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[1]
IMDb profile

Contact is a 1997 science fiction film adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, it stars 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.

[edit] Plot summary

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 Madison, Wisconsin 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. They start a romantic 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, before they were to watch a meteor shower. 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 a 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.

Arroway sees the Hitler footage from Vega

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. Arroway speculates that the pages contain the first volume of an "Encyclopedia Galactica" while Drumlin quips that the message may be from Moses "with a few billion new commandments." Shortly thereafter, Hadden, who had given Arroway the research money years ago, secretly pushes Arroway 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 it should be built. Arroway suggests the machine is an advanced communications device or a form of transportation. Despite her insistence that the designers of the machine are peaceful, Arroway is confronted by military officials who fear the machine is a weapon of mass destruction or a Trojan Horse, and Mr. Rank, a cabinet political religious advisor who points out that the message is "morally ambiguous" and is therefore concerned about whether or not the alien civilization "believes in God." Arroway argues against these theories, and suddenly finds herself supported by Palmer Joss, now the personal 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 confirms 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.

Known simply as "The Machine" throughout the rest of the film, the device slowly takes shape. It is basically four concentric rings with a crane above it, from which the passenger pod is dropped in. 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 atheism. The committee rejects her application, presumably because they cannot choose someone who does not represent humanity's belief in a higher deity. 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 Hokkaidō, 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 entirely by his professional beliefs, but also by 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 Hokkaidō. 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, counting down from ten as The Machine exerts incredible amounts of power, and at the count of one 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. Traveling at overwhelmingly fast speeds, Ellie is suddenly stopped. At her first stop she sees the star Vega, and catches a glimpse of a mammoth artificial object in space (presumably the antenna that originally transmitted the message), 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 at first looks light brown and wavy, 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. Just before she is sent back, she witnesses a meteor shower, and so they finally watch the meteors together.

Instantly, Ellie wakes up inside the transport pod, being contacted by Hokkaidō 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 (see Occam’s Razor, in simple but a little misleading explanation: all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.). 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. 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 (although it clearly says her journey happened).

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 the author, Carl Sagan.

[edit] Cast

• Jena Malone ... Young Ellie
• David Morse ... Ted Arroway
• Jodie Foster ... Eleanor Arroway
• Geoffrey Blake ... Fisher
• William Fichtner ... Kent
• Sami Chester ... Vernon
• Timothy McNeil ... Davio
• Laura Elena Surillo ... Cantina Woman
• Matthew McConaughey ... Palmer Joss
• Tom Skerritt ... David Drumlin
• Henry Strozier ... Minister
• Michael Chaban ... Hadden Suit
• Max Martini ... Willie
• Larry King ... Himself
• Thomas Garner ... Ian Broderick
• Angela Bassett ... Rachel Constantine
• James Woods ... Michael Kitz

[edit] History

Sagan had intended Eleanor Arroway's story to be a movie even before he published the novel of Contact in 1985; the book had its origins in a 60-page film treatment Sagan wrote with his wife, Ann Druyan, from 1980-81.^[2] Though the author had been interested in the movies since the 1960s, when he advised Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke during the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey and talked with Francis Ford Coppola about "the possibility of making a film about alien contact,"^[3] the movie version of Contact would languish in various stages of pre-production for more than a decade before finally getting made.

Sagan, Druyan, and film producer Lynda Obst spent hundreds of hours discussing how Contact could be adapted for the screen, in conversations that were tape-recorded and to which Sagan biographer Keay Davidson later received access. Davidson wrote, "These transcripts make enthralling reading [and] show how seriously these bright, enthusiastic, middle-aged children of postwar America and the 1960s wanted to make a movie that would intellectually entice viewers."^[3] Along with conducting scientist think tanks and talking to female scientists about sexism in the field, the discussions included how scientifically complex the final film could be. Scientific accuracy was crucial in Sagan's mind; Druyan later said that, whenever they were watching a movie together and the filmmakers made a scientific error, Sagan would sarcastically ask, "Couldn't they afford to hire a graduate student?"^[3]

After years in limbo (Obst lost control of the project in the early 1980s, and didn't begin working on it again until she was hired at Warner Bros., who owned the rights), the project was greenlit in 1993, with George Miller attached to direct.^[1] Jodie Foster signed on to play Ellie after reading the screenplay's second draft, and Ralph Fiennes was approached for the role of Palmer Joss.^[1]

Warner Bros. hoped to release the film by Christmas 1996, but after Miller asked several times to push back production, the studio fired him.^[1] Druyan later told Entertainment Weekly that "Warner Bros. finally came to the conclusion that George would make a great movie, but [that] it wouldn't be ready until after the millennium." Robert Zemeckis (who had been offered the project before Miller) took the project over, making a series of quick decisions: he changed the ending, kept Foster, and cast Matthew McConaughey as Joss. Carl Sagan died during the film's production, just seven months before its release.

[edit] Changes from novel to film

Although the film ended up remaining relatively true to the plot of the original novel, it differed from the original book in several notable respects. In the novel, for example, five scientists undertake the journey in the "machine," whereas in the film Ellie takes the journey alone. In the novel there is a female President in office, but the film uses footage of then-President Bill Clinton. Much of the characterization and dialogue of the President in the novel (including, with a few small changes, the memorable line "Twenty million people died defeating that son of a bitch, and he's our first ambassador to outer space?") was transferred to the Presidential advisor played by Angela Bassett. For obvious reasons, the novel's subplot of a Cold War-era world united by the message (and the character of a Russian scientist with whom Ellie has a turbulent friendship) was dropped.

Also, in the novel, the destruction of the first Machine is due to an unspecified reason. However, it would appear that it was not due to a suicide bombing, because no mention of that was made as even a possibility for the destruction. However, in the film, it is due to a suicide bombing by the Christian preacher Billy Jo Rankin. The character's only purpose in the novel was as religious opposition to the construction of the Machine. In the film, his character plays a much more important role, due to his death, an event that does not even occur in the book.

Also, in the novel, Ellie has a sporadic romance with Presidential science advisor Ken van der Heer. The filmmakers left der Heer out entirely and "seriously discussed [characters as varied as David Drumlin and] the Russian scientist who collected dirty playing cards" as Ellie's love interest before settling on Palmer Joss, played in the film by Matthew McConaughey. Ellie's character remains the lead, in a role reversal that inspired Foster to quip, of McConaughey, "He's got the girl's part."^[1] In the novel, Joss plays a much smaller role, though he does send Ellie a talisman shortly before she goes on board the machine. (In the novel he gives her a pendulum, and in the movie a compass.) McConaughey, who is religious, refused to deliver his character's line "My God was too small," telling Druyan that it was sacrilegious.^[3]

Obst has said that the studio sent her notes warning her against "nerdifying" Ellie and, eventually, the novel's coda (in which Ellie discovers a hidden message deep within the digits of pi) was dropped, partly because executives thought that "pi would be too difficult a concept to explain to a mass audience."^[3] Ideas that were discussed (and rejected) as possible replacement endings included a spectacular finale in which a light show in the sky is created by the extraterrestrials to prove their existence, and an ending in which Ellie (who, as the machine is taking off in the novel, thinks to herself, "I wish I had a baby") gives birth to a child.

[edit] Special effects

The special effects of Contact were produced by both Sony Pictures Imageworks as well as Peter Jackson's Weta Digital. Typical of Zemeckis' work, the effects work was intensive, in what was a first for Foster. She later said, when asked about working in front of a bluescreen, "It was a blue room. Blue walls, blue roof. It was just blue, blue, blue. And I was rotated on a lazy Susan with the camera moving on a computerized arm. It was really tough."^[1] The elaborate effects were well-received upon Contact's release (getting nominated for several awards, including a Saturn Award and Annie Award, and winning the 1998 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.) Among the more notable effects scenes in the film are the following:

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. When passing by Mars, the "face" can be seen.

News footage of then-President Bill Clinton was used and digitally altered to make it appear as if he is speaking about alien contact. This was not the original plan for the film; Zemeckis had actually asked Sidney Poitier to play the President. Soon after Poitier turned the role down,^[1] Zemeckis saw a NASA announcement in August 1996 featuring then-President Bill Clinton. "Clinton gave his Mars rock speech," the director later explained, "and I swear to God it was like it was scripted for this movie. When he said the line 'We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say,' I almost died. I stood there with my mouth hanging open."^[1] Zemeckis incorporated the Clinton speech into the film, and the altered footage caused a controversy both from the White House and from news organizations, over the ethics of fictionalizing such footage.^[4][5]

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.

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.

[edit] Trivia

• Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, makes a short cameo appearance, along with former United States Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.
• William Fichtner's character in the film, a blind astrophysicist with enhanced hearing as a result of his condition, is named Kent Clark, a play on the name of Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent. The character is based on a real-life blind SETI scientist, Kent Cullers.
• Actors John Hurt (Hadden) and Tom Skerritt (Drumlin) also starred in the 1979 film Alien, about a hostile extraterrestrial intelligence.
• 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.
• Contrary to what the Kitz character suggests during the congressional inquiry, and as Ellie tries to explain, 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 different stations on Earth on different continents simultaneously; any such hoax would quickly be exposed by the location detecting technique of multilateration.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Contact (film)

• Contact at the Internet Movie Database
• Official Site
• Review of Contact at Film-Flam, a Wiki for movie reviews
• Larry Klaes' in-depth analysis of the realism of the film and novel
• An article on the visual effects
• An article on the audio effects
• 1995 version of Contact film script
• Dialogue transcript of 1997 film