Contact: Sadly Out of Touch

I really wanted to like this one. I have great respect and affection for director Robert Zemeckis's movies, and this one works pretty well until it fails completely in the penultimate scene.

Contact could have been great, if only Zemeckis had listened to Matthew McConaughey's character, who told Ellie (Jody Foster) that he couldn't support her entering the "Machine" as a representative of mankind because she believed that the 95% of the planet who believe in God were delusional.

The screenplay does a fair job of presenting both sides of the God argument and there are sympthetic (and unsympathetic) characters on both sides, but the key antagonist (a bleached-blonde whackjob from rural Utah--Jake Busey) is a religious fundamentalist, so we know on what side of the argument the filmmakers fall.

That didn't surprise me, but what did is that Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Castaway, Forrest Gump), normally a director with a pretty good handle on making a crowd-pleasing (and thus profitable) film, flatly avoids giving his audience (remember that 95%?) what they really want: a film about the infinite yet benign universe and our tiny but important place in it. He simply cannot bring himself to do so. Why? Zemeckis strays a long way from Carl Sagan's book anyway, so why not craft an ending that will please the 95% who are buying tickets to the movies?

It would have been easy: When Ellie arrives on the bright nighttime island shore a billion miles from earth, she encounters a being that she at first believes is her father (David Morse), deceased since Ellie was ten. But it's only seconds before she realizes that this cannot possibly be her father; there is no such thing as life after death, according to her religion, Science.

"We thought it would be easier for you," says Morse, "if I looked like your father." Oh, really. Isn't this just the same old condescending crap we've seen in a dozen sci-fi movies (The Day the Earth Stood Still, to name just one)?

The lesson is that we humans are just too stupid and superstitious to be able to grasp infinity, etc. So these benign aliens, in their infinite condescension, pull our most sacred and tender memories out of our subconscious and prop them up in front of us, torturing us with fake fantasms. All-knowing? While they were in there rooting around, didn't they encounter the pain of loss? And these are the good guys? So, aside from this being a hackneyed, tired plot device, Zemeckis blew it when he made Morse an alien at all.

Contact has grossed near $200 million, but one small change would have doubled that amount: When Ellie asks the apparition if he is her father, he should have said, "Yes, Ellie, it's me! Isn't it wonderful? Life goes on, and there is an entire universe awaiting us on the other side of death's door! Your mother and I love you and we're waiting for you when your time on earth is done."

There wouldn't have been a dry eye in the house, for this is the secret wish of everyone who has ever lost a loved one. (Even the other 5% -- come on, admit it.)

And how is such an ending contrary to Science anyway? Isn't it less fantastic to believe in life after death than to believe that some unknown alien race (unknown even to the alien who greets Ellie on that distant, sandy shore) created a transit system a billion years ago and then disappeared? How is that any different than believing in God? He isn't exactly around to sign autographs, either.

The only answer is that the space ship we momentarily glimpse between wormhole jumps on Ellie's trip to Bali somehow makes it more palatable to the athiests in Hollywood. After all, if these god-like aliens use space ships, then we can't be too far behind them, right? No humility required, no prostrating ourselves before Diety. All we have to do is acquire a few more scientific facts and we too can fold space and time and be all-powerful. How needs God and all that moralizing hoohah?

And that's the real reason Hollywood eschews the crowd-pleasing and Occam's Razor-attuned ending I've suggested: the core fact is that most Hollywood denizen's spiritual growth was arrested during their teen years. They deeply fear the notion of God, a being that has expectations and demands upon us.

Science, on the other hand, makes no such demands, no such expectations, no such -- dare I say it? -- judgments. And that is why Science is the preferred Hollywood god, because they, like any rebellious teenager, don't want to hear about responsibility; all they want is power, avoidance of consequences, and an endless summer. (Hence the cool surfing spot out past Vega.)

So, to spite his own face, Zemeckis refused to give the 95% of us who actually believe in a God that is bigger than our own selfishness, what we go to movies for: hope that there is something bigger than us out there -- and not just bigger brains, but bigger souls.

Don't tell me Hollywood always follows the money. When it comes to core issues, like the teenager who doesn't know where money comes from, they cannot face the facts: 95% of the planet is probably onto something.