Contact (film)

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Contact

Contact Promotional Movie Poster
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Produced by Steve Starkey
Robert Zemeckis
Written by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg (screenplay)
Carl Sagan (novel and story)
Ann Druyan (story)
Starring Jodie Foster
Matthew McConaughey
Tom Skerritt
David Morse
Music by Alan Silvestri
Cinematography Don Burgess
Editing by Arthur Schmidt
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release date(s) July 11, 1997 U.S. release
Running time 153 min.
Language English
Budget $90,000,000 (estimated)
IMDb profile

Contact is a 1997 science fiction film adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, its main stars are Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor Ann "Ellie" Arroway, Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss, James Woods as National Security Advisor Michael Kitz, and Tom Skerritt as Dr. David Drumlin.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film opens with a montage shot of Earth in space, with a loud background noise made up of radio and television signals from recent years. As the camera pans out, the transmissions become older, until the camera loses sight of Earth, the Solar system, and the Milky Way in an unimaginably vast, silent universe.

The main protagonist, Ellie Arroway, is introduced as a child, living with her father in suburban America and obsessed with amateur radio. After a scene in which Ellie asks her father if humans can talk to other planets, and if there are other civilizations in the universe, the scene changes to Arroway in her late 20s, a brilliant scientist and researcher working on the SETI programme, using the gargantuan Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico for her research. While working at Arecibo, Arroway meets Palmer Joss, a student of theology researching for a book on science's impact on the Third World. The two fall in love and start a relationship. At this point it is revealed that Ellie, whose mother died during childbirth, lost her father due to a heart attack when she was still a child. Despite her commitment to the SETI project and her scientific genius, Arroway is unknown amongst the academic community, and is ridiculed by her former teacher, Dr. David Drumlin, an officious, pompous, arrogant man who has been promoted to Chief of the National Science Foundation and Science Advisor to the President of the United States. Drumlin arrogantly tells Arroway that her research is a waste of time and public money, and shuts down the project.

The team, including the blind, brilliant astrophysicist Kent, leaves Puerto Rico, and for an unknown reason, Ellie deliberately does not telephone Palmer Joss, effectively ending the relationship. With the help of friends and partners from the Puerto Rico site, Ellie spends the next thirteen months trying to find a new source of funding for her research. During a presentation to a board of directors at the fictional Hadden Industries Inc, Ellie loses her temper and is ultimately awarded a large grant from the corporation's reclusive owner, billionaire industrialist S. R. Hadden (John Hurt).

Leasing time from the government-owned Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, Ellie and her colleagues spend the next four years combing the skies. Yet again, Drumlin intervenes, and recommends to the government that they cancel Arroway's lease contract in favor of more legitimate research. But that very night, Arroway herself detects a signal of unknown origin being picked up by the radio telescopes. In frenzy, Arroway and the team realize the message is being transmitted as a sequence of prime numbers, and trace its origin to the star Vega. The team passes the co-ordinates to radio telescope stations across the globe and, realizing that they have found an artificial signal that can only have come from an advanced alien civilization, they release their information across the world.

Overnight, the New Mexico facility becomes the scene of an international media circus while two dozen radio telescope sites around the world confirm the message and continue to track it. Dr. Drumlin arrives at the site with the American National Security Advisor, Michael Kitz (James Woods). While Drumlin pompously tries to direct operations at the site, Kitz chastises Arroway for having breached National Security policy by sending the message around the world. Arroway and Kitz begin a heated argument, and at this point, Kent hears a complex interlaced audio structure woven into the sequence of prime numbers. The team quickly discovers that this sideband of additional data is interlaced with a television image. The team feeds the signal into a television set, which reveals that the television signal is footage of Adolf Hitler, making his opening speech at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

The Hitler footage causes uproar amongst the government, prompting Kitz to immediately try to militarize the SETI project, fearing that they have been contacted by a pseudo-fascist civilization. Arroway explains that that particular footage of Hitler was the first television transmission powerful enough to travel into space, that the aliens would not have understood what they were looking at or who Hitler was, and that their sending the message back was simply a way of making contact with another intelligent civilization. Despite her arguments, Arroway is increasingly ignored as Drumlin takes credit for finding the message and tries to strip Arroway of any authority in subsequent developments. Meanwhile, back in New Mexico, what was thought to be noise amongst the frames of the Hitler footage is found to be tens of thousands of pages of data written in an alien language. No-one, however, can work out how to decode the pages. At this point, Hadden, who had given Arroway the research money years ago, steps in and secretly pushes her back into the limelight by showing her how the encrypted data sheets fit together in a 3D fashion, revealing blueprints for a machine. This gives Arroway considerable power, and back in Washington D.C., the Cabinet meets to discuss theories on what the machine does, and whether or not they should build it. Arroway suggests the machine is an "Encyclopaedia Galactica" or an advanced communications device, while Drumlin quips that the message may contain "a few billion new commandments." Despite her insistence that the machine is peaceful, Arroway is confronted by military officials who fear it is a weapon of mass destruction or a Trojan horse, and by extremist Christian politicians who refuse to work with an alien civilization that does not follow Christianity. Arroway tries to argue back against these shallow theories, and finds herself supported by Palmer Joss, now the Religious Advisor to the President, who walks into the meeting room and defends her theories against the Christian politicians and military officials. The President himself (shown as Bill Clinton) walks in at this stage, and holds a press conference on the machine. Although scientists are unable to say what the machine does, the team at New Mexico uncovers a variety of clues, including an image of a human being inside a transport pod, that confirm the machine is an interstellar transport, designed to take a single human occupant to Vega. The President authorizes the United States to build the machine. Meanwhile, Palmer Joss and Arroway start a romantic relationship.

The Machine operating.
Enlarge
The Machine operating.

Known simply as "The Machine" throughout the rest of the film, the device slowly takes shape. Due to the high cost of The Machine, which prevents any single nation from paying for it alone, the International Machine Consortium is formed to finance its construction, with the actual construction taking place at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The US government compensates individual nations in different ways, offering them the opportunity to put forward candidates for the machine seat, or granting nations technology and contractual rights. To choose who will take the seat, an international committee of scientists, philosophers, theologians, politicians, psychologists, and various academics is formed, in order to screen and select a suitable candidate who can not only survive the rigors of the journey, but who can fairly represent the entire human race. Palmer Joss is included in this committee, and he therefore cannot spend much time with Arroway, as she is one of the candidates judged by the committee. Surprisingly, Dr. Drumlin resigns from his government post in order to become a candidate, and after a former astronaut abandons the contest at the request of his family, Drumlin and Arroway become the main contestants for the machine seat.

Arroway appears before the international selection committee, and although she gives excellent answers to the questions asked and appears to be a prime candidate, her performance is shattered when Palmer Joss himself deliberately trips her up by forcing her to reveal her agnosticism. The committee rejects her application, explaining that they cannot choose someone who does not represent humanity's belief in a higher deity. Instead, the committee awards the seat to Dr. Drumlin, who, as Arroway points out, tells them exactly what they want to hear instead of telling the truth. Ellie ends her relationship with Joss and stays with the project as a technical advisor. On the day of the first full-scale systems test on The Machine, a huge crowd gathers at Cape Canaveral and the entire world watches to see what The Machine will actually do. As The Machine begins to operate, the world cheers, but at this stage Arroway detects a security breach. A religious fanatic (Jake Busey), whom Arroway had encountered in New Mexico and Washington, has infiltrated the site by posing as an employee. Beneath his disguise, he is wrapped in explosives. As Drumlin and technicians try to stop him, he commits a suicide bombing, killing Dr. Drumlin and dozens of technicians, and destroying The Machine.

After the disaster at Cape Canaveral, Arroway arrives home and finds satellite communications equipment. The equipment connects her with Hadden, who is now living on the Mir space station in an attempt to delay the progression of his cancer. Hadden informs Ellie of the existence of a second Machine, secretly built in Hokkaido, Japan by sub-contractors recently acquired by Hadden's company. He then astounds Arroway by telling her that the International Machine Consortium wants an American to make the journey, and that they want Arroway to take the seat.

Ellie travels to Japan to become the passenger on the second Machine. Shortly before Ellie suits up, Palmer Joss makes amends with her by revealing that his acts at the committee hearing were influenced not by his professional beliefs, but his personal fear of losing her. The two make amends as the Consortium reveals the Machine's existence to a stunned world, which waits eagerly for news from Hokkaido. On the day of the test, Ellie enters the transport pod and notices bizarre changes occurring in the metal structure, which turns slightly translucent. Her communications signal becomes fuzzy and the team prepares to abort, but at this stage Kent, the astrophysicist who had stood by Ellie from the very beginning, picks up Ellie's faint voice telling the team she is ready to go. The team agrees to go ahead, and Ellie's transport module is dropped into The Machine.

Inside her pod, Ellie perceives herself traveling at immense speed through a series of wormholes which transport her from place to place, while the translucent metal of the pod allows her to see all around her. At her first stop she sees the star Vega, and catches a glimpse of a mammoth artificial object in space, which could only have been constructed by a highly advanced alien civilization. She is then rapidly transported to a quadruple-star system. Glancing down at the night side of a planet below her, Ellie sees the lights of an immense city arranged in a geometric pattern, exclaiming "They're alive" before being propelled at even greater speed to the site of a celestial event which is so beautiful she cannot find words to describe it. Drifting into unconsciousness, Ellie wakes in a bizarre environment which has been simulated to represent, to the smallest detail, a childhood drawing she made of the beach at Pensacola. At this point, Ellie notices an entity walking towards her, which reveals itself in the form of her deceased father. Ellie stammers that it is not real, and quickly realizes that it is not her father, but an alien creature that has taken the form of her father, and has downloaded her thoughts and memories in order to look, speak, and act like her father. The creature replies that she is right, that he is not her father, but speaks to her in the soothing, loving way her father used to, even using her childhood nickname "Sparks", and explaining that they have simulated her father's appearance and the beach environment in order to make her feel more comfortable. Ellie asks the creature why she has been brought here and why their civilization contacted Earth, to which the alien replies that it was Earth that first contacted them, and that they were just listening. The alien explains the nature of the transit system, explaining that their civilization merely found the system, built long ago by another alien race that has long since moved on. Ellie asks the creature if all the civilizations they found are brought through the system like she was, and it replies no, that only some are brought. The creature explains that the human race is an interesting species, capable of such extremes of love and hate, and it is this curious mix which has prompted their civilization to send Earth the plans for The Machine and bring Ellie through the system. Asked why she has been brought, the creature explains that it is not a test, not a trick, that the countless civilizations using the system are introduced to each other simply because existence in the immensity of space is lonely, and the only thing that makes the loneliness bearable, is each other. Ellie, despite her protests, is then told that she must return and cannot take any proof, according to the civilization’s ancient philosophy. As a farewell, the creature tells Ellie that her journey is just the first step towards contacting other civilizations, and that in time, humanity will make another step. With a loving farewell, the alien sends Ellie back through the system to Earth.

Instantly, Ellie wakes up inside the transport pod, being contacted by Hokkaido Control. She asks how long she has been gone, and is stupefied to learn that the pod did not go anywhere, it simply dropped straight through The Machine. Forty-three separate cameras recorded the event, and since her head-mounted optical recorder taped only static, she has no evidence of her journey.

With opinion divided over whether Arroway made the journey or simply hallucinated it, Kitz heads a Congressional inquiry and suggests that the entire project could have been a hoax. By stating that the hoaxer would have needed immense financial resources, engineering expertise, and imagination, Kitz prompts Ellie to name Hadden (who by this point had finally succumbed to cancer while aboard the Russian space station). Kitz suggests that Hadden, a perverse and complicated man, hoaxed the signal and all subsequent events were a way for Hadden to test new technologies, with Earth governments paying the bill. Arroway admits that, as a scientist, she must acknowledge the possibility that it was all a hoax, that she may have hallucinated it, and that if she were part of the inquest, she would be just as skeptical. However, when Kitz asked her to openly accept that the journey did not happen, she cannot. She holds fast to her story, and, in an ironic twist, is placed in the position of believing in something for which she has only her personal experience and no objectively verifiable evidence to present to the world. When asked if she is telling others that they must take her story on faith, she replies that she wishes she could share her personal experience of the journey. It is ironic that the International Machine Consortium previously rejected her for not having faith in God, while now the inquest members refuses to have faith in her testimony. Ellie leaves the hearing hand-in-hand with Joss, and to her surprise, is greeted by a large crowd of cheering supporters. As Arroway and Joss step into their car, a reporter asks Joss if he believes Ellie's story. Joss replies that as he is a man of faith, and that Ellie is a woman of science, they are bound by different covenants but share the same purpose - a search for truth - and that he believes her.

After the inquest concludes, a dialogue between Kitz and a Presidential Advisor reveals a secret report on Arroway's headset video camera, which only recorded static. Although the pod apparently dropped straight through the machine and Arroway was only out of contact for a fraction of a second, her headset recorded approximately eighteen hours of static, the time she claims it took to complete her journey. This objectively verified evidence in support of Arroway's story clearly impresses the presidential advisors and they decide her SETI work should be funded.

The film ends with Ellie having received a government grant to continue her SETI project at the newly-expanded radio telescope array back in New Mexico. Arroway is shown telling children to keep asking questions and looking for answers. The movie ends with Arroway reflecting quietly as the sun sets over New Mexico. The final shot depicts the words "For Carl" set against a backdrop of stars, as a dedication to Carl Sagan.

[edit] "Contact" and religion

One of the central themes in Contact is that of science (personified by Dr. Eleanor Arroway) being perceived by some as being in conflict with those who believe in God (personified by Palmer Joss). Throughout much of the film, both are seen as existing outside of the other's domain. There is initially a very clear stipulation that scientists can try to understand the universe without needing to introduce God into any explanations. Dr. Arroway, the heroine of the tale, when asked if she believes in God replies that there is no evidence for or against the existence of God. Joss, however, is shown as a moderate religious man. It should be noted that he is not a priest and the movie makes no mention of which religion he belongs to. Instead he is a general, all-purpose religious representation, encompassing only the ideal of belief in God and leaving any details of dogma out of the movie. In one of their conversations, Joss reminds Dr. Arroway that people can have experiences that make them hold beliefs even if they do not have objectively verifiable evidence to support such beliefs.

Dr. Arroway's main reason for not believing in God is lack of objectively verifiable evidence. Joss' belief in God and Arroway's experience of the aliens illustrate the fact that people can hold beliefs even in the absence of objectively verifiable evidence. Joss believes Arroway without any proof, and states that science and religion are merely different tools in mankind's search for truth. Arroway does not ask the world to accept her story on faith. She continues to explore the universe using the tools of science.

While the film portrays Palmer Joss' Christian beliefs as tolerant, agreeable, and well thought-out, the film simultaneously subtly criticizes Christian fundamentalists. During the scene in which Arroway discusses The Machine with the American cabinet, she encounters opposition from Richard Rank, the leader of the fictional "Conservative Coalition", a play on religion-oriented right-wing political groups. The leader of the organization, who appears to have considerable political sway, is presented as shallow and unintelligent as he openly objects to the project based purely on the fact that it is not known whether or not the aliens "believe in God" and the Vegan message is therefore "morally ambiguous at best." The film's main Christian secondary character, the extremist preacher, is equally criticized. During the media circus at the New Mexico facility, the preacher is portrayed as a somewhat psychotic character, blaming science for destroying the world and stating that the aliens are God. During a short appearance in Washington, D.C., the preacher is again portrayed as mentally unstable, glaring hatefully at Arroway while his followers chant "Praise God" monotonously and endlessly. Ultimately, the extremist preacher sabotages the entire project by blowing up The Machine, believing that he is acting in "the best interests of mankind." The preacher leaves behind a video suicide note filmed in Utah, which is a bastion of religious conservatism. The preacher's character may be based upon that of The Curate from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, who believes that the invading Martians are demons from Hell. Both the preacher and the parson attach religious ties to the aliens - the preacher in Contact believes that the Vegans are God whilst the parson in The War of the Worlds believes the Martians are demons, both perceiving corporeal (or at least natural) creatures to be deeply religious in nature, and both wrong on the nature of the aliens, which are simply "people" rather than religious entities.

[edit] Special effects

Special effects were produced by both Sony Pictures Imageworks as well as Peter Jackson's Weta Digital. The movie opens with a scale view of the entire Universe lasting approximately three minutes. It begins by zooming away from the Earth and through the solar system, through the Oort Cloud, then through the nebulae and stars in the galaxy, away from the Milky Way, through the Large Magellanic Cloud, through Andromeda, and through billions of other galaxies, finally ending up by coming out of the eye of young Ellie. The effect is accompanied by slight anachronisms in the audio which are meant to emphasize the observer's distance from Earth by juxtaposing the tracking shot with radio transmissions that travel at the speed of light and were produced years or decades before the present. Close to Earth, modern-day radio chatter is heard; but as the "spacecraft" passes Saturn, which is approximately one light-hour from Earth, we hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech (1963), even though the film is set in the "present day" (1997). The radio transmission of the speech would, in fact, have reached the stars Pollux and Arcturus by then. Also, there is a minor "astrographical" error in the sequence. When the camera passes through the Eagle Nebula, the three distinctive columns are shown as we see them from earth, not as they would be seen in a pull back of that magnitude.

Jena Malone, who played Young Ellie, has dark brown eyes, while Jodie Foster has blue eyes. Rather than have Malone wear blue contact lenses, computerized colorization was used to make her brown eyes blue.

The crane shot going through the window towards Ellie's room was done by filming the house with a bluescreen inside the door's window which was later blended with a shot of the room on a set.

The dish of the Arecibo radio telescope was digitally cleaned up.

In the scene where young Ellie fetches her dad's medicine, she runs around a corner, up a flight of stairs, around another 90° corner, and down a hallway towards a bathroom medicine cabinet with a mirror on its door. In an unusually smooth transition, the film switches from point-of-view of the camera to a view of the reflection on the bathroom mirror in mid-hallway.

In the scene before Ellie descends to the beach, six different emotional performances (happy, sad, afraid, etc.) of Foster and one of Malone are morphed.

The film was nominated for a "best special effects" Saturn Award, a "best individual achievement: effects animation" Annie; and won an "outstanding visual effects" Golden Satellite Award and a "best use of animation as a special FX in a theatrical" WAC award.

The movie won the 1998 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

[edit] Mistakes

It is not possible to fake a signal from a distant star using instruments in near earth space if the signal has been picked up from several distant stations on earth simultaneously. This is because of the technique of triangulation. A near earth signal would appear to come from different parts of the sky in New Mexico and Australia (two base stations in the film), rather than the same part of the sky (Vega).

[edit] Trivia

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  • Author Carl Sagan died during the production of the film, and just seven months before its release.
  • Part of the movie is set at the Very Large Array, an NRAO observatory near Socorro, New Mexico. The NRAO facility is actually "the wrong stuff" for SETI, but it does look the part. The VLA combines a set of relatively small dishes with aperture synthesis to produce detailed maps of large radio sources. Interstellar communications, on the other hand, simply requires maximum collecting area. Arecibo, shown earlier in the film, is a much better match. It must be taken into account, however, that Arroway was forced to leave Arecibo by Drumlin.
  • Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, makes a short cameo appearance, along with former United States Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.
  • The "key" that S. R. Hadden finds in the transmission and that allows the message to be decoded seems to be a variation on the artificial language Lincos, first described in 1960 by Hans Freudenthal.
  • News footage of President Bill Clinton was used and digitally altered to make it appear as if he is speaking about alien contact. The altered footage caused a controversy both from the White House and from news organizations, over the ethics of fictionalizing such footage.[1]
  • William Fichtner's character in the film, a blind astrophysicist with enhanced hearing as a result of his condition, is named Kent Clark. Clark Kent is the human name of Superman, an alien who comes from a vastly advanced civilization on the planet Krypton and who, among his superhuman abilities, possesses super hearing. The character is based on a real-life blind SETI scientist, Kent Cullers.
  • Actors John Hurt (Hadden) and Tom Skerritt (Drumlin) also starred in Ridley Scott's 1979 film, "Alien."

[edit] External links

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