It must have been listening to NASA podcasts about the size and age of the universe that prompted me to take Contact down from the "unwatched DVDs" shelf where it has languished for almost a decade!I've always been a big Jodie Foster fan, since I first saw her in Bugsy Malone and Taxi Driver, when I was far too young to be thinking innocent 'naughty thoughts' about Tallulah in the former and far too young to even be watching the latter. Taxi Driver was the first video I ever personally rented when my parents bought our first top-loading video cassette player back at the dawn of time ... and then I had a rule that every film had to be watched FIVE times before I would return it!
While sharing the screen in Contact with an incredible cast - Matthew McConaughey, John Hurt, James Woods, Tom Skerrit, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, William Fichtner, Jake Busey, David Morse, to name but a few - it's Foster who owns this film as single-minded, driven astronomer Ellie Arroway.
Written by science visionary Carl Sagan - based on his own novel - this is a hard science film that tackles head-on the dichotomy of science and religion in the face of mankind's first extraterrestrial contact, which probably explains why it wasn't a blockbuster hit - despite its stellar cast. This is no E.T., but also it's not a dry science documentary. With its cerebral take on alien contact, it has more in common with 2001, but is less "trippy".
Almost two-and-a-half hours in length the film may seem a bit of a bum-number for some - especially given that there are no death rays or brain-sucking monsters - and the action takes about 35 minutes to really get going, but the wait is worth it (if you can handle the slightly unconvincing romance between scientist Foster and religious scholar McConaughey).
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