Review of Contact (1997) by Meritcoba — 19 May 2016

After spending a third of a trillion dollars Ellie, played by Jodie Foster, finds herself at the other end of a worm hole. That is to say: back on Earth. It took her 18 seconds to do so.

Earth, inhabited by moronic creatures called humans, has just found itself to be the target of practical joker living on a planet orbiting Vega or thereabouts. Thereabouts cause that planet was probably just a relay station. It send them humans an instruction manual for building a device nobody on Vega or thereabouts could afford to build, hoping them humans would do it. And they did. In fact, they made even two of them. How stupidly funny is that.

To their great embarrassment one of the humans appeared so they sent it back with some garbled message that would have the slow witted creatures pondering stuff for the rest of their pathetic existence. What is next? Ellie asks her dead daddy, the guise the alien has assumed for her(and not Adolf H, which would have been funny). Well, we sent you back without a shred of evidence and nobody will believe you. And we erased all the tapes, and the audio and anything that could proof we exist. How about that? It will be just like .. a religion.

Fine with me, Ellie says. For as we have found out from the movie, Ellie doesn't believe in gawd.. but she does believe in something after having had her trip to another world. So she has become a spiritual person so she can have intercourse with the religious guy named Palmer Joss without feeling ashamed for it. (In hindsight the painful look on her face when she kisses Palmer might very well be because Foster was a closeted lesbian, which by Jove would at least have made the movie more interesting if Ellie had been too. Nuke them straight people! ).

So the whole movie, aptly named contact, was about finding an excuse for the atheist (assumed closeted lesbian) Ellie to have (straight) intercourse with the christian Palmer. Two third of a trillion dollars spent on matchmaking and brain reprogramming.. Does this movie get closure that way? Perhaps it does.

The more I think of this movie, the lower my scoring. The biggest part of the movie turns around a conflict between science and religion, in which the latter means: the christian faith of the american kind. 95 percent of the humans are religious someone says to atheist Ellie, which is why she doesn't get elected at first to go and visit the aliens. She could have replied: but only a third of them are christian. So who will it be? A christian volunteer? A muslim one? A jewish? A buddhist? Which religion shall be required? And if it will be christian, which denomination? The catholic one? Oh and did I tell you about my sexual orientation? Only 4% of the female population confesses themselves to be lesbian. And how about white vs black vs asian? What race shall represent earth?

But we just skip over that one shall we.. cause, darn it, this is america and there is just one american gawd and that is the white christian one and no other exist!

The nicest part of the movie is the beginning sequence, in which we see no humans at all. The camera travels backwards from the planet into outer space. Cool that!

In between there are some more nice shots of desert landscapes and some sequences about the planets.

As long as there are no humans in it, the movie is actually nice.

Jodie Foster, how I like her, is at her worst here. She seems constantly on the brink of a nervous breakdown, about to scream or about to cry. Why did they send that nervous wreck to the aliens? No wonder they returned her and without any evidence so they will not send another one. Cause them humans are just too stupid to get that travelling through wormholes mucks with space and time. But you know.. Einstein is dead and with him all the brilliant scientists have died out.. Stephen Hawking? Never heard of the guy. Carl Sagan? Wasn't he a script writer for sci-fi movies? Higgs? Penrose? Witten? Just a bunch of loonies.

The movie has also Blofield in it. He is named Hadden. Hadden is a deus ex machina. When the plot grounds to a halt, he steps in with a lotta money and gets it floating again. So money is the gawd here? Jup.. the movie is almost brilliant. But there aren't any cats in it though so it remains almost.

At the end of the movie Ellie is back were she started: in command of a large array of antennae listening to the universe. Did anything happen in between? Apparently not. It was all a dream probably or maybe she got back to another earth in another universe? Isn't that her once deceased dad in the background walking toward her over a pearly white beach? What was it all about? Well we see her looking up at the night sky showing a milliard sparkling stars. She has become that spiritual person in which the scientist and the religious nutcase have become one. I feel at peace with the universe now. We are not alone.So let's depart with that gooey feeling. Yuck.