DATE: Thursday, July 10, 1997               TAG: 9707100069

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   83 lines

IS ANYBODY OUT THERE ? THE MOVIES HAVE ALWAY EXPLOITED AS WELL AS PRESERVEDOUR FASCINATION WITH THE UNIVERSE BEYOND OUR GRASP. THROUGHOUT THE YEARS, THEY CONTINUALLY PRESENT THE SAME QUESTION:

``We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.''

Carl Sagan

SINCE TIME began, humans have been looking up - and wondering.

For almost as long, we've been looking up at movie screens - and have been given mixed and speculative messages. We have been both frightened (``Alien'' and ``Invasion of the Body Snatchers'') and cajoled (``E.T.'' and ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind'') by the movies' version of what might be out there.

It is not surprising that the century that began with Georges Melies' ``Voyage to the Moon'' (1902) is approaching its end with Robert Zemeckis' ``Contact,'' surely the most complex and introspective science-fiction movie since 1968's ``2001: A Space Odyssey.'' Audiences during the time span between 1902 and 1997 have continued to clamor for variations of the very mystery that remains unsolved.

The so-called ``answer'' is just as elusive as ever, but the questions have become more demanding. While Melies' French movie pictured pretty girls loading a cannon to shoot a capsule to the moon, Zemeckis' film attempts no less than to reconcile the differences between religion and science. Based on Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, ``Contact,'' which opens Friday, stars Jodie Foster as an obsessed scientist who receives the first message from outer space that, once and for all, would prove there are intelligent beings out there.

Is there anything out there?

The question has never been asked so often as in recent years. The controversy about what, if anything, happened in Roswell, N.M., in the 1940s continues with claims that UFOs landed and that the event was suppressed by our government. The landing of the Mars Pathfinder and the Sojourner micro-rover's maneuvering through Ares Vallis, a gigantic canyon on Mars' surface, provide new images but retain the secret, or promise, that intelligent life is further off, or nonexistent.

The Galileo spacecraft continues to circle Jupiter and its moons - new worlds in their own right.

The movies have always exploited, as well as preserved, our fascination with the universe beyond our grasp. In the 1930s, there was ``Buck Rogers'' with a now-laughable Ming the Merciless. Not until 1950 did the subject seem acceptable to movie audiences as anything but fantasy. In that year, two movies, ``Rocketship XM'' and George Pal's semi-documentary ``Destination Moon,'' became box office hits, and the floodgates were opened. We haven't had a scarcity of big-screen aliens since.

The attraction has always been three pronged: (1) fear of the unknown, (2) lure of the unknown and (3) the urge to conquer.

The Cold War reflected moviemakers' obsession with alienated aliens, bombarding us with extraterrestrial meanies for much of the '50s and '60s. We had everything from ``Devil Girl From Mars'' to ``This Island Earth,'' ``The Thing,'' ``Mars Needs Women,'' ``Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,'' ``The Blob'' and the unforgettable ``I Married a Monster From Outer Space.'' Reportedly, the latter title was actually used as grounds for divorce in an earthling court.

Perhaps it was our worldly cynicism that sparked a more-recent rash of good-natured aliens who were superior to earthlings in their sensitivity and caring. The epitome of the genre, of course, was Steven Spielberg's ``E.T.,'' featuring a creature who looked pretty scary but only wanted to heal and help the earthlings while finding a way to phone home.

The ``Star Wars'' and ``Star Trek'' films suggested, at the least, that the future held a world in which humans could master the situation - and even prevail. Superman always proved a winning force for the right. ``Starman'' involved an Earth woman's romance with a likable one of ``them'' - no less than Everyman Jeff Bridges. ``Cocoon'' suggested that eternal youth could be a benefit from outer space.

And, in my own personal all-time favorite sci-fi film, Robert Wise's ``The Day the Earth Stood Still,'' an outer space visitor brought hope of peace, but the politicos simply wouldn't accept it.

Most of these films were mere escapist fare, though. It took Stanley Kubrick's ``2001: A Space Odyssey'' to traverse the spectrum from our past to our future and ask not only what it all meant but also whether mankind is really ready to know?

Now comes ``Contact,'' perhaps to deepen the discussion. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Warner Brothers

Jodie Foster stars in "Contact"...

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