The opening shot of Contact is likely the longest pull-back in movie history. It's a moment of imaginative reverence for the medium of film itself, for the experience of sitting in a darkened movie theater and hearing a cacophonic blast of sound suddenly recede into the distance behind the screen, and finally, into silence. It's a moment of purity, where we realize both how beautiful a special effect can be, and how delicate is the ambience surrounding a moving image. It's also a moment of tremendous narrative economy, which sets the stage for the fantastic intergalactic tale that's to follow.

Alas, this breathless stage-setting is followed immediately by some of the most hamfisted expository material since Twister. We're introduced to a child named Ellie who's using a short-wave radio to make contact with ever-more-distant locales from her Wisconsin home -- as the film opens, she's saying a big hello to some anonymous fellow in Pensacola. Soon, she's grown impatient with the limited reach of her equipment, and muses, "I'm going to need a bigger antenna." You can almost see a script page turning: PAN AND DISSOLVE TO: Ellie, now an adult, gazing at the world's largest radio telescope.

Such predictable fillips notwithstanding, the film also suffers from the burden of feeling that it has to tell its audience everything twice. We're told that Ellie's father died when she was 9, and that she has a problem with religion. Fair enough. But then we're subjected, through more flashbacks, to a tediously literal replay of her father's death and her skeptical encounter with a priest after dad's funeral. Memo to director Robert Zemeckis: sometimes less is more.

Ah, the quest for more. There's been a lot of pre-release puffery about how "important" Contact is. "If this film doesn't work, it'll be harder for the next guy to make a film about something," Zemeckis told The New York Times. Unfortunately, Contact is almost all narrative and contrivance, deploying characters and dialogue in an unremitting effort to make sure that you don't miss anything. Unfortunately, movies that want badly to be "about something" have an annoying tendency to spell themselves out in big gaudy letters so that the viewer can't possibly miss the point. This sort of self-importance often manifests itself as simple heavy-handedness.

The late Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, which was originally developed as a motion picture treatment in 1979, is a mostly unpretentious exploration of the concepts of science and religious faith and the possible (but quite fictional) intersection of the two. Zemeckis's approach to the material is consistently, and perhaps understandably, more Spielberg than Sagan, emphasizing tricky dolly shots and whiz-bang FX work. When the tactics don't work, they're simply tiresome. But when they do work, watch out. The special effects in this film are more effective than anything else I've seen this year, and Jodie Foster gives an effortlessly agreeable performance as the putative everywoman representing all of humanity on its encounter with the great unknown.

Foster's Ellie Arroway is a smart, idealistic research scientist who's given her career over to scorn and ridicule. That is, she's dedicated herself to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a field of study that's on a par with astrology, as far as national science adviser David Drumlin (Tom Skerrit) is concerned. As the film opens, Ellie has settled in the Puerto Rican home of the aforementioned telescope, where theologian and soon-to-be best-selling author Palmer Joss (Matthew Mcconaughey, pretty but empty) sidles into a cafe with her and is immediately smitten. By the end of the first reel, Ellie and Joss are in the sack together, discussing Big Questions.

Ellie soon abandons the Puerto Rico site -- not to mention Joss, whose New-Age-theologian leanings are incompatible with her own very scientific philosophies -- in favor of what's known as the Very Large Array in New Mexico. She's given to sitting out in the desert, listening to the radio spectrum through headphones as a few taps on the keyboard of her laptop computer swivel the massive dishes this way and that. Pretty soon she's hearing a distinctly otherworldly transmission and rushing madly back to the lab. The pulse finally quickens, and Contact slips into gear as a suspenseful speculative thriller. (It slips out again before too long, but finds its second wind as the third act begins.)

Images and other messages are embedded in the transmission, which is coming from somewhere in the neighborhood of the star Vega. One of the messages is a set of schematics for the construction of a device that will apparently allow just one human being to travel, well, somewhere. Political intrigue and upheaval ensues, as ten candidates lobby to make the trip and the President's advisers (including a rabid James Woods as national security adviser) jockey for placement on the project. Significantly, Drumlin makes the transformation from SETI skeptic to true believer in a heartbeat. Most delightfully, a rich weirdo (well played by John Hurt) who lives on an airplane helps Ellie remain in the political game and eventually pulls some strings on her behalf. The best bit of human drama in the film may be his: "Want to go for a ride?"

The President is portrayed by Bill Clinton, through the dubious magic of digital compositing that cuts and pastes fragments of his speeches into this new context. Dumb move -- if Zemeckis (who used similar techniques in Forrest Gump, where they were a more important part of the story) is trying to remind us of how clever his video effects crew is, I guess it works, but shouldn't we be concentrating on the story instead of sophomoric visual tricks? Nearly as distracting is the appearance of what looks to be the entire CNN news team, explaining the events of the film to us. I'm sure that this is meant to give us a "realistic" media's eye view of the story, but it has the side effect of making us think less about Contact and more about whatever it was we saw on CNN last night. (It just made me think about media conglomerates, since Time Warner, which released this movie, owns CNN.)

Even so, there's some nice stuff going on here. The story seems logically sound without rubbing our noses in quasi-scientific backtalk. The performances are quite good if not remarkable -- with the exception of Mcconaughey, who seemed to me utterly vacuous. The scenes depicting what actually happens after Ellie gets into that machine are proof that some pretty shaky dramatic ideas can be given weight by the liberal application of knockout special effects. In these shots, the film is absolutely absorbing. It's terrific, nearly alchemic filmmaking -- and the heavenly extraterrestrial landscape that follows is only a minor comedown compared to what comes later.

Contact is demonstrably at its best when it's most wordless. The story is betrayed by a talky, club-footed denouement that doesn't have the good sense to quit when it's ahead. Matters come to a head when Ellie's subjective experiences are subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny as Joss's theological beliefs, but the heads on screen are still talking about this -- explaining it to us, making sure that we catch on -- long after the point has been made. Readers of the novel will recognize that the very last element of Sagan's story (it has to do with the number pi and the existence of God) has been jettisoned, which may be just as well from a cinematic standpoint. But it's functionally replaced by a clumsy "confidential" report on Ellie's experience that's shared by two secondary characters. What a disappointment.

The obvious point of reference for any film about "first contact" is Stanley Kubrick's late 1960s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, which remains the definitive cinematic treatment of a human encounter with alien intelligence. The ace up Kubrick's sleeve was, ironically, incomprehensibility -- he flabbergasted us and then faded to black. Contact takes some cues from 2001, but is by design more earthbound than its predecessor. Ultimately, it's simply a good film striving mightily toward a greatness that exceeds its grasp. In doing so, it throws its own limitations into sharp relief. At one point, Foster feels unworthy of her ultimately intergalactic mission: "They should have sent a poet," she murmurs. If only a poet had worked on this screenplay, then we might have had something.