Breathless, goofy, beautiful.

Contact is nearly two and a half hours of huge swings typical of a Robert Zimeckis film (before this, he made Forest Gump, Death Becomes Her, the Back to the Future sequels, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit), and he’s afraid of neither reach nor earnestness. Yet somehow, Contact‘s goofiness is found less in its incredibly ambitious ideas than in its (very ’90s) stylistic quirks. This movie holds up so very well, thanks largely to a tight script and well-crafted dialogue which never lose their grip, no matter how big the questions and inevitably unwieldy the answers become.

Jodie Foster gives an incredible performance. She’s doing so much – and so much that could go so wrong – straddling a spectrum of notes in any given moment, from the huge (“They should have sent a poet!”) to the incredibly nuanced (choose any look she gives a male character, from love interest Matthew McConaughey to asshole Tom Skerritt).

Is Jodie Foster’s Dr Ellie Arroway one of the great heroines of 20th Century cinema?

Robert Zimeckis’ direction is also doing an awful lot, often in particularly showy oners: from jaw-dropping VFX moments like the mirror shot…

… to scenes where the camera follows from devices to faces and back, always with intent. There is, of course, the sound design of the alien transmission itself. Beyond these moments, the story, based on astrophysicist Carl Sagan‘s book, explores big themes via sprawling concerns, with a breathlessness ranging from the big existential “What if we aren’t alone?” questions, down to the personal character beats in story that manages to be about science vs religion and workplace chauvenism and how puritanism inevitably hijacks anything everything in America.

Above all, Contact lives up to its promise, its most important question – as John Hurt‘s billionaire benefactor S.R. Hadden creepily and iconically asks – “Wanna go for a riiide?”

Further Viewing

More on the making of the mirror shot (via Cooke Optics):

… and then there’s the rest of the movie – ‘The Making of Contact‘ featurette:

mikehill.design offers a reading of how Ellie’s journey to Vega is told symbolically through visual design: