Contact (1997) Critic Reviews

Contact is that rare big-budget motion picture that places ideas, characters, and plot above everything else. Read the full review

Contact is superior popular filmmaking, both polished and effective. But despite its success and its serious intentions, it's finally a movie where the storytelling makes more of an impact than the story. Read the full review

Sagan's novel Contact provides the inspiration for Robert Zemeckis' new film, which tells the smartest and most absorbing story about extraterrestrial intelligence since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."Read the full review

If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts.Read the full review

When Contact finally comes alive, it leaves you frightened and thrilled and emotionally overwrought, as only a child can be. The rest is pandering. Read the full review

Beautifully crafted and legitimately involving once it locks onto a dramatic track, film benefits from remaining mysterious about how far it intends to go in pursuing its themes, but also suffers from long-windedness and preachy final-reel explicitness as to its message.Read the full review

The movie, adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan, presents one long chain of teasingly open-ended questions about reason versus faith and technology versus religion, and ends up tentatively embracing mysticism over rationality.Read the full review

Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, may be too long, too self-important and too "Gump"-like to be completely satisfying. But it contains elements that are so striking they pretty much redeem the film. Read the full review

Contact aims to be a film of ideas but serves too many of them half-baked. Read the full review