Contact (1997) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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1997 is the year we make Contact.

Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact is filled with wonderment at the workings of the universe, a cast of characters that make up a wide range of various belief structures, and some strong themes of faith versus science. It asks the audience a number of questions about belief and knowledge and creates a film built on the hopeful wish that humanity will survive long enough to make contact with other life forms.

First Impressions

The trailer opens with various shots of a woman at a telescope array listening on headphones. Suddenly she hears something and the whole world is aware that contact with an alien species has been made. Mathematical information is communicated that instructs humans on how to build a device, possibly a transport vessel of sorts. The woman is being closed into a spherical device, as she looks apprehensive. Robert Zemeckis returns to the science-fiction genre with a very serious looking film.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

The film opens with a camera pulling away from Earth through the Solar System and then the galaxy, as famous songs and audio clips from the previous 60 years are played. When the camera reaches the Pillars of Creation the audio drops out and the swirling galaxies coalesce into the eyes of a young girl. This is young Eleanor Arroway (Jena Malone) who is experimenting with a Ham radio with her father (David Morse), contacting someone in Pensacola, Florida. Years later, Ellie (Jodie Foster) continues listening to the airwaves and beyond at the  Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Ellie is working for David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt) who would prefer science to be more profitable. She also meets Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), a young theologian, whom she is immediately attracted to. When she explains why she is searching for extraterrestrial life, he has the same quote as her Dad, that if there weren’t civilizations out there it would be a “waste of space.” A flashback identifies a key moment in her life when her father dies, and the priest claims it was God’s will. Drumlin pulls her funding, so she and blind colleague Kent Clark (William Fichtner) look for other sources of funding. She interviews at the Hadden Foundation which provides her with the money needed.

Four years later, Ellie is working at the VLA in New Mexico when she hears something on her headphones while relaxing near the giant satellite dishes. She races back to the offices to have her colleagues confirm the signal, which is definitely not man-made and coming from an intelligent source 26 light years away, near Vega. As the military and news crews show up, the team discovers a video message of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympics encoded within the noise. This makes head of the National Security Council Michael Kitz (James Woods) very nervous. President Clinton has a press conference revealing the news to the world as Drumlin swoops in to take over the project.

With the help of secretive industrialist SR Hadden (John Hurt), Ellie is able to decode the pages of text data which includes plans for a transport machine big enough to hold one person. At a gala party celebrating the discovery, Palmer–now a spiritual counselor to the White House, re-enters Ellie’s life. The United States, with the help of other nations, decide to build the device and Drumlin wants to be the one to go. A series of interviews for potential candidates include both him and Ellie. But when it comes to final summations, Palmer outs her as an Atheist and Drumlin is chosen to take the prime seat.

During a systems check of the device at Cape Canaveral, a religious extremist (Jake Busey) sneaks onto the gantry and detonates a bomb, killing Drumlin and others, and destroying the Machine. Hadden, now in self-exile about the space station Mir, calls Ellie to inform her that there is a second Machine in Japan, and that she is to be the pilot. Palmer shows up and apologizes to her for his earlier actions. The sphere, where Ellie rides, is dropped from a tower into four rotating rings. Ellie experiences a wormhole that takes her to Vega and then further on to other galaxies. She passes out and awakens on an alien beach, confronted by a manifestation of her father.The alien tells her that it’s easier for her to see someone she knows. It tells her that they did not contact the Earth, but vice versa. Humans are now being invited into a larger community, but she will not be able to have any proof with her when she returns.

The pod falls into the catch net, and a disoriented Ellie asks what day it is. She feels like she was gone for 18 hours, but all observers, and instrumentation, saw her fall straight through the rtings and into the net. He video device recording only static from before the launch. At a hearing, Kitz grills her, refusing to believe that she had an experience that science cannot explain. He suggests that the whole thing was a final hoax by SR Hadden before he died. Palmer tells Ellie, and the gathered reporters that he believes her. In a private call between Kitz and White House official Rachel Constantine (Angela Bassett), she reveals that the interesting thing was not that Ellie’s device recorded static, but that it recorded 18 hours of static. Ellie gets continued funding to continue working at the VLA continuing to look for life in the universe.

“In all our searching the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” – Alien in the guise of Mr. Arroway

History in the Making

Contact is a dramatic departure for sci-fi films in the late 90s, as well as for director Robert Zemeckis. It changed the tone from fun and action oriented sci-fi films to one much more cerebral and serious. It also marked a change for Zemeckis whose previous films were considered comedies. His Back to the Future trilogy, now considered a fundamental pillar to the time travel genre, was his entry into science-fiction, but he had started branching out since then. With his previous 1994 film, Forrest Gump, Zemeckis had transitioned from comedic films to more dramatic fare (even though Gump still has many comedic moments).

Contact is based on a novel of the same name by astronomer and television host Carl Sagan. A noted science author, this was Sagan’s only fictional novel. Contact, the novel, was very similar to the film, but containing much more detail and other smaller changes–as is expected with adaptations of this kind. What differentiates this film from previous depictions of first contact with extraterrestrials is the more realistic portrayals of that event. It’s not a dystopian, action film like Star Trek: First Contact, the spectacle of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or even an alien invasion like Mars Attacks. Contact with aliens is depicted as humans listening carefully for transmissions coming from deep space that are not naturally occurring, and then acting on those messages. Rather than sending a message of apprehension, the entire discovery, which is from Ellie’s point of view, comes with a wonderment and a hopefulness that is often lacking in films of this type.

Genre-fication

Science-fiction stories come in multiple flavors, but they break down into two basic categories: the pulpy, adventure stories, and hard sci-fi. This is the difference between sci-fi adventures like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, and more thoughtful and realistic depictions such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner. Hard sci-fi favors logical and more scientifically accurate depictions of concepts, whether set in the future or present day. And while Contact contains a number of tropes related to the discovery that humans are not alone, it does it in a way that is based in reality, rather than an overly dramatic set piece.

Since the dawn of sci-fi cinema, and stories for that matter, aliens have been visiting the planet and attacking for various reasons. The War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars, through The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and Independence Day all have aliens invading, or appearing with malice of one kind or another. This alien archetype was obviously fueled by Cold War worries of invading armies and nations during a time when America, specifically, was undergoing a big change. Later films built on those archetypes as a basis to tell larger stories in the same vein. Contact, with its diverse characters, makes use of some of these previous films’ ideals, but turns the tone into more of a real-world event.

First contact does not come as a spaceship buzzing through the atmosphere or an alien attacking a farmer. It is depicted as a string of repeating tones representing prime numbers, which when further deciphered contain visual and text data. Kitz, the security director, is on hand when the video message is decrypted and is shocked to see images og Hitler being projected back at them from beyond the solar system. The assumption from the military is that the aliens are out to get us. Kitz thinks that the aliens send images of a fascist leader to indicate their support of that ideology, or instructions for a device, which would turn out to be a bomb. To people like him, everything unknown is a threat. While Ellie see’s how benign the messages are. Only suitably advanced species would be able to solve these messages, indicating that they are ready to head out to the stars and meet others like them.

Societal Commentary

Human nature is very much on display here. As mentioned above, Ellie is excited at the prospect that alien life exists. It provides her an answer to the question of why is the universe so big, and are humans alone in the universe. Her life is striving for contact (with aliens) but in reality she’s striving for any sort of meaningful interaction after the death of her father. Other characters like David Drumlin and SR Hadden are very much out for themselves. Drumlin uses his position to take credit without taking credit, for Ellie’s discovery. She was working with him when the project started and he mansplains his way into her discovery, thrusting himself to the forefront. Hadden, who also does what he wants and when he wants, sees the bigger picture and uses Ellie as a pawn in his plan to thumb his nose at the governments who want to “get him.” He funds her research and gives her the pushes she needs, monetarily and via solving the puzzle of the codex, to keep going. But in the end his oversight and affiliation with her, leads people like Kitz to not believe the story of her trip. Guilt by association as it were.

For all of its science-fiction elements, the major theme in the film boils down to science versus faith. Ellie’s life, since the passing of her father, has been based on gathering empirical evidence mostly due to her curiosity. But also partially as a rejection of the church whose representative told her that her father’s death was “God’s will.” Her refusal to take anything on faith or to even have Faith (with a capital ‘F’) seems like her thumbing her nose at God and the church. Conversely, Palmer Joss is a man of faith; one of the good kind. Contact shows two other types of religious men in order to paint Palmer in the proper light. Rob Lowe is Richard Rank, who is the leader of the Conservative Coalition, and concerned that he has no indication of the aliens’ beliefs and whether they believe in God. He says “God,” not a god. As if there is only one potential deity. He represents the political side of the theological spectrum. The other character is named Joseph in the credits and played by Jake Busey. He is a fire and brimstone evangelist that shows up outside the VLA asking the assembled if the scientists are the ones that should be speaking to “your God.” He is on the other end of the spectrum, eventually succumbing to terrorism in an attempt to stop the Machine from launching. Palmer serves as a midpoint between these two extremes. He follows his faith, and the intent of the scriptures, rather than the exact words. He understands that there are people who believe things other than what he does, like Ellie. And he does not push his doctrine on her. But he also does not prop her up when voting for her, since he feels she does not reflect the beliefs of a vast portion of the world.

To Ellie, she sees no need to place her faith in a higher power. Her scientific insights have always served her well. She listens to the radio telescopes and doesn’t hear God. She hears the radio signals of the past, just as the aliens do. Their messages to her do not take the form of a booming voice or a burning bush, but express themselves in mathematics and science, as she believes all higher communication must do. When she finally goes on the journey to the other side of the galaxy, she sees things she can neither explain nor even verbalize. She tells her audio recorder that they should have sent a poet, since she has no words to describe the beauty of the stellar formations she sees, as she is brought to tears. She then has an intensely personal meeting with someone that looks like her father, telling her the way that the universe works, and that she is to deliver this message back to her homeworld–but without any evidence. For her the switch was so subtle that she didn’t realize that she had been converted. Everything leading to her encounter was scientifically based, as were the messages she was to return with. But without the proof, no one would believe her. She claims that she did indeed have “an experience,” and “everything I am tells me it was real.” An experience that she is now asking others to take on faith, of which only Palmer Joss shares a belief in.

The Science in The Fiction

Contact was the first movie to popularize the scientific theory of Occam’s razor. Ellie first posits this question to Palmer at the gala. As they continue to discuss science versus faith, she asks if he’s familiar with this precept of Occam’s razor. As a note, the word razor in this case indicates a philosophical principle rather than a sharp device for cutting. Ellie explains to Palmer that given the choice of two competing ideas about something, the one with the simplest, or least number of elements is the correct one. She explains that between the choice of an all-powerful God who created the universe yet chose not to give evidence of His existence, or the idea that humans invented the deity so they wouldn’t have to feel alone, the answer would fall with the latter. Her certainty of this proves to be her undoing, as Kitz questions her later about her experience with the aliens. Having no proof, and appearing to have fallen directly through the device into the safety net, Kitz claims that the simplest answer was that she never made the trip. Of course, the audience is let in on the fact that 18 hours of static was recorded which indicates that Ellie’s experience was real.

Much of the film also revolves around the decoding of the documents sent by the aliens. Each page has a series of codes on it, as a rubric, to help the humans figure out the mathematical concepts. With Hadden’s help, they are able to figure out how to connect pages to one another using a three-dimensional structure, rather than the planar view of a sheet of paper. This leads them to building The Machine, a device that was designed meticulously to do the job of transporting a single person to the Waystation in the center of the Universe. Humans nearly messed this up, twice. After the destruction of the first Machine, the revelation of a second one in Japan allows the plot to continue. But the engineers do not feel comfortable allowing a passenger into the sphere/cockpit without a seat and safety restraints. Since this was not part of the plans, the additions cause the device to vibrate and eventually destroy the seat. Ellie survived the destruction by sheer luck, having reached for the toy compass given to her by Palmer, and unhooking from the restraints at the last moment.

The film also speaks to the treatment of women in the science field. Ellie is shown working harder than her male counterparts in order to get funding, satellite time, or even the attention of men, like Drumlin, in order to move forward in her research. When her discovery is finally made, men like Drumlin step in to take over for her, directing the research and presenting the facts to the news media. She is given a back seat to the show that she created. She is also pushed back as the astronaut to go into space, and then silenced about her experiences by men, like Kitz, with other ambitions and agendas. Contact is speaking to audiences and depicting the way many women in science, and other fields, are relegated to supporting roles, even when they have made the necessary steps and strides to forward the field further. The men in Contact, with the exception of Palmer, all seem to have fragile egos which cannot handle a woman being in the lead. This paved the way for other stories of strong scientific women such as the real tale of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan in Hidden Figures, or the fictional portrayals of Sandra Bullock in Gravity, or Amy Adams in Arrival.

The Final Frontier

Contact was not the last sci-fi film for the movie’s leads. While most of the work done by Foster and McConaughey deal with dramatic roles, she returned to the genre in Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 film Elysium, while he starred in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 Interstellar. Interstellar dealt with similar themes of contact and scientific accuracy in depicting wormholes, time travel, and deep space exploration as the protagonist searches for answers about the nature of life and the universe.

Besides presenting complex scientific and philosophical ideals about the nature of life and the universe, Contact shared the importance of listening. For Ellie it was more about listening in space to determine if there is life elsewhere. But then it was also about her listening to herself and others, in a more personal way. Her connections with people were eclipsed by her passion for her work. She had her head in the clouds, literally, that she did not see what was right under her nose. Besides the overwhelming hope that the film provides to audiences about the potential of alien contact, it also shares the real power is in the contact made right here on Earth between individuals. That sort of connection is the stuff that can truly change the universe.

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