The Struggle of Proof and Faith - Contact (1997)
Can you proof something that you only have faith in? That’s the main question that pushes the story of the 2 hour fiction flick Contact. Jodie Foster played alongside Matthew McConaughey in this film. James Spade and Angela Basset were there, and also a host of other rather unfamiliar yet nevertheless great cast of characters. Robert Zemeckis wore the captain’s helmet behind the camera. The story was made from a novel by Carl Sagan.
A movie of this sort doesn’t come often. I couldn’t keep my eyes of the television set for almost the whole duration, except of course for those annoying moment when I have to go the loo. The dialogues are amazing, the scenes, especially the space shots, are incredibly vivid and realistic, and the characters.. they are just so powerful as if each character himself can be turned into a movie of his own.
I can help but feel respect to the director Robert Zemeckis in this film. He crafted the work so well, I can’t help being captivated by every scene he produced. The plot, I tell you, is amazing. Suspenseful to the very end, if you just loose 5 minutes at the start, or at the end, then you’ll lose a big puzzle that might just give clues to this movie’s unpredictable conclusion - that end factor you love that makes you discuss the film zealously with your friends when you just got out of the cinema. Personally i just can’t help thinking, in movies like these, how smart the director was. He was just basically many steps in front of us in every way. In the explosion scene in which the suicide bomber blew the “machine” that Jodie has to ride on, Zemeckis had given numerous clues in the earlier part of the film about who the bomber was. If you pay attention very well, then you’ll know who this guy was and what was his motive and intention for being there. These clues was given very smoothly that when I watched him for the first time, I thought he was just unimportant part of the scene, but actually, later on, he will be an essential character of the story. Or, the part in the end where Jodie’s whole experienced was being questioned and doubted, Zemeckis made every proof available from the beginning that the whole experience could exactly be it, just a delusion, while, in fact, we watched the whole show and witness ourself that it wasn’t – heck, it even made me questioned my judgement myself. In short, Zemeckis was just supernatural in this movie. Brian de Palma, handling the ultra-intricate first Mission Impossible film, was perhaps, in my view, the only real contender to him in terms of intricacy.
Most importantly, this fim, which tells the story inside a life a scientist (Foster) who long to prove alien exists, in the process, points out the most paradoxical fact human has struggle with for centuries: that God do exists, we can feel it, yet there is no way we can prove it.. This is the core of the film for me, at least. The film shows why we can’t always proof something, yet we know what we see or hear or feel is completely TRUE. The film corroborate our understanding about this problem by way of bringing up a character who has based her whole life on proofs and facts and placed her in a situation where she has to present to the audience something she knows really true but without any proof nor fact.
The mindblowing morality about this film is human often can know something is true without being ever able to proof it. And this is what happens when we think of our divine creator, our supreme being, God. God is something we can feel and we know true, but yet there is no direct proof to support it. Watching this simple concept evolves into a tangle of stories, powerful characters, vivid pictures and realistic sounds is such a delight to see and what made this Zemeckis/Sagan flick will still be intriguing and unique compared to many other ubiquitous hollywood flicks that had graced our cinema screens from time to time.
