Dr. Ellie Arroway (Foster) has been listening all her life. She listened to the ham radio her father (David Morse) set up for her when she was a child, trying to contact people around the world. As an adult, she works on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project and listens to the stars.

While on the project she meets Palmer Joss (McConaughey), a man who believes deeply in God and is searching to discover how much of a benefit science has really been to the human race. Palmer quickly falls for Ellie and they have a brief affair. However, when SETI's funding is cut by Dr. David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt), Ellie heads up her own project in New Mexico financed by a Howard Hughes-type billionaire named S.R. Hadden (John Hurt).

Ellie pushes the project as far as she can, desperately listening. Just as the project's about to end, she hears a signal from space. It's definitely intelligent and it's more than just an audio signal. There's surprising video footage and schematic diagrams for some sort of machine.

But what does the alien's message mean? What do they want? Are they hostile? Will the message lead to contact with an alien race? As Ellie and those around her struggle to answer the questions and decipher the message, the next question becomes, if there is contact, who will be the first to meet them?

Sagan's voice rings through

Contact is a terrific thinking-person's movie about the search for extraterrestrial life, a subject that hasn't been brought to film this well since Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There isn't one big bug alien in sight, and the White House doesn't get destroyed in spectacular fashion. The thrills from Contact come from one woman's obsession and what she discovers during her search to find the answer to one simple question: Are we alone? Through its quest to discover the truth, Contact ends up being more about the human race than the aliens Ellie is so desperately searching for.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg, Contact is based on the novel of the same name by the late Carl Sagan. Sagan's enthusiasm, wonder and curiosity ring throughout the entire film, taking viewers to surprising places as it delves into not only questions of science, but also questions of religion and how the two might be connected.

However, Contact is not a perfect film, and it seems particularly manipulative when it brings in the "bad guys." Also annoying was the incorporation of President Clinton, placed in scenes with the actors (undoubtedly to make the movie seem more timely). A stint by Rob Lowe as a moral majority leader was silly casting for such a serious movie. Also, with a large pool of highly-trained astronauts ready to go up in space, it seems highly unlikely the two main candidates for space travel would end up being the characters chosen in the movie.

Still, with the Mars landing and the public's growing enthusiasm for space travel, the timing for this film would be perfect if only Sagan were still around to see it. He would have been proud.