Contact

I finally managed to catch the movie “Contact” playing on our local cable channel, Astro. I didn’t see when it first came out since I just got back from the States and had other more urgent things to do besides watching a movie – finding a job for a start.

I did catch glimpses of this flick when it played on cable a few years back and also its subsequent re-runs but never was interested to sit through the whole film. On the surface, the slow-paced drama wasn’t intriguing enough for my frenetic, on-the-go lifestyle back then. Now that I, more often than not, can be seen in the boudoir reclining and nursing Sadia, gazing at the telly is quite high on the list of my daily activities.

I actually didn’t see the beginning of Contact but when Jodie Foster was running frantically through a field of gigantic satellites it caught my attention.

Contact is directed by Robert Zemeckis, one of Hollywood’s successful and renowned directors. He also directs Forrest Gump, Back to the Future and The Frighteners, to name a few. Its protagonist, an Academy award actress, Jodie Foster successfully carries the role with much credibility and evokes a wide range of emotions onto the movie screen.

Jodie plays a well-established professor cum scientist whose passion for all things extra-terrestrial was confirmed one day when she (and her cohorts) finally made contact with alien beings through a series of sound and other encoded signals.

The counterpoint to Jodie’s character is Matthew McConaughey, a celebrated Reverend whose wisdom and advice are often sought by the Government on matters related to and/or affecting religious sensitivity.

These two happened to be lovers while in college but their diverging viewpoints and belief systems led to their break-up. Needless to say, their passion was reignited when they reunited for a project involving these aliens’ secret message.

After Jodie and her team triumphantly deciphered a hidden message by the aliens, the government agreed to build a multi-billion machine according to the specifications detailed in the message. It was their hope that this machine would enable them to enter a different time portal and finally communicate with this alien species.

Jodie’s dedication to the project was however met with disappointment when she wasn’t chosen to be the one to sit in and man the ‘time machine.’ This was in large part due to her atheistic stance on life that runs counter to the pro-religion government. As a ‘logic-oriented’ scientist, Jodie believes in Darwin’s natural selection and theory of evolution. Not in the existence of a Supreme Being. In other words, choosing her to pilot the time pod was bad for politics. Unbeknownst to her, Matthew also played a hand in convincing the Selection Committee to reject Jodie since he feared losing her lest the project proved to be fatal.

When a freak accident involving an anti-alien fanatic destroyed the project, she got a second chance to enter the elusive time dimension after being actively sought by a wealthy, eccentric philanthropist who had already built an exact replica of the machine at an undisclosed location.

Equipped with a portable camera secured on her head, she crossed the threshold to a series of unfamiliar, strange planes where our usual perception of time and space is nonexistent. At her last surreal ‘stop’, she encountered her father who had died a few years earlier. In actuality, the alien assumed the form of her dad, someone whom she was close and comfortable with, to answer some questions that she might have in her capacity as a scientist and a daughter.

Following the discourse with her father, she ‘regained consciousness’ and found herself being rescued by men working at the base where the time pod was installed and launched.

When she inquired them as to how long they had waited for her pod to be orbited back to earth, they gave her a bewildered look saying that she never left the place and the pod had just simply fell to the sea from where it was hung.

And it only took 5-7 seconds for it to tumble down to the water.

Jodie was adamant that her experience was real. It was close to a few hours that she was THERE. In this OTHER spatial dimension. Her only proof - the recorded images that she took - however came out as only static.

She was devastated that the Committee that investigated her findings didn’t believe her. Since she didn’t have scientific backing to her discovery, they dismissed the whole episode as quackery and a figment of her wild imagination. From that moment on, she realized she only has her faith to fall back on….

What she didn’t know was that the static images on the camera did capture a few hours worth of pictorial data, NOT 5-7 seconds when she had crashed to the sea!

The juxtaposition of science and religion in this gem of a movie has a profound effect on me. I find the unraveling of Jodie’s character as she was assailed with images and sensations beyond the ordinary human experience, resonates with genuine feelings of awe and remorse. The mostly level-headed Jodie became emotional and found herself in a sticky situation when the events that mattered to her couldn’t be explained away with science or logic.

The faithless Jodie was shown by God, that even her trustworthy science did not have the capability and tools to replicate or prove empirically her presence at a different dimension. The film came to a full, karmic circle as evidenced when the professor was ridiculed by her rational-thinking peers and the public. In the last scene, as she sat down near the seemingly bottomless ravine of Grand Canyon (or was it someplace else?), contemplating her cumulative set of experiences, I believe she has now come to terms with her faith in God, or a Supreme Being if you may. To me, the boundless abyss aptly represents no matter how much knowledge we have earned in this lifetime, we are still small when compared to the sometime unfathomable yet undeniably infinite wisdom of God. So, at the end of the day, we have to take it to faith that God knows best!