Features heavy-handed exposition, repetitive, maudlin flashbacks, uneven performances and endless sermonising.
Comment
06/24/06
Contact (1997)
65 %
Reviews Counted: 51 Fresh: 33 Rotten:18 Average Rating: 6.7/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 30 mins
Synopsis: Devoted astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway undertakes an emotional and spiritual journey after receiving the message she's waited for all her life--a mysterious signal beamed in from alien beings, who pass along instructions for building and piloting a craft that will presumably survive the... [More]
Genre: Science-Fiction/Fantasy
Starring: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Composer: Alan Silvestri
Producer: Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Joan Bradshaw, Lynda Obst
Story: Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan
Screenwriter: James V. Hart, Michael Goldenberg
Producer: Robert Zemeckis, Steve Starkey
Composer: Alan Silvestri
Producer: Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Joan Bradshaw, Lynda Obst
Story: Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan
Screenwriter: James V. Hart, Michael Goldenberg
Producer: Robert Zemeckis, Steve Starkey
Reviews
Top Critic
Less sci-fi blockbuster, more spiritual thinkpiece, this is a Close Encounters Of The Third Kind for the X-Files generation.
01/01/00
Top Critic
With all the science and technology, Zemeckis and the writers made room for spiritual debates (some of them painfully slight), political commentary, and a strangely tepid and inert romance...
01/17/08
Click to read the article
06/09/07
Top Critic
When Contact finally comes alive, it leaves you frightened and thrilled and emotionally overwrought, as only a child can be. The rest is pandering.
06/08/07
Foster's voyage is an astronomical letdown, largely because Zemeckis' ideas of heaven and earth don't extend beyond what can be envisioned as a celluloid event.
11/04/05
By hating the two-dimensional villain ... the audience feels they have found 'the bad guy' and aren't challenged to consider the flimsiness in Arroway's or Josse's perspectives.
12/06/04
The story doesn't always do justice to the mind-bending visual opening of Robert Zemeckis' movie, which features Jodie Foster as an annoyingly intense scientist.
06/28/04
A rare find -- a science-fiction film more interested in ideas than scary critters.
10/15/02
You've got some great moments and an intriguing, haunting last act, but most of the movie isn't very exceptional.
09/10/02
...credit the makers of Contact... with making precisely the kind of movie that we imagine [Carl] Sagan would have wanted made.
08/07/02
The build-up of the film is exceptionally well written, as ``Contact'' gives us two attractive adults who actually discuss issues and concepts instead of trading coy double entendres.
06/23/02
When it tries to personify the struggle between skepticism and faith in the relationship between Ellie and her theologian boyfriend, it becomes flat and obvious.
06/18/02
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