'Contact' hits the world beyond with movie magic
'Contact' hits the world beyond with movie magic
By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan
JAKARTA (JP): Contact, which has been lauded as the year's
"thinking man's sci-fi", may have taken some time to arrive at
our multiplexes, but it's really worth the wait.
Take, for instance, its glorious opening sequence, an eye-
popping triumph of special effects. You're on this tour of the
universe, and suddenly you sense being pulled back into the
depths of space, right past all the planets. All TV and radio
signals -- the bedrock of human civilization -- die out as you
travel further away from our own solar system, and the journey
grows ever more enchanting as it zips through a maze of stars and
galaxies.
All of a sudden, you enter total blackness, which finally
winds up in the pupil of 9-year-old Ellie Arroway (Jena Malone),
who is tinkering with her short-wave radio, trying to communicate
with her dead mother in the great galactic beyond. Her father's
death soon after strengthens her quest for the meaning of life.
Just as this introduction presages the fiercely determined
astronomer she will become, the sumptuous opening sequence is a
hint of the many cinematic wonders Contact holds in store.
Later, we see a grown-up Ellie (Jodie Foster), whose encounter
with eccentric industrialist S.R. Hadden (John Hurt) gives her
the private funding she needs to continue her search for
extraterrestrial life. Her dedication pays off when she picks up
and decodes a message from the star Vega, which contains
instructions to construct some sort of transportation device
which would bring man into its first direct contact with aliens.
In no time, Ellie finds herself catapulted into the center of a
media-feeding frenzy.
No less than director Robert Zemeckis has tuned in to
Hollywood's perennial question "Is Anybody Out There?". This
time, his philosophical baggage consists of the 1985 bestseller
by late celebrated astronomer Carl Sagan. Being a proud, self-
styled populist, Zemeckis set out to turn the story into two and
a half hours of pure movie magic.
He delivers, splicing everything from Stanley Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, to heavy duty elements of suspense, drama, romance
and politics that remain, for the most part, intriguing to the
last reel.
After all, here's a man whose gift for fantasy has made him
one of the industry's most engaging storytellers. Not only was he
the brain behind Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,
but he also proved in that feel-good, hysterical baby-boomer
fudge called Forrest Gump how to succeed less on a character than
on a concept, providing one knows which buttons to push.
But to those put off by Gump's self-reverential aura, Contact
may also seem a little bloated for its own good. At junctures,
Zemeckis' vanity tends to get the better of him as he lines up
media bigwigs around Ellie. Here's a man so obsessed with TV
media as the watermark for credibility that it's hard to tell
whether his fetish for it is in fact a parody (after all, he
started out as a Mad-style satirist) or a statement of faith.
Forcing Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey, the media's current
pin-up boy) into Ellie's life also begs the same question -- is
it satire or plain overkill? This sleazy, splendidly coiffed New-
Age theologist, just about as improbable a character as it comes,
is an example of the miscasting that can abruptly stunt any
actor's career, let alone a rising star.
Screenwriters Michael Goldenberg and James V. Hart fashioned a
strong, engrossing character in Ellie, but their inspiration died
there. James Woods is a skeptical National Security Adviser who
is all bureaucratic paranoia, Tom Skerritt plays Ellie's
obligatory kill-joy boss, and Angela Bassett turns in another
deadpan performance as a presidential adviser. Commanding
performances in their own right, they are ultimately burdened by
the mainstream demand for clear-cut caricatures.
By any stretch of the imagination, however, the movie is a
piece de resistance, and not even Zemeckis' desire for prestige
and legitimacy can change that. Contact is both epic and
intimate, confident but sensitive, richly metaphorical but
strangely close-to-the-ground. It not only manages to imprison us
in a vision, but also salvage all the elements that have long
left our cinema: passion, intelligence and idealism.
Nothing that Foster has done in her illustrious, Oscar-winning
career approaches the honest conviction of Ellie, and she really
gives the movie its soul. But she is not the only reason why
Contact is so -- in the words of Carl Sagan himself --
"impactful". Don Burgess' cinematography proves the right canvas
for Zemeckis' visual imagination: it's all a marvel of elegance
and virtuosity of the highest order. Special effects are not only
effectively realized, but give all key events a sense of rousing
momentum (kudos should go to Sony Pictures Imageworks).
In the movie's most alluring moments -- including the
breathtaking sequence when Ellie sits aboard the space capsule of
her wildest dreams, an astronomer-turned-astronaut awaiting the
countdown of her life -- it's hard to ignore our own primal sense
of cosmic wonderment, willing us to be buoyed and transported
along.
That is until we hit the finale, which offers a breezy,
ambiguous, Hollywood kind of resolution that may disappoint those
searching for hard, critical answers. As it turns out, Ellie is
unwilling to shed her scientific skin by admitting the existence
of God (although her meeting with the Vegan suggests otherwise).
Instead, to appease all the men and women of faith out there, she
acknowledges, in an embarrassingly glib way, that there is indeed
a higher being that science cannot even begin to rationalize.
Zemeckis may not have answered all the questions he
postulates, yet there's no denying that he's presented an
enthralling ride over rugged cerebral terrain, and taken chances
where others fear to tread. Whatever our beliefs are, Contact is
likely to appeal to both our intellect and emotion, because, in
one way or another, we have asked ourselves the same set of
questions: Why are we here? What are we doing here? Who are we?