepares to make a journey to visit the aliens – a journey that will bring her face to face with what appears to be her long-dead father…

Based on a novel by that most humanist of scientists, astronomer Carl Sagan (who was due to make a cameo appearance as one of the committee members selecting passengers for the machine’s maiden flight but died before the scene was shot), Contact had its roots in a project conceived with Francis Ford Coppola (who threatened to sue to get a credit on the finished film). Like all the best science fiction Contact is unafraid to tackle Big Ideas – at its core it’s a mesmerizing interrogation of the ageless debate between religion and science with Foster’s Arroway as committed to and defensive of her scientific beliefs as Matthew McConaughey’s Christian science writer with whom she has an affair is of his belief in God. Sagan’s novel – written after the film ideas were initially dropped – has a more compelling climax in which he makes a plea for a religion based on scientific grounds, but the compromised ending of the film is not without interest, challenging the very nature of belief and suggesting that the gulf between science and faith may be narrower than we thought.

From Zemeckis (who took over the reins from a post-Mad Max George Miller who was originally attached to the film) we expect dazzling eye-candy and he doesn’t disappoint, but Contact is a rare mainstream Hollywood science fiction film where the ideas are bigger than the effects budget and Zemeckis is unafraid to let them play out front and centre. For once the visual effects are wholly in the service of the script rather than the other way around. The opening shot, which takes us from Earth orbit to the farthest reaches of the universe and into the eye of a young Ellie Arroway is breathtaking and sets the agenda for the rest of the film – that the biggest of Big Ideas are often played out in the smallest of arenas. The young Arroway is gifted but impetuous, often overlooking the time and effort that goes into even the most “mundane” of discoveries and is frequently told about the required “small moves” by her father. Though the action takes place on a cosmological scale, the film is quick to remind us that it’s the “small moves” that will get us there in the end. By the climax, Arroway has made her own “small move” – by accepting that science can sometimes be as reliant on faith as religion – but there’s still so much left to do.

It could all have been so different. The script was in development hell for many years for most of the 1980s and at one point was in the hands of producer Peter Guber who inherited it from Lynda Obst who had revived the project after Coppola’s plans came to naught. Under Guber’s watch the project floundered further as various scriptwriters made their passes as the book – which Sagan had published in 1985 – trying to bludgeon it into a more traditional SF story, complete with a son for Arroway who stows away aboard the travel machine and a fleet of giant alien spaceships. Thankfully, Michael Goldenberg and James V. Hart’s final script cleaves close to Sagan’s novel, retaining something of the author’s desire to explore the narrow borderland between science and faith while still leaving enough room for the expected visual pyrotechnics.

Although marred occasionally by sentimentality (where would a mainstream Hollywood film be without its central character pining for an absent father?), Contact remains a smart and thought-provoking film that poses as many questions as it answers. And in that it, sadly, looks more or a rarity with each passing year.