Rating: 
Summary: A collect call from outer space...
Review: CONTACT tackles the question of life beyond the stars. A question asked by most thinking beings on the planet. The story capitalizes on that interest but unfortunately pulls the rug out from underneath. The story concepts are at times rewarding, but the film is brought down by a ridiculous romance and a first alien contact payoff that leaves you feeling ripped off.Jodie Foster is Ellie Arroway, a scientist with an ear for aliens spends most of her life looking for financial support for her search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Most doors are slammed until aliens return the call. Then the film becomes a "Right Stuff" quest for the individual to take the journey to meet the aliens. The film culminates in the actual eye-rolling contact. Occasionally, Ellie is joined by her love interest, an uninteresting preacher portrayed by Matthew McConaughey. Not only is the romance trite and convenient, it also rings untrue. Director Robert Zemeckis does some creative filmmaking here, but often the scenes are overdrawn. The opening journey through space is a wildly stimulating start to the film. Also stimulating is the creation of an alien 'machine'. It is an effects marvel. Capitalizing on an element he used in Forrest Gump, Zemeckis uses political celebrity appearances to ground the film into reality. Jay Leno, Robert Novak and Leon Harris are amongst the appearances. Even former President Clinton appears giving a speech that was non-specific enough when he first said it that Zemeckis could use it to address aliens in the film. These are some of the best moments in the overlong film, a sad statement in a special effects film about alien contact. Subplots could have been shortened or removed. The CONTACT DVD is pretty loaded with several commentaries. The Video and Audio transfer are stellar and can definitely test your sound system. Like the movie or not, the stars will still beckon us so more films will explore the void. CONTACT skims the topic.
Rating: 
Summary: Six Degrees of Separation ... From A Good Nap
Review: Jodie Foster is truly a wonderfully gifted actress, and any reasonable thinking person can understand her desire to attach herself to high quality films. CONTACT is extraordinarily well-made; it's contemporary, with a message for our times; and it delivers a highly personal message against the backdrop of learning we're not alone in the universe. It also happens to be boring as hell. Based on a book that was too cerebral for its own good, CONTACT shows you that a journey to the stars in completely unnecessary ... as you'll only find the aliens taking the form of your dead father. You already know what he looks like and what he'd like to say, so what's the point?
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: I'm a believer in extra-terrestrial life for the exact reason this film's characters believe in them: if we were alone, it would be a pretty large chunk of wasted space. ALIENS EXIST! this film does a masterful job at how people would react to this message received back. and there is a powerful message about faith and science being able to work together, though that message may seem a bit heavy-handed. On a side note, i doubt we'd ever come into contact with aliens, and not for the lack of trying, but just because the distance is far too great. i would love it if we were to contact other beings, but it wont happen just yet.
Rating: 
Summary: Abysmal, ridiculous, shallow, and overacted
Review: With plot holes big enough to drive a truck through this clunker is tough to get through without cursing Hollywood over and over.
This movie is so transparent it is sickening: A small group of scientists working against the inept and corrupt world, discover a
signal from space, Vega, no less!
Every single character in this farce is a glaring stereotype:
1. Dedicated, driven, misunderstood, lone scientist.
2. Corrupt and self-serving leaders.
3. Keep-it-secret government officials.
4. The Public, which are either loony UFO nuts, or right wing bible thumpers.
5. ET's who are advanced enough to build time travel devices but can only detect us by monitoring TV broadcasts.
6. ET's who think we are so fragile that not only can't they show themselves but they must also limit contact to a few minutes
(no doubt due to some obscure Hollywood law).
7. Lover who backstabs at a crucial moment.
8. All breakthroughs come only after a protracted and emotional personal confrontation. The opening scene is the only worthwhile part of the entire movie.
Jodie severely overacts this one to the point of discomfort. Most of the time her face is so scrunched up it looks like she is going
to burst a blood vessel. The script is unoriginal (whole scenes are pilfered, then butchered, from 2001: A Space odessy and
X-files), the science is schlocky and juvenile, and the ending is typical TV fare. To those individuals who think this is how the real Contact will happen you are in for a rude awakening.
It has already happened and it wasn't touchy-feely.
Go see "Fire In The Sky" or read the "Andreasson" sagas
Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Trip
Review: This movie was so much more than I expected, from the awesome opening that starts on earth and pulls back until you are far beyond all known galaxies, to the flashbacks of Ellie (Jodie Foster) as a little girl, to the climatic trip to another planet where the "alien" she meets is not at all what you're expecting.
Everything about this film was awesome with one major flaw, the ending. Although Ellie was gone for a long time, no time passed on earth, so no one believes here. However, there is the fact that her camcorder recorded an hour of static, which is impossilbe if no time elapsed. But James Woods still won't publicly admit that she went to another planet and the movie ends. But the machine is still there, and still very much intact, why don't they just send him so he can see for himself?
This flaw is never explained - never is it said that the machine can only be used once. Other than that, it is a magnificent film, the best part is when they make the first contact, it is handled in a Very realistic way, not with ships the size of Arizona firing on earth, but with a simple mathatmatical message beamed to earth in tones, which the scientists must then decifer, very thought provoking. I highly recommend this film.
Rating: 
Summary: 3-2-1 Contact
Review: Although "Contact" may not muster enough vision to keep company with the mother of all Sci-fi films, "2001", it possesses something the latter sorely lacked: a character to lend the film its emotional center. The closest "2001" ever came to a likable, emotive character was HAL -- the monotone supercomputer that could read lips and offed all but one of the astronauts from its ship. Of course, this was also Kubrick's intent -- his ironic jab that perfectly articulated his nihilistic and irredeemable philosophy on man's nature. Though in a sense it's not fair to compare the two films, I invite the comparison nonetheless to highlight the curious yin and yang relationship the two films bear. One is the darker, lonelier and colder view of man's future; while the other posits the more optimistic philosophy that man makes up the smaller part of a larger - and friendlier - intergalactic community. While Kubrick's version is more compelling, not to mention far creepier, Zemeckis' "Contact" is pure comfort food, thoroughly entertaining and benign. Jodie Foster as always, delivers a believable performance. As Ellie Arroway, the scientist who heads an independently funded program to find signs of life in outer space, Foster finds and delivers the heart of a girl orphaned at a young age.
While the DVD comes with the stock extra features, there's nothing particularly noteworthy or original, not to mention anything revealing in Foster's or Zemeckis' voiced-over comments. But for what it's worth, Contact is still a great movie about not having to feel you're alone. And a sci-fi film that can achieve such, is worth occupying a space in my DVD library.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome! A great movie to buy.
Review: I have always been fascinated by space-related things, this movie got me fascinated. I enjoyed very much this movie because it keeps me interested through the movie.
Rating:
Summary: Uneven script, but I loved the leads
Review: Jodie Foster is Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway, a brilliant radio-astronomer obsessed with making contact with intelligent extra-terrestrials. Unable to relate to real people on Earth, where she's ridiculed for her obsession, Ellie now searches for life beyond it. Complicating things are her boss, Dave Drummlin (Tom Skerrit) a weasel who'll do anything for funding, but also Palmer Joss (Matt Mccaunaghey) as a new age evangelist (he calls himself a "man of the cloth, without the cloth") who speaks to those spiritually unsatisfied at the 21st century's dawn. While Drummlin threatens to yank Ellie's funding, Joss stands to steal her heart entirely. Forced to seek private funding from a consortium headed by the shadowy SR Hadden (John Hurt), Ellie is at the ebb of her career....on that day when somebody returns her call. With the world electrified by the mysterious communication, seeming iron-clad proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, Ellie must now confront a host of even newer complications, like James Woods as a purely odious national security adviser. (Though this is supposed to be set in Clinton's administration, Woods's character seems largely based on his Roy Cohn act, one he used again in "Chaplin" - his lines consist of little more than reactionary theories about the mysterious message). When the communication turns out to be the design for a spacecraft, the US reluctantly busts its budget to build it, while the prospect of extra-terrestrial intelligence brings out the worst in America's fringe elements. This culminates when a test-run of the system is tragically sabotaged by some shadowy types we're supposed to assume are religious fundamentalists. (Not all the stock villains are on the fringe; Rob Lowe plays a character obviously patterned on Christian Coalition frontman Ralph Reed, a young and handsome spokesman for conservatism who has the ear of the politically connected and his speech is tinged with the southern accent Hollywood always uses to clue us in to its meaninglessness) Ellie fiercely competes for the second chance at the trip, and the stage is set for the journey of a lifetime. Well.... I'm not sure whether the climactic trip was a comedown or not, but the rest of the film clearly shows what the script's problem is. Much of Contact deals with the confrontation between science and faith, with the script taking a dim view (ala Ben Bova) of religious types. Joss is the only real character with a religious bent, though much of what he says isn't as religious as simply dismissive of modernity, and he gets to spend the night with Ellie just to assure us that he's the sort of religious nut we can like. The rest of the religious characters - none of whom have real speaking parts - remain as a threat to the scientifically established order, our own homegrown Taliban. The problem is that the script isn't as sure of where Ellie stands as it seems to think. By the end of the film, we see Ellie realizing that her obsession with otherworldly life rests on faith to no less degree than that held by your Sunday-go-ta-meetin Churchgoer. The film treats this as ironic, even though we've realized from about the first that Ellie is something of a revivalist nut under her scientific pretensions, ready to leap to the first prophet who can bestow her needed funding (in this case, the shadowy Hadden). Despite an uneven script I enjoyed "Contact" largely for Foster and Mccaunaghey's performance - though they don't spend near enough time together, they work our a sort of warm fuzzy chemistry, something like unbreakable love across an interstellar gulf.
Rating:
Summary: Multiple reflections.
Review: This DVD has the best commentary on special effects that I have ever encountered. One of the people responsible for those effects comments that this is the only movie which he still had to work on after seeing the preview, though he is sure the people who saw the preview never noticed the subtle effects which had not been added yet. Everything in the movie seems to reflect a level of involvement that real life rarely offers, creating a tension which is so great that the best scene in the movie was cut because someone laughed at that point in the preview. I might have laughed myself, if I was there. The level of disagreement about life on other planets is intense, and evidence that something far more advanced might be observing us is as frightening as this movie makes it seem. My favorite disagreement was about whether a chair would be necessary for space travel. If the design for a pod doesn't include a chair, don't try to take one. Philosophy might also be better if it wasn't an excuse for getting some university chair, which is not the kind of philosophy reflected in this effort. Embarking on this trip, which presses the limits of what might happen at the speed of light, could easily be considered more thrilling than the finer points of any philosophy.
Rating:
Summary: Three little words: Read The Book.
Review: Read The Book. A brilliantly written saga dedicated to furthering mankind's intellect, outlook, and inner peace. The movie didn't understand that. It is dedicated to furthering the career of Jodi Foster. Little beyond that. Even if I am wrong (which happens), please read the book before embarking on the magical, mystical voyage of cliches that you will presented with here. You will be a better person for it.
|
