Contact (1997)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
A radio astronomer receives the first extraterrestrial radio signal ever picked up on Earth. As the world powers scramble to decipher the message and decide upon a course of action, she must make some difficult decisions between her beliefs, the truth, and reality.
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8 films that influenced Contact
What critics say influenced Contact
Zemeckis is clearly going for broke here, with his liberal borrowings from the "trip" sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and from the patriarchal sentimentality of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., not to mention his over-the-top use of McConaughey.
As directed by Robert Zemeckis (who won an Oscar for "Forrest Gump" and gave us the "Back to the Future" films, among others), "Contact" seems to be striving for a blend of the excitement of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and the intelligent musings of "2001: A Space Odyssey."
It has a measure of the awe and spectacle of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and an element of the mystery and hope offered by Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
For me, only a few other films can approach pure science fiction, among them "Things to Come," "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "Fahrenheit 451," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "A.I: Artificial Intelligence," and, of course, the greatest of them all, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
It'll be compared most closely with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but that's only because it treats grand-scale scientific inquiry with some respect.
Just think of Roswell, N.M., or the glowing eggheads in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The clearest stretch of Zemeckis satire in Contact--a survey of the crackpot carnival that's gathered around the earthlings' construction of a Vega-designed spacecraft--is on all counts the weakest, both as an unimaginative rip-off of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole and as a belaboring of the obvious.
But the jazzier stuff harks back to the psychedelia of "2001: A Space Odyssey," the grandpappy of all modern effects movies.
As directed by Robert Zemeckis (who won an Oscar for "Forrest Gump" and gave us the "Back to the Future" films, among others), "Contact" seems to be striving for a blend of the excitement of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and the intelligent musings of "2001: A Space Odyssey."
It has a measure of the awe and spectacle of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and an element of the mystery and hope offered by Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
For me, only a few other films can approach pure science fiction, among them "Things to Come," "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "Fahrenheit 451," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "A.I: Artificial Intelligence," and, of course, the greatest of them all, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
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A lot of reviewers have connected the heroes' profession to Ghostbusters and their black suits to The Blues Brothers and Reservoir Dogs, but in fact these traits have more to do with the movie's posters than with its flavor or vision.
Director Robert Zemeckis, who married special effects and story so delightfully in "Forrest Gump" and "Back to the Future," seems awed by the project's grand scale.
As directed by Robert Zemeckis (who won an Oscar for "Forrest Gump" and gave us the "Back to the Future" films, among others), "Contact" seems to be striving for a blend of the excitement of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and the intelligent musings of "2001: A Space Odyssey."
I understand he had originally intended it as a movie all along, but it wasn't to be until screenwriters James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg and director Robert Zemeckis ("Back to the Future," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," "Forrest Gump," "The Polar Express") used it as the basis for their own movie.
Even Foster's performance, good as it is, skirts self-parody when it recalls some of her other pictures (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs, Nell) by positing her as some kind of middlebrow authentication of earnest female self-empowerment.
Even Foster's performance, good as it is, skirts self-parody when it recalls some of her other pictures (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs, Nell) by positing her as some kind of middlebrow authentication of earnest female self-empowerment.
In her first role in three years (since 1994's embarrassing "Nell"), she brings to the screen what's possibly the most complete portrait of a scientist the movies have ever given us.