Reply #46: Contact didn't try to be a move about personal experiences, though. [View All]

I couldn't agree more that great literature and movies can be built around purely personal experiences, but not if the entire plot premise is the effort of meeting another species!

Contact, therefore, began as a movie about first contact, and turned into a movie about A contact, namely, the main character's contact.

I mean, they start the movie in CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS about the value and dangers of trying to meet aliens, with an entire love interest character about the possibilities of new life, and it turns out that meeting aliens is as informative and transformative as an Oprah show BROADCAST TO ONE PERSON.

Could it have been LESS dramatic, more drained of ideas or imagination than that? What's the point?

Do you think all the characters who believed in her got something, besides believing in her?

As for Signs, if you could get past the earth being taken over by aliens who had no greater power than to run fast and a scary fingernail but hadn't figured out the secret of defending against a baseball bat....