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...
Comment
01/17/08
Contact (1997)
65 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 51
Fresh: 33
Rotten:18
Average Rating: 6.7/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 30 mins
Genre: Science-Fiction/Fantasy
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... [More]
Starring: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt
Director: Robert Zemeckis
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Reviews for Contact
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06/09/07
Top Critic
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
Features heavy-handed exposition, repetitive, maudlin flashbacks, uneven performances and endless sermonising.
06/24/06
Top Critic 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
Top Critic
Top Critic Offers an inspired and inspiring close encounter with the ineffable mystery that lies at the heart of each individual and at the core of the majestic universe.
02/26/02
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Related Forums for Contact
misunderstood, unfairly hated, a near-masterpiece
by: rakastaa 9/1
by: rakastaa 9/1
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