Contact (1997)

This week, Shat The Movies looks to the stars with Contact, Robert Zemeckis’s thoughtful, talky, and occasionally frustrating sci-fi drama about faith, science, and whether humanity is ready for the truth. Based on Carl Sagan’s novel and anchored by a career-best performance from Jodie Foster, Contact dares to ask big questions—then spends two and a half hours arguing about who gets to answer them.

Gene and Big D debate whether this is smart, adult science fiction or a preachy lecture disguised as a blockbuster. They dig into Matthew McConaughey’s spiritual hot takes, the movie’s suspicious politics, the weirdly hostile government oversight, and one of the most memorable fake-out climaxes of the ’90s. Along the way, they ask the ultimate Shat question: is Contact profound—or just very impressed with itself?

Plot Summary

A driven scientist discovers an alien signal containing instructions to build a mysterious machine, forcing humanity to confront the conflict between science, faith, politics, and the possibility that we are not alone.

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