Film
Electric Shadows: Contact
- Director
- Robert Zemeckis
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 140 mins
For all its grand cosmic ideas, this visually impressive, intellectually flimsy SF movie would be impossible to take seriously without the conviction that Jodie Foster brings to her role as tight-arsed Ellie Arroway, a scientist who has channelled her grief at the loss of her parents into an all-consuming obsession with the existence of extra-terrestrial life. Sadly, Gumpmeister Robert Zemeckis’s film, adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan, tries so hard to please everyone that its New Age fence-sitting finally destroys both its intellectual and narrative ambition. The set-up is a promising one: an encrypted radio message from a distant star appears to offer an opportunity for contact with the ETs, but seizing this chance requires international economic co-operation on a massive scale, a giant leap of faith, and the sacrifice of one human life for an unknowable scientific return. But having placed Foster’s mature, atheistic scientist in direct conflict with the establishment’s vague, spiritual waffle, Zemeckis brings the whole thing thudding back to Earth with trite heartstring-tugging.
It’s back on screen in the Cathedral’s new monthly Electric Shadows series of films deemed to have a “theological aspect”. This one’s introduced by Dr. Mark Bould, who teaches Film Studies and Literature at UWE Bristol. He also co-edits the journal Science Fiction Film and Television and the book series Studies in Global Science Fiction.
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