Metacritic reviews

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

Contact delivers on more than a pure visual level, reiterating the idea that greatest progress is made taking "small steps" towards enlightenment.

Its discussions don't go very deep, and moviegoers with strong religious values may wonder why it comes down for humanism over spirituality.

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.

Faithful to Sagan's brand of popularized science, the film never reaches beyond Hollywood spectacle and sentimentality.

Little effort is made to churn up romantic chemistry between Foster and McConaughey. For better or worse, director Robert Zemeckis sticks to Sagan's original vision for these characters, in which they're basically totems embodying both sides of a philosophical dialectic.

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

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.

This bloated, self-important and logically absurd movie, made by the director of the equally historically hysterical "Forrest Gump," pretends to the thrones of Serious Thinking, of Important Messages and of Intellectual Provocation. If there were truly anything serious, important or intellectual about this movie, this planet would be in big trouble.

Contact sure is pretentious. It doesn't deliver on the deepthink, and it lacks the charge of good, honest pulp. It's schlock without the schlock.