Starry-eyed science fiction, seemingly designed or destined to be blurbified into a "2001 for the Nineties" — complete with otherworldly light show and a solarized encounter with a Higher Intelligence. The very opening of the movie lays out the fictional terrain — light-years and light-years of it — as we travel deeper and deeper into outer space to the accompaniment of a reverse-chronology sound montage ("I am not a crook," "I have a dream," and the like), and ultimately to the accompaniment of total silence in the region of space where no transmission from Earth could yet have had time to reach. The imagination is well and thoroughly captured. Not as succinctly as with the justly celebrated jump-cut from the airborne bone to the space station in 2001, but sooner, much sooner. And then in a twinkling we are transported back to Earth, through the wide eye of a nine-year-old ham radio operator, thrilled to make a connection as far away as Pensacola, Fla. The nine-year-old will grow up to be the heroine of the piece (the highly individual Jodie Foster, a little too prone to wear her heart on her sleeve -- a knitted sleeve if it's to match her brow), a promising astronomer ready to commit a lifetime to listening to the heavens through a set of earphones. "Still waiting for E.T. to call?" her mentor needles her: the movie has a knack for putting the celestial issues in down-to-earth laymen's terms. The call from E.T. eventually does come through -- "Holy shit!" -- and what happens next, and next, and next, is solidly, persuasively imagined within a restricted, realistic radius. What happens in the end, however, when the movie loosens the belt of imagination by a couple, three notches, is less solid and persuasive. The design of the spacecraft -- a field in which there has been little progress since 2001, which is to say 1968 -- is a real and exciting advance. (It is constructed according to alien specifications: it must be an advance.) But the trip itself, beyond the improve-your-vocabulary concept of "worm holes," is not an advance. And its sermonizing aftermath is a distant retreat. Based on a novel by Carl Sagan; with Matthew McConaughey, Tom Skerritt, James Woods, Angela Bassett, John Hurt; directed by Robert Zemeckis. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd