Early on in Contact a character is introduced who goes by the name “Kent Clark,” and for the remainder of the film I simply could not get over the fact that no one ever even mentions that he is named after Bizarro’s alter ego.

My theory is that this is a figurative wink to the audience, letting us know beforehand what we otherwise discover at long last: that the events that are about to unfold are nothing but an elaborate prank on the audience and, possibly, the cast.

This movie exists in a limbo somewhere in between Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s unabashed childlike wonder and Ad Astra’s adult ‘we’re alone in the Universe’ pragmatism – which is a polite way of saying that Contact is neither fish nor fowl; the moral of the story, in a nutshell, is that there might be intelligent extraterrestrial life, but then again, there might not be.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with some ambiguity, but let’s consider this: untold amounts of money, physical resources and manpower are spent in the movie (but not by the movie, which prefers to cut corners and follow the unconvincing route of CGI – technology which, by the way, has not aged well nor improved a lot ever since), while we spent two and half hours of our precious time, and it’s all only to learn that, maybe, aliens don’t exist except in overly complicated hoaxes and the minds of impressionable people. That’s a lot of work to do as well as a long way to go to arrive at a conclusion that for many, myself included, is of the foregone variety.

And even if the extraterrestrials in the film were real, they’d still be rather disappointing – though I shouldn’t speak in plural, since we only see one in the form of Dr. Ellie Arroway’s (Jodie Foster) long deceased father. The good news is that Ellie’s dad is played by David Morse, and you could certainly do a lot worse than that (and that goes for the rest of the ensemble cast); the bad news is that Ellie’s close encounter takes places on a beach that is supposedly meant to mimic a drawing she made when she was nine years old.

This is bad because the drawing, which looks like an actual preteen might have drawn it, is a veritable Monet compared with the computer-generated beach where Ellie has a very anticlimactic meeting with the alien, who tells her nothing she, or for that matter we, didn’t already know or believe – which in turn doesn’t mean that the place itself has to be equally underwhelming; why not a real beach? Or, perhaps even better, a set made to resemble a real beach? This would doubtless speak to either Ellie’s imagination or the aliens’ handicraft much more than what we end up getting.