We all have our own gatewayformative blockbuster. For me, first contact came during the hot summer of 1997 when a summer-camp trip to the movies sent me down a wormhole with Jodie Foster. Contact, Robert Zemeckiss sprawling, melancholy movie about Ellie Arroway (Foster), the scientist who first detects a signal from another world, may not be a box-office champ or a pure classic. But the movie, which came out 20 years ago today, set a marker for what smart, emotionally compelling science fiction can look like. And thinkingback on it as a professional critic, I see that Contact is one of the Rosetta stones that helps me understand why I love what I love today.

In Contact, Ellie (played as a little girl by Jena Malone) grows up with a father who teaches her to monitor shortwave radio frequencies and nurtures her love of the stars before dying, leaving her an orphan at age 9. As an adult, she becomes a talented scientist whose peers believe she is wasting her time and energy on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But after she receives funding from a reclusive billionaire (John Hurt), Ellie discovers unambiguous evidence that someone is out there, and decodes the message they have sent, which turns out to be schematics for a mysterious machine.

Unlike in most movies about contact with aliens, the extraterrestrials inContact are almost peripheral. Its the conflicts between humans that matter.

Ellies opponents are people like David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt), who favors applied science and pulls her funding in an effort to push her onto what he sees as an appropriate career path; national security adviser Michael Kitz (James Woods), who wants to militarize the work on Ellies discovery; and Richard Rank (Rob Lowe, weaponizing his handsomeness), the leader of a Christian Coalition-type organization who tries to stymie Ellies work on the grounds that aliens might not share human morality. The things that divide them are not how seriously they take an obvious alien threat, the tension in so many first-contact movies, but what counts as a worthy goal in science, who should control major advances and once the machine turns out to be a transport who should represent humanity to the stars. The big explosion, when it comes, is not the result of an alien attack, but a suicide bomber who believes we should stay here on Earth.

Its not so much the hard science fiction in Contact that has stayed with me as the films sense of whats important. Whats most realistic and compelling about the movie is its understated curiosity about how humanity would respond to a discovery of this magnitude. Contact, like Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy, is a sharp argument that by skipping to the most dramatic, conflict-oriented outcome, pop culture is leaving dozens of promising stories on the table. There are more things in our arcane policy debates about heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in action filmmakers philosophy.

Ellie herself is a character type thatremains relatively rare: a brilliant scientist who is passionate, enthusiastic, occasionally girly. Contact is a movie that doesnt think female characters have to be only one thing.

While the characters in the movie sometimes punish Ellie for being emotional, Contact itself never does. Of course it makes sense that she would have strong reactions to the degradation of the scientific research she believes in, or to Drumlins tendency to run her down and then claim credit for her work. Her alternately quavering and furious response to the panel that has convened to select the first passenger to another part of the universe doesnt demonstrate weakness. Instead, Ellies response reveals the hypocrisy of Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who exposes her agnosticism because he wants to keep her safe on Earth, and the scheming of Drumlin, who fakes a piety he doesnt really feel to outflank her. Fosters limpid eyes and quivering chin are some of Contacts best special effects.

In keeping with that confident approach to emotion, Contact isnt afraid to be a sweeping romance in whichbig ideas fuel chemistry. Ellie and Palmers meet-cute involves his research on the impact of technology on indigenous communities; the first thing that attracts her to him, beyond McConaugheys laconic charm, is Palmers defense of pure rather than merely applied science. Ideas, particularly Palmers conviction that aliens first contact should be with someone who believes in God, keep them apart for much of the movie, which is realistic: Ellie would be hopelessly compromised if she threw over her lifes work for the theologian who blocks her from her dearest ambition, even if he is drawling and cute. Palmers big romantic gesture is to show up and supportEllie when she gets the opportunity to be the one to make first contact after Drumlin is killed in a terrorist attack. Intellectual arguments dont substitute for sexual heat in Contact theyare the heat.

Fosters performance as Ellie isnt aggressive or extravagant; it doesnt loom over the movies that have followed it.But I think of her every time I watch Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) head off into the abyss to try to save humanity in Interstellar, or Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) struggle to save herself in Gravity. Ellies cerebral, optimistic quest to prove we arent alone in the universe is a counterpoint to Ellen Ripleys (Sigourney Weaver) ferocious battle for survival in the Alien franchise, an argument that in space, no one can hear you scream, but someone just might introduce you to the greatest secrets of the universe.

Original post:
20 years after 'Contact' came out, the rest of pop culture still hasn't caught up - Washington Post