Review of Contact (1997) by Marshall L — 03 Apr 2015

The subtitle of this movie should be: "When the hard sciences get weird." There's so much good physics and astronomy stuff in this movie, it's hard not to give it four stars, and so much corporate intrigue as well (the whole idea of building a second station in Japan is totally something Google should be doing) but Matthew McConahay and Jodie Foster are about as far from astrophysicists as you can get.

Sadly, they're not the biggest problem with the film. The problem shared by a much more recent film, Interstellar, is the incessant digressions into metaphysics. The film isn't content to offer a reproducible wormhole on earth; it also has to re-introduce Jodie Foster to her long-deceased father who proceeds to explain how the wormhole works.

I mean, wtf? Just let the scientists cluster in awe at what mankind can achieve; there's no need to bring resurrection of dead relatives into it.