Robert Zemeckis may have risen to prominence of the director of broad crowd-pleasers like Romancing the Stone, the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Forrest Gump, but he’s also proven to be highly adept at balancing drama with broad genre trappings, which became especially notable as the 1990s became the 2000s, when he delivered Contact and What Lies Beneath back-to-back.
The former was a lot more mature than audiences had come to expect from Zemeckis, which was by no means a bad thing. In fact, Contact has generally been regarded as one of the more underrated and overlooked sci-fi stories of the last quarter of a century, even if it did draw strong reviews from critics and come close to recouping its hefty $90 million budget twice over at the box office.
Thanks to the streaming age, though, fans can revisit virtually any movie they want at the push of a button, which has led to Contact establishing… well, contact, with the iTunes most-watched list per FlixPatrol. Jodie Foster racing against time to try and decipher a possible extraterrestrial signal stirred up a hornet’s nest among the government and religious fanatics onscreen, but the project wasn’t averse to ruffling a few real-life feathers, either.
Not only did the studio receive a letter of protest from the White House over using Bill Clinton’s composited image, but CNN publicly voiced regret over its decision to have real-life staffers appear in the film, while NASA had its own issues with the events depicted on the story, and that’s without even mentioning several lawsuits being filed against the production, with George Miller and Francis Ford Coppola among those seeking damages.
It might have been a storm in a teacup, but it helped give Contact an added edge of notoriety.
