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Contact (1997)
Front Cover Actor Back Cover
Angela Bassett Rachel Constantine
Geoffrey Blake Fisher
William Fichtner Kent
Jodie Foster Ellie Arroway
John Hurt S.R. Hadden
Rob Lowe Richard Rank
Maximillian Martini Willie
Matthew McConaughey Palmer Joss
David Morse Ted Arroway
Tom Skerritt David Drumlin
James Woods Michael Kitz
Movie Details
Genre Drama; Mystery; Science-Fiction
Director Robert Zemeckis
Producer Steve Starsky; Robert Zemeckis
Writer Michael Goldenburg; James V. Hart
Studio Warner Bros.
Language English
Audience Rating PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Running Time 153 mins
Country USA
Color Color
IMDb Rating 7.3
Plot
If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.

The opening and closing moments of Robert (Forrest Gump) Zemeckis's Contact astonish viewers with the sort of breathtaking conceptual imagery one hardly ever sees in movies these day--each is an expression of the heroine's lifelong quest (both spiritual and scientific) to explore the meaning of human existence through contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie begins by soaring far out into space, then returns dizzyingly to earth until all the stars in the heavens condense into the sparkle in one little girl's eye. It ends with that same girl as an adult (Jodie Foster)--her search having taken her to places beyond her imagination--turning her gaze inward and seeing the universe in a handful of sand. Contact traces the journey between those two visual epiphanies. Based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact is exceptionally thoughtful and provocative for a big-budget Hollywood science fiction picture, with elements that recall everything from 2001 to The Right Stuff. Foster's solid performance (and some really incredible alien hardware) keep viewers interested, even when the story skips and meanders, or when the halo around the golden locks of rising-star-of-a-different-kind Matthew McConaughey (as the pure-Hollywood-hokum love interest) reaches Milky Way-level wattage. Ambitious, ambiguous, pretentious, unpredictable--Contact is all of these things and more. Much of it remains open to speculation and interpretation, but whatever conclusions one eventually draws, Contact deserves recognition as a rare piece of big-budget studio filmmaking on a personal scale. --Jim Emerson
Personal Details
Seen It Yes
Index 126
Collection Status In Collection
Links Amazon US
All Movie Guide
DVD Empire
Atlantic DVD
Product Details
Format DVD
Region Region 1
Screen Ratio Widescreen 2.35:1 Color (Anamorphic)
Layers Single Side, Dual Layer
UPC (Barcode) 085391504122
Chapters 43
Release Date 2/3/2004
Subtitles English; French; Spanish
Packaging Snap Case
Audio Tracks ENGLISH: Dolby Digital 5.1 [CC]
FRENCH: Dolby Digital Surround
Nr of Disks/Tapes 1
Extra Features
Color Closed-captioned Dolby Widescreen
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