Contact
Director: Robert Zemeckis.
Starring: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Skerritt, Angela
Bassett, John Hurt, David Morse, Rob Low, William Fichtner.
I used to like Ms. Jodie Foster. I hadn't seen a lot of her movies but I
was always impressed with her and considered her a good actor with a
sensible head on her shoulders. Then, I saw Nell. As a
result, I was dragged kicking and screaming to see Contact.
Having sat through 150 excruciating minutes, I came to the conclusion
that
Contact is Nell in reverse: a basically intelligent,
articulate young woman turns in to a rambling fool.
Let's get down to specifics. The flashbacks. When her father
collapses, what is with the young Ellie (Ms. Jena Malone): the agonisingly
slow crawl in to the house and down the stairs? If she knew her father
had a condition, why wasn't she running to see what was the matter.
It made no sense. When, however, she did start running to get the
medicine, the slow motion made at least our section of the audience burst
out laughing, probably not the intended effect.
The walking slowly down the stairs scene was indicative of all the
problems that I had with this movie. Everything took way too long.
("We're at 30%. We're at 31%. We're at 32%.") Coupled with that we
had all these extra things happening to drag out the movie. We all
know that Ellie (Ms. Jodie Foster) gets to go into space but instead
we had to
wade through at least half an hour of the possibility that she
wouldn't.
The acting was consistently good and nothing looked too hokey, which
is always a plus for a science-based movie.
Mr. McConaughey's accent, however, seemed to wander a bit and when
Ellie is talking to the group of children, who
speaks to children in
that tone of voice (other than the Wiggles and that's a whole other
movie)? Also, I'm not thrilled with the
technique of using the real president of the US within the movie. It
seems a bit like grandstanding and detracts from the story. For those
scenes I was sitting there trying to work out what he was really
talking about, or how they were created.
Finally, the ending was less than satisfying, both from the general
message of the movie (and, boy, did this movie have a message) and the
way the whole thing was wrapped up.
The idea of religion versus science is not a new one and not an
intrinsically boring one but it's boring here.
I'm almost tempted to read the book on
which this movie was based just to see if the subject is handled any
better there.
In its favour,
Contact was boring in two and a half hours; Breakdown
managed to be boring in just 90 minutes.
Rating: CP
© Nikki Lesley 1997