For reasons no one quite seems to understand, movie science fiction grabs a lot of people down deep, even those who aren't trekkies. No doubt this susceptibility derives in part from the sheer dazzlement of high-tech wizardry so stunning that it turns the most jaded moviegoers into wide-eyed children. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) set a new standard, a quantum leap ahead of anything seen on the screen before, but that was surpassed by the sound-and-light show of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the elegant marvels of George Lucas's Star Wars saga (1977-83), and a generation of ever more spectacular special effects.

Magic aside, all of these tales are made of the stuff of psychodrama, both personal and cultural. We don't need the resident semiotician to point out that something is cooking in the very violent four-film Alien series (1979-97), in which the loathsomely parasitic she-monster becomes known, without the least trace of affection, as "the bitch." About Alien it is hard to say too much: primal, visceral, purely dark, and very haunting—the all-mother as Evil. This is not the friendly "other" one travels 50 light-years to encounter.

What is most curious, though, about these films is not their enormous popularity (note the mammoth crowds for this spring's retooled Star Wars saga). Rather, it is the great distance these pop-tales go in pushing religious themes, particularly the quest to meet and know an alien "presence" who either comes to Earth or for whom we go looking. Close Encounters features a Damascus Road everyman scrambling up Sinai (Devil's Tower, Wyoming) to meet, bully though it is, the stupendous Power of techno-splendor; ET is a glowing-heart incarnation tale that climaxes in resurrection and ascension.

Invariably tales of space or time travel carry this heavy thematic freight, the allure of the "might be" or "should be." Maybe it's imagining the endless "out there" in relation to we small creatures on this small globe. In any case, we wonder and then wonder still more. More than that, perhaps, we long and groan to know What out there might help us here, on this tangled, painful Earth, for we sure do need it. Classic sci-fi pics feature cosmic riddles and quests, and their protagonists are more pilgrim and disciple than hero or warrior. Usually this religious text comes cloaked in protracted metaphors of journeys toward meeting, intimacy, and home, an "other" or Eden that will ease our galactic solitude. What these voyagers find—well, that's another matter.

The newest big-time sci-fi flick ($90 million) to travel this very route is Robert Zemeckis's Contact, and it does so more overtly than any of its predecessors. In fact, what this film is about, all of it, is faith and science and how these different domains of human experience stake their claims to knowledge and also—surprise!--to the very soul. Although long stretches of the movie suffer from the unctuous sincerity that almost imploded Zemeckis's Forrest Gump, Contact has sweep, passion, and spots of real cinematic achievement.

If Contact entices audiences, even skeptical ones, it is in no small part because the Seeker in this film just happens to be a brilliant and attractive astrophysicist, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). Arroway has given herself totally—and unwisely, for her career—to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Flashbacks make clear the origins of her obsession. Her mother died in childbirth, her father when she was nine, and so she has no reason to count on people staying around—nor, for that matter, does she warm up to a God who orphans nine-year-olds. Evidently males can't be trusted either, at least not as represented by love-interest Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), a White House spiritual guru whose role is poorly written, cast, and acted. Sometimes real friends are hard to find.

So we look—or listen—elsewhere: Arroway spends her time tuned in to radio telescopes. When the government yanks her funding, she gets rental money from an eccentric megaindustrialist, S. R. Hadden (John Hurt). Then, only months before the government will bar her from even renting its scopes, she hears the Big One, the Real Thing, the undeniably intelligent signal that sends an eerie hello and, hidden in its greeting, a proposal for a bizarre launch vehicle that will send just one human "out there" for a meeting. To the tune of a half-trillion dollars, an international team builds the thing, and Arroway ends up, after great complications, being the one chosen to go.

The rub comes in what happens on her trip. Or doesn't happen. The government claims the launch failed: the vehicle didn't go anywhere (and in fact, it didn't, maybe). Arroway asserts that she did indeed journey far and profoundly (the audience goes too): to a resplendently gorgeous world where she briefly meets her father, who tenderly offers cryptic lessons in metaphysics.

An official inquiry follows to determine whether the project's prize researcher has gone daft. In televised hearings, Arroway concedes that she has absolutely no empirical proof that she went anywhere or saw or talked with anyone. Still, pleads she, despite her passionate skepticism, she would stake her whole being on the reality of this "vision" she has been "given." For her it comes as grace itself. She will never be the same; she wishes that everyone could know what she now knows and feels of "awe and humility and hope." Clearly, she has learned something about creatureliness: that people are at once, paradoxically, "tiny and insignificant" and "rare and precious." Something out there is "greater than ourselves" and tells us "none of us are alone."

These avowals would have much less force if the audience had not journeyed with Arroway. The visual effects here are indeed special, climaxing the whole tale with the palpable wonder of her flight. When she first hears the signal from space, she is startled, stunned, burning with intellectual curiosity, eager to find out what hit her, and this remains her bent—until, that is, the trip wherein she moves from transfixed to transfigured in response to the surpassingly beautiful world she beholds. First awed and then dazzled and enveloped, in rapt adoration she repeats, "So beautiful" and "I had no idea," over and over. The stars and the firmament all but sing. The lost father she again embraces doesn't understand much more than she does, but he, too, clearly is transfigured. Here is beauty so astonishing that it can only mean one thing: somehow, Love runs the show.

In Contact, Zemeckis provides an aesthetic warrant for religious belief, incommensurate with a reductive empiricism that discounts the significance of "subjectivity." A newly returned Catholic (of sorts), Zemeckis says that he wanted to direct Contact to explore the conflict by making extraterrestrial life a "metaphor for some high power," as the New York Times chastely put it. In the end, it comes down to this: Arroway sees the original glory, of which, smart and knowledgeable as she is, she had "no idea." That the universe was so resplendent and suffused with Love, her science never told her, and this recognition comes to her as rapturous shock.

This is pretty good creation theology, and happily it avoids the frequent sci-fi understanding of the "other" as a mysterium of menacing bluster (Close Encounters) or pure malice (Alien). What Arroway sees and savors has about it what Jonathan Edwards calls, in his own paradoxical splendor, a "sweet and gentle and holy majesty; and also a majestic, and awful sweetness; a high and great, holy gentleness." Lots of conservative religious folk label as New Age any film that doesn't end with God or Jesus in neon lights or embossed in the credits. But indirection is not a bad strategy, as Lewis, Tolkein, and others have amply demonstrated. As Arroway's father reminds his impatient, world-leaping daughter, usually only by "small moves" does the species come to know the Holy One. Not bad, not bad.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 13