MISSION: PREDICTABLE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The movie Contact is something like one of those mysterious asteroids that get the astronomers all worked up: a large body of gaseous matter surrounding a relatively small core of solid substance.

You would not, however, characterize it as "hurtling" through space to that theater near you. It proceeds very slowly through many banal deliberations about cosmic enigmas to a comfortably reassuring conclusion in which scientific humanism and vaguely uplifting religiosity are squishily reconciled.

This is not, frankly, a place at which one is rooting for Jodie Foster's Ellie Arroway to end up. Foster has always been an actress who gives intelligence a good name, and she's very attractive here as a stubbornly obsessive scientist, convinced there are brainy beings out there in deep space trying to get in touch with us, then triumphantly picking up their mysterious signals from the void.

The movie, adapted from Carl Sagan's novel, is good--up to a point--on the inevitable hubbub that follows. Leading it are a national security adviser (James Woods) going nastily paranoid about space invasion; a presidential science adviser (Tom Skerritt) trying to shunt Ellie out of the loop as the government builds the shuttle (plans kindly provided by the aliens) needed to penetrate our newly defined outer limits; and--oh yes, oh help--Palmer Joss.

He is sort of a New Age Billy Graham who has wormed his way into the high councils of state as spiritual consultant to the President. He is played with a nice shiftiness--you really wouldn't want to trust this guy with a church-collection plate--by Matthew McConaughey. Yet director Robert Zemeckis lets him carry the movie's message. That is to say, Joss, not Ellie--bless her sternly rational soul--happens to be right; there is, just as he has so tiresomely predicted, a metaphysical dimension to deep space.

It turns out to look like a Club Med and to offer reunions with the dear departed, but without any sectarian representation of a diety. This turns cerebral Ellie into numinous jelly, but it is an alarming comedown from the director who played so entrancingly with time travel in the Back to the Future movies and gave us the delightful alternative reality of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The success of Forrest Gump has made him Hollywood's philosopher-king, free to spend a fortune doing for the simple pieties what he recently did for simple-mindedness: make them look like a nice easy road to spiritual fulfillment. Zemeckis and his colleagues have been all over the press congratulating themselves on throwing an intellectually challenging movie into the summer maelstrom. What this tells us about them--and if Contact is a hit, the rest of us--is too depressing to contemplate.

--By Richard Schickel