Contact Blu-ray delivers great video and audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
Dr. Ellie Arroway, after years of searching, finds conclusive radio proof of intelligent aliens, who send plans for a mysterious machine. Based on the novel by Carl Sagan.
To quote sci-fi great Arthur C. Clarke, "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe, or
we are not. Both are equally terrifying." And both, most would agree, are equally difficult to
physically substantiate. While Clarke was speaking of extraterrestrial intelligence, his quip could just
as aptly apply to God, that other unproven heavenly figure. Astronomer, skeptical inquirer,
and agnostic Carl Sagan, author of Contact, devoted his life to seeking the uneasily
obtained answer to one of humanity's central questions—are we alone? Of course, his was a strictly
scientific quest, one that led him to being an early proponent of SETI—the Search for Extra-
Terrestrial Intelligence—but he was also interested in what ramifications the discovery of alien life
would have on our world's insular, anthropocentric faiths. And yet Sagan, unlike hardliners like
Richard Dawkins, didn't want to destroy religion. He just wanted to see it evolve, so to speak.
The truth is out there.
In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan wrote, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at
science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our
prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'?" Sagan then concludes that a "religion, old or
new,
that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to
draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." Fittingly,
then, Contact is a film that explores the intersection of science and faith, a film that
admits there are no easy answers, and that looks outward in transcendent amazement at the
universe that we inhabit. The opening shot literally does just that. We start on a close-up of
Earth as seen from space, and hear a cacophony of radio chatter and television signals, all
broadcasting out into the void. As we pull back, past the moon, past Jupiter and Saturn and the
nearest star systems, the sounds subside into silence and our tiny place in the Milky Way is lost
among billions upon billions of galaxies tumbling end over end into nothingness. Yes, we are very
small.
The film starts in earnest with Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), a SETI researcher working at the
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Given the fringe nature of her work, funding is quickly cut by
David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt), a soulless scientist-turned-bureaucrat who thinks Ellie is wasting
her time looking for little green men. After procuring private resources from eccentric bajillionaire
industrialist S.R. Hadden (John Hurt), Ellie continues her search at the Very Large Array in New
Mexico, where she discovers a pulsing signal from the Vega system that contains a sequence of
prime numbers—indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. What's more, the signal
also includes a ciphered message, blueprints for a machine that Ellie theorizes might be some
kind of interstellar travel device. The U.S. government—in a display of uncharacteristic efficiency
—quickly builds the machine, but it's destroyed by a religious fanatic. S.R. Hadden then reveals to
Ellie that a second machine has been built in Japan ("First rule of government spending: Why
build one when you can have two for twice the price?") and invites her to be the device's
passenger. What follows—and I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the film—is an
interstellar voyage, an almost religious experience that Ellie, much to her scientific chagrin, can't
prove actually happened.
Throughout the film, Ellie's belief in the extraterrestrials—she has faith, without
evidence, that the machine serves a benevolent purpose—is compared and contrasted with the
religious belief of Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), a theological pop-philosopher with whom
Ellie shares a one night stand in Puerto Rico. (He's "a man of the cloth, without the cloth.") While
lying in bed with Ellie, Palmer describes his religious conversion, a subjective experience that left
him absolutely convinced of God's existence. This is echoed later in Ellie's journey into the
cosmos, a trip she can neither deny nor substantially prove. When Joss is called to comment on
the validity of Ellie's claims, he tidily sums up the film's message. "As a person of faith," he says,
"I'm bound by a different covenant than Dr. Arroway. But our goal is one and the same: the
pursuit of Truth. I, for one, believe her." The point seems to be that science and religion don't
have to be opposing camps, or non-overlapping magisteria, as atheism-apologist Stephen Jay
Gould has described them. Rather, the whole of the human experience can be encompassed if
religion lets go of some outmoded myths and if science accepts faith as an adjacent method of
discovery. Now, I'm the first to admit that that's an extraordinarily tall order, but I have to give
credit to the film for not being preachy or aggressively one-sided. When it comes down to it,
Contact is about having a sense of awe and curiosity about our place in the cosmos,
about strict rationalists learning to wonder at the majesty of the universe, and about the
religiously devout becoming comfortable enough with their own beliefs to investigate the
empirical evidence at hand.
With all this scientific/philosophical talk, the film could've easy devolved into a flighty, didactic
discourse, but thankfully the proceedings are grounded by solid acting—Jodie Foster's brilliant
performance is impassioned and vulnerable—a relatively tight script, and a sense of realism that's
lacking in most big-budget sci-fi epics. Contact certainly has its share of loose threads—a
few gaping plot holes and a handful of eyebrow-raising implausibilities among them—but it
requires much less suspension of disbelief than similar films. Part of this is due, naturally, to Carl
Sagan's continued involvement with the project. After he first wrote the screenplay in 1979, the
title roasted for some 15 years in development hell, a waiting game that prompted Sagan to go
ahead and write a best-selling novelization of the story. When production finally geared up, he
was on hand to assist with scientific accuracy. It would've been interesting to hear his views on
the finished film, but sadly, he died six months before its release. Still, Contact is
dedicated "To Carl," and the film is a fitting tribute to a man who spent his life popularizing
scientific inquiry.
Aside from a few small quibbles, most of them relating to the film's source material, I was mostly
satisfied with Contact's 1080p/VC-1 encoded transfer. I've read some recent buzz on the
internets regarding injudiciously applied DNR, but if digital noise reduction was used here, it's very
slight, as this transfer still retains a distinct filmic quality, with none of the smearing or waxiness
usually associated with noise reduction measures. A thin stratum of grain is apparent in most
shots, and it looks natural enough, to me anyway. The only segment that seems patently
artificial is the climatic "beach" scene. Foster is in front of a green screen composite shot, and it
looks like the edges of her face have been smoothed out to make the separation between the real
foreground and the fake background less jarring. Of course, this blurring is all too evident in high
definition. This scene also suffers from over-saturated colors, including some much-too-ruddy skin
tones. Contrast has a tendency to get a little hot throughout the film, causing black levels to
occasionally crush shadow detail and giving certain colors, like reds and greens, a somewhat
overheated appearance. But I should stress that this was never overtly distracting, and never
diminished my enjoyment of the film. In general, Contact looks great in its upgrade to
Blu-ray, noticeably besting the now-ancient DVD in every area. While some of the digital
composite shots are soft by modern standards, most of the film shows an excellent sense of
presence and clarity for its age, with fine texture apparent in facial detail and the weft of cloth.
Plus, the print itself is quite clean, with only a few scattered white specks and the rare instance of
contrast wavering. Eagle-eyed videophiles may find some nits to pick, but overall, this release of
Contact is largely true to source.
Less controversial is Contact's able but not always willing Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround track,
which pumps out some satisfying sound when the film really calls for it, but seems surprisingly
vacant at other times. The film's audio showpiece is the frenetic wormhole sequence, which opens
with the circular rotors of the machine sweeping through the rear channels in a kind of slow
strobing effect accompanied by rumbling LFE resonance. Aside from this brilliant bit of sound
design, there are few discrete, cross-channel effects in the track, and the rear speakers don't get
much play. There's some crowd chatter and environmental ambience on occasion, but during
certain scenes—like a massive rainstorm—the surround channels never come to life like you might
expect. Still, the mix aptly conveys the drama of the film, utilizing a solid dynamic range and
prioritizing both dialogue and Alan Silvestri's fantastic score, which is full of rich but understated
cues that support rather than overwhelm. Contact has one or two eargasm-inducing
moments, but expect a mostly quiet, dialogue-driven experience.
Commentary Tracks
Owners of Contact's DVD release will recognize these commentary tracks—and, indeed,
the rest of the special features—but if you've never had the film on home video, you won't be
disappointed here. First up is a fantastic solo track by Jodie Foster, who weaves complex character
and story analysis with on-set anecdotes and ultra-intelligent thematic discussion. She's very
soft-spoken throughout, but with warmth and insight, Foster's track is, for my money, the
highlight of the supplementary features. Next, director Robert Zemeckis and producer Steve
Starkey offer a solid mix of technical and production design details and their own thoughts about
the film's message. Visual effects supervisors Ken Ralston and Stephen Rosenbaum wrap things
up, naturally, with a track focused on the many CGI composite shots in the film. I wasn't too
engaged by the last track, but the commentaries by Zemeckis and Foster are essential listening
for fans.
"Making Of" Featurettes
In The Making of the Opening Shot (SD, 20:02), Ken Ralston and Stephen Rosenbaum
guide us through the process of building the epic CGI pullback shot that starts the film, from
reference photos and wire-frame animatics, to light shading, choreography, and layering. At
twenty minutes and featuring a lot of repetitive imagery, the feature runs a little long, especially
considering how simple the shot seems by "modern" standards. The most interesting bit is at the
very end, when a string of statistics shows various technical facts about the opening shot, like
how many computer hours it took to complete (117,384.16), how many gigs of disc space it
consumed (184.3), and how many individual pixels were used during the sequence (13,396,
973,280).
Likewise, in The Making of the NASA Machine Destruction (SD, 5:52) and The Making
of the Harrier Landing (SD, 8:55), Ralston and Rosenbaum dissect the sequences layer by
layer and show us all the individual elements used to make the shots look convincing.
High Speed Compositing Reel (SD, 6:08)
In this segment, Ralston and Rosenberg explain high-speed compositing—the use of mattes to
layer photographic or CGI elements—and show us several examples from the film.
Machine Fly By, Hadden's Plane, and NASA Control Room (SD, 2:21 total)
Here, 3-D computer graphics artist Tim Wilcox gives us a brief look at the CGI geometry used for
previsualization on certain scenes. I'm not sure why all three of these segments couldn't have
been combined into one.
5.1 Music-Only Track
This feature allows you to watch the entire film sans sound effects and dialogue, putting Alan
Silvestri's excellent score in the forefront. Do note that the music is presented by way of a lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 encode.
As it examines the slim, Venn diagram-style overlap between science and religion, and prompts us
to look to the sky in wonder, Contact is, in my view, one of the better sci-fi films of the
1990s. Fans will be glad to see that the movie has received a decent treatment on Blu-ray, and I do
encourage everyone to listen to Jodie Foster's excellent audio commentary. Recommended, with no
reservations.
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