Review of "Contact"
I can tell that the summer silly season has started what with
"Contact" being released shortly after "Men in Black."
"Contact",  for those of you who live in Regina, is Jodie
Foster's latest offering to a generation of Forrest Gump
styled scientific bright lights. If Jodie's earnestness in
this flic doesn't make you toss your cookies, then a couple
of other leaps of logic will.
Jodie plays a driven radio-astronomer who devotes her life to
scanning the heavens for radio signals evidencing signs of
intelligent life. Grab your hankies for the first part of the
flic where you wade through the pathos of poor Jodie being
motherless, and eventually being fatherless as well. I fully
expected the dog to be run over by a Mack truck to wring more
tears out of this distraction from the main plot. Come to
think of it, since this flic is a clever modernization of the
"Wizard of Oz", I'd expect poor Toto to be eaten by aliens
within the first twenty minutes of this celluloid tripe.
Jodie's early searches for intelligent life were thwarted by
a classically evil Tom Skerriff playing a science-mongering
bureaucrat. (You can't really count the absence of
intelligent life in the screenwriters who created most of the
insipid dialogue, they were working from the utter banality
of a Carl Sagan book so at least they have a plausible excuse
for their ignorance.)
Jodie manages to have a "meaningful relationship" with a
fellow who is touted as a modern day religious ethicist. In
case you have the IQ of a turnip, they bludgeon home the
point numerous times that Jodie's horizontal jogging partner
is some sort of world renowned thinker - bringing - choke -
"modern context to a belief in God." Okay, fasten your
seatbelts because twenty running minutes later, after
slipping Jodie the staff of Christ, this "ethicist" sees no
problem with sitting on a space-voyager selection committee
where Jodie is a candidate. The man wouldn't recognize an
ethical conflict of interest if it sat on his face - you'd
think he was a lawyer.
Next, the gullible audience is led to believe that Jodie
finally picks up an extraterrestial transmission; which, she
being brilliant or something,  decodes in mere minutes. Even
better, the message has the complete plans for a sort of time
warp/extra-galaxial space travel machine.
Naturally, good ole' American  know-how, grit, motherhood,
apple pie, and enough jingoistic bullradish to choke a whale,
transpire to get this mothering huge blender built at a cost
of mere trillions of dollars. The first prototype of this
space blender is blown up by a religious fundie terrorist
played by Gary Busey's son (who shares the same coke-crazed,
maniacal gleam in his eyes and an overbite that could
re-dredge the Suez Canal.) Tom Skerrif, evil-science
mongerer, is burnt to a crisp.
This leaves Jodie to be strapped in a dentist's chair, closed
into a giant Ben-Wa ball, and then dropped into the space
blender. For those of you who haven't noticed that the
seventies are over, I'd highly reccomend a couple of hits of
Blue Frog blotter acid and a front row seat for the right
ambiance to view a spectacular sequence of visuals as Jodie
is whipped through space-time wormholes like an olive pit
through the lower intestinal tract. She emerges into the poor
screenwriter's unimaginative impression of "heaven", thus
warping the movie's theme back around to the God/Science
debate which burdens the flic with tedium through it's first
hour.
Jodie brings back absolutely no evidence that she's been
anywhere, except for a near-psychotic character shift which
changes her from a hard-radished science jockey to a
spiritualist. Gawd, you'd think that for a trillion bucks she
could at least have picked up a souvenir T-shirt.
The flic drags on for another ten minutes, trying vainly to
grasp at tenuous moral & philosophical points, and ends
appropriately with Jodie lecturing a group of school children
- treating them to a kindergarten voice that presumes that
they're all idiots - which is, in fact, the assumption that
the director has made about the viewing audience.
Rating: 1/2 a weeping Virgin Mary statue and another banana
for "Abe" the world's first space primate.
 
--- Maximus 2.00
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