Official trailer
Ellie spends Contact committed to empirical evidence, and the film’s resolution asks her to trust an experience she can’t verify, the exact position she spent the whole film arguing against. The story invalidates its own protagonist’s worldview and calls that growth.
My rating: -10. Stupid story, bad ending. The stupidity is structural: the film builds a protagonist defined by a coherent epistemological position and then requires her to abandon that position as the film’s resolution. That’s not character development. That’s the writer winning an argument by rigging the scenario.
The frustrating thing about Contact is how good it is until it isn’t.
For two acts it’s the smart, patient first-contact movie I’d want somebody to make, and then the last act hauls its own heroine in front of a government panel and makes her argue the other side’s case. The finale plays like a debate where one side rigged the microphones. A -10 is what a film earns from me for building something this careful and then setting fire to it on purpose.
What the Film Sets Up
Jodie Foster’s Ellie Arroway is one of the better scientist protagonists in science fiction cinema. She’s precise, driven, willing to sacrifice personal relationships for professional obsession in ways that feel like actual scientific obsession instead of dramatic convenience. Her history, the father who died young, the radio telescope that became a surrogate for connection, the career built on the conviction that humanity isn’t alone, is developed with enough detail that she feels like a real person instead of a symbol.
Her epistemological position is stated clearly and repeatedly: she believes in evidence. She doesn’t believe in God because there’s no evidence for God.
She doesn’t believe in alien contact because there’s no verified evidence for alien contact. She applies the same standard to everything. This isn’t presented as arrogance or limitation, it’s presented as intellectual integrity, as the real position of someone who has thought carefully about what knowledge requires.
The first contact storyline builds slowly and with real care for the institutional mechanics of how SETI research works, how government and military apparatus would respond to verified alien signals, how the international community would negotiate access to alien technology. The procedural honesty of the first two acts is the film’s most valuable quality, and Foster plays it with complete conviction.
The Third Act and Its Failure
Ellie travels through the wormhole device. She experiences eighteen hours of subjective time, travels through wormholes, possibly encounters alien beings in the form of her dead father, receives messages about humanity’s future and place in the universe. She returns to Earth after what appears to be an instantaneous jump, her recorder contains eighteen hours of static, but all external evidence suggests she never went anywhere.
The film then asks her, and the audience, to accept that her experience was real despite the absence of evidence.
The government panel presents her with exactly the challenge she’d have put to anyone claiming an unverifiable transcendent experience. She has no evidence, only her testimony, and the film treats her insistence as the correct, grown-up response, the moment it loses me completely. Watching a scientist get beaten with her own rulebook while the movie congratulates her on her growth is about as insulting as a finale gets.
This is a film where the scientist learns that faith in unverifiable experience is epistemologically equivalent to faith based on evidence. That’s faith winning, by putting the scientist in a situation where her scientific standards can be turned against her.
Is Contact as good as people say?
Contact gets its -10 as a film with a strong protagonist, solid procedural honesty in its first two acts, Jodie Foster working at the top of her range, and a structural failure so fundamental that it damages everything else. The stupidity, invalidating your protagonist’s worldview by giving them an unverifiable experience and calling their acceptance of it growth, is a craft failure at the story’s deepest level.
A different ending, one that honored Ellie’s epistemology while admitting how hard her situation is, would have made a far better film. The ending Zemeckis delivered is the film’s defining failure, and I’d call it a betrayal of the one character the film got right. I’d have cut the hearing-room conversion entirely and let her walk out with eighteen hours of static and a question she can’t close.
Frequently Asked Questions
Palmer Joss and the Love Story Problem
Matthew McConaughey’s Palmer Joss, the religious thinker who works as Ellie’s love interest and the film’s voice of faith, is the script’s most convenient construct. He exists to embody the position that Ellie’s worldview opposes, to represent what faith offers that empiricism doesn’t, and to be romantically available to Ellie in ways that are dramatically convenient regardless of whether they make sense given who both characters are.
The love story between Ellie and Palmer is the film’s most significant structural problem outside the third act. These are two people with incompatible worldviews who are attracted to each other in ways the film presents as transcending the incompatibility. But the incompatibility is the point, Zemeckis wants the film to be about the synthesis of science and faith, and the love story is supposed to embody that synthesis. Instead it feels like the film is making two characters who shouldn’t work together work together because it needs them to.
Palmer’s job in the third act, providing the political cover that lets Ellie’s mission go ahead and then becoming the voice that challenges her to believe her unverifiable experience, is mechanical. He’s the plot device that enables the climax and the narrator who explains what the climax means. McConaughey does what he can with it, and I still can’t find a person in there. Palmer is a vending machine for the film’s thesis, and every time he turns up I can hear the screenwriters clearing their throats.
The First Contact Setup
The film’s procedural honesty about how scientific institutions work, the funding politics, the competition between researchers, the government and military apparatus that would surround a verified alien signal, is its most valuable quality. The SETI research is depicted with real attention to how that work happens: the patience of it, the statistical methodology, someone’s quality who has spent their professional life listening for something that most people assume isn’t there.
James Woods as National Security Advisor Kitz brings institutional weight to the scenes where government and scientific community collide over control of the first contact process. His priorities, security, national interest, political management of an unprecedented situation, are coherent and comprehensible even when they conflict with Ellie’s priorities. These scenes do what the film does best: show how institutions with different logics would interact when confronted with something outside any existing protocol.
The alien signal itself, mathematical and beautiful and carrying the plans for a transport device, gets the right mix of reverence and thriller mechanics.
Who controls the plans? What’s the device for? Can it be trusted? Those questions generate real tension in the middle act, and I was completely engrossed through that stretch. That’s exactly why the ending disappoints me so much. A dull film wouldn’t have bothered me. This one earned my trust and then spent it on a lecture.
What the Film Should Have Been
A version of Contact that takes Ellie’s empiricism seriously, that follows the logic of her worldview through the alien contact experience without using that experience to convert her to faith, would be a significantly better film. The alien contact could have been ambiguous in ways that her empiricism couldn’t resolve without requiring her to abandon empiricism. She could have ended in a state of real uncertainty, not certainty of the experience’s reality, but certainty that the evidence she has doesn’t support a definitive conclusion either way.
That’s the real condition for someone in Ellie’s position.
She had an experience. The evidence doesn’t confirm it. The rational response is sustained uncertainty and continued investigation, not the leap to faith that the film presents as growth. A film willing to leave Ellie in that uncertainty, alive to the experience, honest about the absence of evidence, continuing to work, would honor both the protagonist and the premise.
So it’s a -10, and the damn thing deserved every bit of it. A careful, intelligent first-contact story with a terrific heroine gets thrown away in the last act so the film can win an argument it never had the evidence for. I’ll forgive a dumb movie that knows it’s dumb long before I forgive a smart one that cheats at the finish, and Contact is the smart one that cheats. That’s why it sits below films with a fraction of its talent.
