'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?