For after the journey, Jodie’s spaceship doesn’t actually appear to have gone anywhere.A remarkably similar gyroscopic engine, one that opens a “dimensional gate in folded space”, is present in the Event Horizon, the eponymously named cruciform-shaped spaceship that the film’s designers have said that they consciously evolved from the architecture and facade of Notre Dame in Paris. That this ark is, to all intents and purposes, an ovum, brings the motif of the Virgin birth full circle.Yet the way the spaceship works is entirely heretical. And just to confirm the Florentine iconography, a line of radiotelescopes vanishes behind her like tilted church cupolas, receding in perfectly ordered 16th-century perspective.When Foster receives instructions on how to build a ship, instructions that come encoded within the images of a 1930s TV broadcast by Adolf Hitler, she could as well be Noah, receiving his plans from God on how to build the Ark. The religious markers in Contact are there for everyone to see, from Noah to the New Testament.

Matthew McConaughey’s character, Palmer Joss, who becomes religious adviser to the fictional President in Contact, acts as a kind of Joseph figure for the Virgin Jodie: chaste, supportive and with a hard- to-read peripheral role in the unfolding drama. The image of her with her hand cupped to her ear, listening intently to the whispering sounds from outer space, immediately brings to mind the Annunciation iconography of the Renaissance, where the Virgin Mary is told she is to bear a child. When Jodie Foster’s character first hears the sound of an alien transmission on her portable computer in some South American grasslands, we observe her on her own, in a solitary and almost pastoral context. The ancient city of Babylon was, after all, where Judaism absorbed its Zoroastrian ideas, creating the apocalyptic book of Daniel in the process. So why is Babylon 5 suddenly more popular than the perennially popular Star Trek? Simply because it gravitates towards the opposite pole to Star Trek’s optimistic techno-hubris, or seemed to for a while, at least, before the creepy spider-beings that wished to cloak the universe in darkness were revealed as just another race with advanced technology.Modern SF is as much about religion as it is about science. On the other, we have quasi-religious, over-portentous fears of the coming apocalypse.Babylonian horrors couched in SF terms have been stalking popular culture for the last decade, from Alan Moore’s innovative comic books to the ever-expanding X-Files stable and the several series of Babylon 5. On the one hand, we have the Independence Day scenario, ugly monsters with ray-guns and absurdly concocted languages (full marks to Tim Burton for satirising that particular lame convention in Mars Attacks! – the aliens just bark like crazed chihuahuas).

Now the news comes along that a similar film, Sphere, is finally in post-production in the US. Sphere, starring Dustin Hoffman, features the crew of a hi-tech submersible descending into the deepest part of the oceans and encountering pretty much the same deal: alien beings appearing as celestial ones, and taking on the heart-stopping appearance of the dead.
Science fiction in the movies is growing increasingly bipolar, alternately exhilarated by the vistas of new technology and depressed by pre-millennial tension. This month, we see Jodie Foster in Contact go to Heaven on a spaceship and, blow me, meet “angels” in the forms of people from her past. ABC Cinemas’ director of marketing, Ray Wallis, says it’s time to “bring back romance to the cinema”.Watch this space to see just what kind of romance the loveseats bring back …. In last month’s sci-fi blockbuster Event Horizon we saw Sam Neil go to Hell on a spaceship and meet assorted “demons” appearing as familiar people from his past.

These are the kinds of truths that sex in the cinema brings home.If you still aren’t convinced that sex in the cinema helps keep public order, consider the fact that ABC Cinemas is giving a test run to 90 sets of “loveseats” in t heir cinemas in Edinburgh and Norwich. These double seats – apparently popular in the 1960s when everyone was testing out the birth control pill – are there for courting couples. Even if she really doesn’t need a body double, the fact that she thinks she needs one is gratifying. There’s always someone somewhere with better legs, better hands or a better set of rear cheeks, no matter who you are. As more people end up single, separated, divorced or otherwise non-partnered, it’s good to see a love affair in action. It’s nice to see someone having a good time, if only as an aide-memoire.Women, especially, get a nice sense of schadenfreude when big stars like Julia Roberts use “stunt butts” for nude love scenes.

By seeing their graphic and erotic love-making, we understand why he would give anything to be with her.Of course, there are other good reasons for sex in the movies For one, it’s fun. Films didn’t always rely on graphic sex to put bums on seats.
Despite the fact that actresses are always saying they won’t do nude scenes unless it is essential to the storyline, the truth is that some movies require sex and nudity to tell their story effectively One such film opens today. Photographing Fairies, a stunning English drama, tells of a young photographer whose life is irrevocably changed after the death of his beautiful bride.The young widower (played by Toby Stephens, son of Dame Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens) is a sort of 1913 version of The X-Files’ Fox Mulder: he wants to believe “the truth is out there”, that he will see his wife again. Even the notion of Bogie and Bergman “doing it” is about as tenable as the thought that your parents still, well, you know. Oddly enough, the next scene usually involved a newborn baby.