September 1998

Contact:Special Edition
Reviewed by Karina Montgomery
DVD Format

Overall Enjoyment:
Picture Quality:
Sound Quality:
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Karina-Scale Rating: Matinee with Snacks

Starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Theatrical Release: 1997
DVD Release: 1998
Dolby Digital 5.1
Widescreen

Contact is the film version of the very excellent Carl Sagan novel, perfectly casting Jodie Foster as an independent, intelligent woman with an insatiable curiosity about the stars beyond and who receives first contact from beyond our solar system. It's mostly faithful to the book, and the departures are forgivable in the denser medium of film, but some have found the totally faithful ending to be lost in the translation.

This special edition DVD is definitely the way to go if your appreciation for a work grows after realizing just how much went into it. I mean, three audio commentary tracks! Jodie Foster talks about the acting experience, not just "this is how it was on the set that day," but also defining a character that she identified very strongly with, and working with some insidiously complicated effects shots. Foster is always a thinking woman, and rarely imparts a sense of fun in the roles she tackles (with the exception of Maverick), but her take on Ellie and Carl Sagan's book is one of reverence, and it comes through in her performance and her commentary. I am usually bored stiff by actors talking about acting, but Foster frequently delves past the motivation du jour into more of the bigger picture of what she was trying to do with her part.

Rudely, Zemeckis and Starkey talk through that breathtaking opening sequence, tempting me to shut them off entirely. I was least pleased with this audio track. Many of their observations are covered better by the other two tracks, and they make a lot of obvious points (such as pointing out character direction and foreshadowing that were self-explanatory). They lost major points for babbling during the opening. Foster and Ralston/Rosenbaum speak as well, but little and quietly. Respectfully.

The effects guys' track is incredibly self-serving, but I am so grateful that they point out shots that one would not even know had any effects in them -- the movie takes on a new life when one realizes the enormous amount of invisible magic happening. Just as Gary Sinise's legs were simply...gone in Forrest Gump, a great deal of what happens on screen in Contact, effects-wise, can just slip by unnoticed. The best shot in the movie, despite their explanation as to how they did it, I still had to replay three times at 1/8 speed, trying to see just how they pulled it off. Very cool.

I was pleased to see little artifacting, although considering the amount of computer data crammed into each frame of this movie, I am surprised the theatrical print didn't have pixels in it! It's a dual-layer disc. My one complaint with the letterboxing (which I am always in favor of) is the deep black of space is just not as black as the boxes, and it somehow lends a glare to the opening sequence. But maybe it's just me. This disc also has computer animation concepts and tests, special effects designs, and "more." The special features section, sadly, is mostly a lot of dry text that could have easily been liner notes instead -- but this is more tree-friendly. Within the special features is the innocuous "alien encounters" section which contains more dynamic audio-commentated sequences and features. Even if you watched the opening sequence with the effects supervisors' commentary, they go through it and others again in more detail here. Regrettably, it sometimes goobs into a weirdly scored PowerPoint presentation of what they wanted to do. This may be the best documented film project released to home video yet. They even say how many times they crashed the servers writing the opening sequence (25).

When I saw this movie in the theater, I thought as the film progressed (and thereby digressed from the book), it became weaker and weaker, until when it climaxes with the culmination of Foster's journey, and reclaims the original text, the movie can't sustain the "correct" plot elements, due to its own deviance from them. As a piece of craft, Contact is exquisitely planned and executed, but occasionally the liberties the makers took to make the wonderful book more accessible to the average audience member destroyed the point they were trying to make. And, on top of that, I really can't stand Matthew McConaughey. In a scene with Jodie, he looks like even more of a cocksure hack who stumbled accidentally into a career than ever before. Plus, after 12 Monkeys, David Morse is just not an actor to whom I can warm up.

Overall, the movie is greatly served by the technical information imparted by the commentary tracks, and so I would recommend this disc to any cinephile and Foster fan.

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