Contact - 1997

This movie has some interesting points and Jodie Foster is always good, but Matthew McCoghnay’s character is completely useless, there was absolutely no need for any kind of forced-love-story in this movie. 

Foster plays Ellie: as a girl she loved to talk to people far away on the cq, and she grew up to be a brilliant scientist, listening for messages from outer space. Not many believe in her project, but a mysterious rich man gives her money to continue her research. Finally she receives, along with her team, a message from space: a transmission of Hitler at the Olympics games, received and sent back with instructions to build a strange machine. The mysterious rich man also gives her a code to understand the data, and the machine is build. Nobody knows what it is really for, and there’s a competition to decide who will have to try it; Ellie applies of course, but a veteran is chosen over her, obviously. Good. Still, there’s a rebellious organization that is against this whole alien-thing because they don’t have our same God and stuff like that. Fanatics, to be clear. Ellie recognizes one of them in disguise but it’s too late to stop him. He has a bomb and the entire machine is destroyed. It’s not over though, because the rich guy had another machine built for him, in secret. So she enters it and goes on this journey… It basically is a big construction with a ball where she enters, only room for one person. The journey starts with the ball falling… and all the people there see is the ball landing in the water, directly, without going anywhere, and they think the mission has failed. She says otherwise. When the ball was dropped, she went through a lot of space tunnels, long tunnels, and she meets someone. An alien appears to her taking her father resemblance. She says it was a beautiful experience that lasted 18 hours, but when she comes back they tell her it all lasted a second. There’s an inquiry on the mission, many people don’t believe her, but she insists with her story even if she can’t prove it to them.

The entire sub-plot about God was also useless, just like MM’s character. Useless and pointless. It always annoys me the argument “I don’t believe in God because I’m a scientist”, it is so silly! How can they say that? Incredibly silly.