arodplatypus 's review for:

Contact by Carl Sagan

4.0

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I was torn between giving Contact 3 stars or 4 stars. I was generally fascinated with the story, and Sagan weaves an elegant, intertextual narrative, elucidating the tension between religion and science, individualism and collectivism, and our personal mythologies and our cosmic mythologies. The climax was a riveting page-turner. However, the last 20 or 30 pages were a real let-down. In those pages, the text was very heavy-handed in its declarations of intelligent design and a creator, which is incredibly disappointing. Why can't it be enough to show us the magnificence of space, the awe-inspiring complexity of science, the power of humanity when it chooses to unite in a common cause, and the expanding layers of the mystery that is our universe? The movie did a better job of uniting religion and science as a quest for truth without telling us what to believe in the end. Part of the beauty of this story was that the more we ask, the more we learn, and the more we learn, the more we realize we have yet to learn. Leaving the story there would've been beautiful, poetic, and full of truth.