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'''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.

Contents

Plot summary

Cast

Production

Development

Adaptation

Effects

Reception

Trivia

References

External links

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 at impossible speed 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 a book on science's impact on the Third World. He gives her a compass from a Cracker Jack Box. She gives it back and says that someday it might save his life. They start a romantic relationship. It is revealed in flashback 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, arrogant man who has been promoted to Chief of the National Science Foundation and Science Advisor to the President of the United States. Drumlin unblinkingly 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 Clark, 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. That very night, Arroway herself detects a powerful 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. 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. 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.
Though the Hitler footage causes governmental panic, with Kitz demanding to militarize what he sees as a conflict with a pseudo-fascist civilization, Ellie points out that the Olympic broadcast was simply the first television transmission powerful enough to travel into space. Though Kitz concedes this point, Ellie is increasingly ignored by the government and media as Drumlin begins to take credit for her discovery. Meanwhile, 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 undecodable alien language. After several failed attempts to decode the language, Hadden, on an overnight meeting with Ellie, reveals to her that he has discovered that the encrypted data sheets fit together in a 3D fashion, revealing complex blueprints for some sort of mechanical device . This information gives Ellie renewed political power, and she returns to Washington D.C. where the Cabinet meets to discuss theories on what the machine does, and whether or not it should be built.
Despite her insistence that the machine's designers are likely to be peaceful, Arroway is confronted with officials who worry about the "morally ambiguous" and potentially Godless nature of the civilization, fearing that the machine is a weapon of mass destruction or a Trojan Horse. Ellie is supported by Palmer Joss, who has become the personal religious adviser to the President. The President himself (shown as Bill Clinton) eventually decides to authorize the United States to build the machine, which is identified as an interstellar transport device designed to take a single human occupant into space (presumably Vega). The reunited Joss and Arroway start another romantic relationship.
Construction begins in Cape Canaveral, Florida on "The Machine," which is basically four concentric rings with a gantry above, from which the passenger pod is dropped in. The astronomical cost of construction and technology rights are split between several different nations, with the International Machine Consortium (IMC) managing overall construction and operation, and an international committee of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and politicians is formed to select a suitable candidate to make the journey. Joss is included in the committee and Ellie is among the potential candidates, preventing them from spending much time together. Dr. Drumlin resigns from his government post in order to become a candidate, and he and Arroway become the main contestants for the "machine seat." While being questioned before the committee, Ellie is forced by Palmer Joss to reveal her atheism, and Drumlin is eventually chosen to make the journey. It is implied that the committee did not want to select a candidate who doesn't represent "humanity's belief in a higher deity."
Ellie ends her relationship with Joss and stays with the project as a technical adviser. The day of the Machine's first full-scale systems test is a widely-attended celebratory event, but Ellie notices that a religious fanatic (Jake Busey) she had previously encountered has infiltrated the site by posing as an employee. She alerts Drumlin to his presence, but before Drumlin can stop the explosive-strapped fanatic, he commits a suicide bombing, killing Drumlin and dozens of technicians, and destroying The Machine. Soon after the Cape Canaveral disaster, Arroway receives a communication from 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 by his corporation in Hokkaidō, Japan, and tells her that the International Machine Consortium still wants her to go on the journey.

Ellie travels to Hokkaidō, where Palmer Joss meets her and reveals that his acts at the committee hearing were influenced not entirely by his beliefs, but also by his personal fear of losing her. He makes peace with her going on the second Machine, which is then announced to a stunned world. Ellie enters the Machine's transport pod (IPV) assisted by two technicians. As the Machine begins to build up power, the rings transfer their energy to the pod, which makes the interior metal of the pod begin to turn slightly translucent. Her communications signal becomes fuzzy as the energy field increases, and the rings begin to create a massive energy vortex in the core of the machine. The Machine becomes structurally unstable and the team prepares to abort, but Kent picks up Ellie's faint voice telling the team she is "Ok to go." The team agrees to go ahead, dropping Ellie's transport module into The Machine.
Inside the pod, Ellie travels at immense speed through a series of wormholes, while the translucence of the pod allows her to see all around her. She then stops briefly in the Vega system, where she sees a complex radio antenna (the one that originally transmitted the message) that could have only been built by a highly advanced civilization. She is then pulled into another wormhole, and is transported to a quadruple star system, where she sees a planet that appears to have cities and indications of advanced alien life. The pod is then pulled into another, "much more violent" wormhole. She then gets out of her chair after seeing the compass given to her by Palmer Joss float undisturbed in the pod's zero gravity environment. The violent vibration causes the restraint system to detach and impact the wall of the pod. She finds she has been transported to the site of a celestial event so beautiful she cannot describe it. After losing consciousness, Ellie awakes on a surreal beach that resembles a childhood drawing she made of the beach at Pensacola. She sees a transparent entity moving toward her, which slowly takes the form of her deceased father, and overcome with emotion, she embraces him. She then realizes that she is in a simulated environment based on her thoughts and memories. She talks briefly to the alien who has taken her father's form. It tells her that there are many other civilizations, some of whom they try to contact with the blueprints for the machine to access the transportation system, which was already there when they arrived at this place. She is told that she cannot take back any proof to Earth, because "it's the way it's been done for billions of years." He adds that they made the first step (of potentially many) in contacting Earth because, in the immensity of space, "the only thing we've found that makes the loneliness bearable is each other." Before she is sent back, they witness a huge meteor shower, and so they finally get to watch the meteors together.
Ellie wakes up inside the transport pod and is told that the pod simply dropped through the Machine without going anywhere, a fact supported by forty-three separate cameras. With opinion divided as to whether Arroway made the journey or simply hallucinated it, Kitz heads a Congressional inquiry and argues vitriolically that the entire project was a perverse multi-billion-dollar hoax orchestrated by Hadden (who has just succumbed to cancer.) Arroway admits that, in accordance with Occam’s Razor, the hoax theory is the more logical explanation, but that she continues to believe her journey took place. As one Congressman points out, the atheist Ellie is put in the ironic position of asking the public to accept her unsupported personal experience based only on faith.
Ellie leaves the hearing with Joss, who embraces her experience, and both are greeted by a large crowd of supporters to whom Arroway has become a prophetic figure. It is then revealed by Kitz that a secret report states that Arroway's video headset recorded approximately eighteen hours of static, the exact time Arroway claimed she was gone, despite the cameras showing her drop straight through the machine with no interruptions in descent. Though the information is suppressed, Kitz decides to continue to fund Ellie's SETI work. Ellie is shown 18 months later, giving a children's tour of the newly-expanded radio telescope array back in New Mexico, and is last shown sitting in the desert during sunset, looking not at the night sky but at a palmful of desert sand. The film ends with a backdrop of stars, with the words "For Carl" shown against them.

Cast

★ Jena Malone ... Young Ellie

★ David Morse ... Theodore Arroway

★ Jodie Foster ... Eleanor Ann Arroway

★ Geoffrey Blake ... Fisher

★ William Fichtner ... Kent

★ John Hurt ... S. R. Hadden

★ 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

Production

Development

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. Sagan, Carl. ''Contact: A Novel''. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. p. 432. 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 '' and talked with Francis Ford Coppola about "the possibility of making a film about alien contact,"Davidson, Keay. ''Carl Sagan: A Life''. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. 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."Davidson, Keay. ''Carl Sagan: A Life''. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. 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?"Davidson, Keay. ''Carl Sagan: A Life''. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
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. Cover Story: Making ''Contact'' 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. Cover Story: Making ''Contact''
Warner Bros. hoped to release the film by Christmas 1996, but after Miller asked several times to push back production, the studio fired him. Cover Story: Making ''Contact'' 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.

Adaptation

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. Due to the movie being made after the fall of the Soviet Union, 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 identified as "Joseph." The only religious character in the novel, Billy Jo Rankin, existed as religious opposition to the construction of the Machine. In the film, the 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." Cover Story: Making ''Contact'' 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.^[1]
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."Davidson, Keay. ''Carl Sagan: A Life''. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. 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 she wishes she had had a baby) gives birth to a child.

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." Cover Story: Making ''Contact'' 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, Cover Story: Making ''Contact'' 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." Cover Story: Making ''Contact'' 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.^[2][3]
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.
In the scene on the beach with Ellie and her "father," the water appears to only recede from the sand; there are no waves approaching the beach.

Reception

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 and from where Drumlin had Arroway removed, 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.

References

1. Davidson, Keay. ''Carl Sagan: A Life''. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
2. http://web.archive.org/web/20031105101908/
3. http://www.parascope.com/articles/slips/fs_184.htm

External links

★

★ 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

★ Making Contact An article on the audio effects at FilmSound.org

★ 1995 version of Contact film script

★ Cinematographic analysis of Contact

★ Dialogue transcript of 1997 film

★ Movie stills