In 1997 director Robert Zemeckis, fresh off an impressive string of hits (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, all three Back to the Future movies, and Forrest Gump) only had one flop under his belt, the bizarre black comedy, Death Becomes Her.
He was on a roll that few filmmakers at the time, save for Steven Spielberg, could boast of.
It is with that kind of swagger that Warner Bros.
handed him the keys to a feature film adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel, Contact - a project that had been stalled for myriad reasons throughout the 80s and 90s.
Sagan had tried and failed to get his novel adapted to the big screen several times before, mostly to failure as a result of studio personnel changes and in one absurd case involving previous director George Miller's insistence that the Pope be written in as a major character.
Let the record show that the Pope doesn't appear once in Sagan's novel.
Eventually the project landed in Zemeckis' hands and the rest is history! Well, actually it's not.
You'd be hard pressed to find most people putting Contact on their list of favorite films.
In fact, the most pop culture notoriety this movie has seen comes from an episode of South Park, in which it is mocked for failing to deliver on its vague promise of having something to do with aliens.
You can point the finger at Warner Bros' marketing campaign for making that promise in the first place.
The trailers for Contact leaned heavily on the idea that we would be meeting with an alien race and that would be the whole point of the film.
It wasn't and as a result audiences were pissed.
Contact opened in the second week of July at #2 with a respectable weekend gross of $20.
5 million dollars.
Unfortunately for Warner Bros.
, Men In Black opened the week before at #1 and not only held onto that spot the following week, it actually delivered the aliens that Contact never even had in the first place.
So misguided was this marketing strategy that the film kept slipping further and further down the box office chart in the subsequent weeks.
Dreck such as George of the Jungle and the abysmal Spawn (which opened in the same #2 position as Contact and somehow grossed $19 million dollars, coming just shy of Contact's first week gross) also helped to push it out of the top 10.
Another blow to Contact was its hefty $90 million dollar budget.
Some of this budget went towards the beautiful final act in which Jodie Foster's Dr.
Ellie Arroway makes her journey to the Vega star system in the alien-designed, human-built space taxi, but we'll get to that in a bit.
The bulk of the money was spent on landing star power.
Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey didn't come cheap, especially in 1997.
Their co-stars probably demanded a much lower payday but there are a lot of secondary characters in this film - all of them delivering fantastic performances to boot.
Tom Skerritt, Angela Basset, William Fichtner, James Woods, John Hurt - these are all fantastic actors giving top notch performances here.
Most importantly, these were all people who starred in movies made for adults so it made sense that they would be cast and paid well for Contact, a movie for adults that examined adult themes and ideas that most people don't even think about until they're in their thirties.
What themes, I imagine you asking yourselves? Oh nothing heavy, just the idea of feeling alone in the world and searching for answers in the heavens rather than in the company of your fellow man.
You know, typical sci-fi action stuff.
I'm sure Warner Bros were kicking themselves for not rewriting this as a zany alien invasion shoot-em-up starring Howie Long who saves the day by throwing a football into the space taxi to jam it up and prevent any more colorful aliens from coming to Earth.
But let's get back to the themes of Contact, shall we? Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) has always been interested in communicating with people "out there," whether it be a faceless voice on a CB radio or with the mysterious extraterrestrials who reside in the Vegan star system and communicate via drum-n-bass.
This longing to communicate with the unknown is at first ignited by the death of her mother and then further fanned by the passing of her father, which she blames herself for not keeping another bottle of the medicine he needed on the first floor of their house.
This idea of having more than one of what you need is later revisited when John Hurt's eccentric billionaire S.
R.
Hadden tells Ellie that the US government built a second secret space catamaran with his help and of course towards the end of the film when Ellie meets the alien and it's her dad - something South Park took umbrage with.
As I mentioned before, the main theme of Contact is the idea that we're so isolated within ourselves that we'd rather point our gaze toward the stars in search of humanity than simply find it staring back at us right here on Earth.
This point is made by Matthew McConaughey's Christian philosopher and Arroway's semi-love interest, Palmer Joss - two non-words that are also not the name of any human, ever.
Despite his unfortunate namesake, McConaughey's believer is actually brilliantly painted as a skeptic in this film's universe of Ellie Arroway's unshakable belief in what we're led to believe is the "true" high power: alien life.
We're so pulled in by the gravity of Arroway's belief (thanks to a terrific performance by Foster) that our reaction to Joss's belief in God is dismissal and resentment for even suggesting there isn't life out there that can give us what's missing.
Before it is revealed that a second space ferry exists, Palmer Joss purposely sabotages Arroway's chances of being the one who gets to take a ride on the spacey train by publicly asking her one simple question: "Do you believe in God?" Of course she tries to answer diplomatically but in the end she concedes that she does not and therefore Tom Skerritt's dastardly scheming opportunist David Drumlin gets the nod to take the space walk.
Anyone who has seen this film knows how that works out.
In the only bad performance in Contact's 150 minute running time, the breathtakingly handsome Jake Busey rolls his eyes into the back of his head like a great white shark about to snap into a sea lion and detonates a bomb, destroying the space bangbus and everyone on board including himself and his signature veneers.
But the seed has now been planted in both Arroway's and the audience's mind: was this part of God's plan? If it is, God is one hell of a CGI engineer.
Once Arroway's space pod drops into the space whirly-bird, you get to see where the rest of the money went after principle casting.
Arroway's trip through the cosmos is stunning to behold, especially when you remember that this was 1997.
Spawn was only a month away, folks! The depiction of a cosmic subway system is truly beautiful.
What's even more beautiful is the scene when Arroway finally makes the titular contact with the alien and it is indeed her father, or at least that's the form it takes.
Ellie is assured that this is real and is only the first step in a process that has been in effect for longer than anyone can remember.
The only problem is, Arroway can't prove any of this.
The Google glass headpiece she was equipped with only recorded static and it appears to everyone on Earth that her space egg merely dropped straight into the water and didn't travel through the cosmos at all! Director Robert Zemeckis has given us all the pieces but leaves it up to us to put them together (much like when Forrest Gump taught Elvis how to dance like a cripple.
On second thought, this is nothing like that and proves to be a far more rewarding cinematic experience).
Palmer Joss has his God.
In the end, Ellie Arroway has her alien.
But neither of them can prove it.
We're left with the idea of averting our gaze from the heavens, whether it's aimed at God or Alf, and onto one another.
If God and aliens can co-exist, surely mankind can.
Contact dared to tackle these themes and asked us as an audience to ponder bigger ideas that just seem out of place during summer blockbuster season.
In the end, this film is just another example of a studio getting involved and gumming up the works.
Deceitful marketing and poor timing ultimately doomed Contact to be ignored by history and relegated to niche editorials reminiscing about Hollywood's tragically underrated gems like this one and the one you're reading now.
If you've never seen Contact or it's been a while since you last watched it, it's definitely worth revisiting.
Especially if you were one of those who were initially turned off when you were promised aliens and instead were given an exploration of man's relationship with himself and God.