Despite its lineage and some impressive special effects, Contact is a disappointingly earthbound production, weighed down by the ballast of talking-heads dramaturgy and bloated storytelling.

If Contact is disappointingly soft in the head, it can also enthrall. Zemeckis is such a potent imagemaker that he is capable, for long stretches at a time, of sweeping you up in his vision.

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.

"Contact" rewards subsequent viewings precisely because it allows viewers to contemplate nuances in both story and philosophy that may have previously eluded them.