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| Contact | |
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 Contact Promotional Movie Poster |
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| 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 James Woods John Hurt Tom Skerritt and Angela Bassett |
| Music by | Alan Silvestri |
| Cinematography | Don Burgess, ASC |
| Editing by | Arthur Schmidt |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date(s) | July 11, 1997 U.S. release |
| Running time | 153 minutes |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $90,000,000[1] |
| Gross revenue | $171,000,000[2] |
| IMDb • Allmovie | |
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 Arroway, Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss, Tom Skerritt as Dr. David Drumlin, James Woods as National Security Advisor Michael Kitz, and John Hurt as billionaire industrialist S.R. Hadden.
The story follows the relentless efforts of the film's protagonist, Dr. Eleanor Arroway, or "Ellie," to advance research with the SETI project and search for evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence by listening for contact via radio astronomy, something which she feels would be the greatest possible human achievement "for the history of history". The film explores what might happen if such contact indeed were made, and the enormous difficulties the human race might encounter in coming to understand that contact, with significant internal conflict occurring in differences over culture, religion, politics, and human perception as the story plays out. Sagan also explores what kind of message a much older alien civilization might hold for humanity in its fledging steps to join an interstellar community of sentient beings.
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Contact is presented as the story of the protagonist, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). As a gifted young child (played by Jena Malone), she is encouraged by her father Theodore (David Morse) to study amateur radio and the possibilities of extra-terrestrial communications. After her father passes away, Arroway continues her studies, completing her graduate degree under Dr. David Drumlin (Tom Skeritt), and becoming involved in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. There, she meets Kent (William Fichtner), a blind researcher that assists her by listening to the radio signals for patterns in the noise, and Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), a Christian theology student writing a book on the effects of science on the Third World and who becomes romantically involved with Ellie. After some time, Drumlin decides to pull the funding from SETI, and Arroway is forced to find other sources of funding to continue on the program. After eighteen months of searching, Arroway is able to gain funding from the reclusive billionaire industrialist, S.R. Hadden (John Hurt), allowing her to continue her program at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.
Four years later, with Drumlin putting pressure to close the program and funding sources low, Arroway manages to find a strong signal from the Vega star, and with her team, are able to tell it is not natural, repeating a sequence of prime numbers. Arroway tells other observatories around the globe about the source to avoid losing the signal and maintain continuous tracking. This announcement causes both Drumlin and the National Security Agency (NSA), led by Michael Kitz (James Woods), to attempt to take control of the facility. As Arroway, Drumlin, and Kitz argue, Kent and the other team members discover that a video source is buried in the signal; this eventually resolves into footage of Adolf Hilter's welcoming address to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Though Arroway and her team postulate that this would have been the first television signal broadcast outside of Earth's atmosphere, and has been trasmitted then relayed back from Vega, 27 light years away, the project is brought under tight security. As President Bill Clinton and Drumlin give a television address to downplay the impact of the Hitler image, Arroway learns that a third set of data was found in the signal; over 60,000 "pages" of what appear to be technical drawings. Specialists are brought in to attempt to decode the drawings but have no luck. As Arroway returns home one night, she is contacted by Hadden, offering to meet her at a remote airport. Aboard his private plane, Hadden introduces himself to Arroway, and reveals that he has found the means to decode the message, as the pages are meant to be interpreted in three dimensions. Arroway gives this information to the decoding team, and the pages are slowly deciphered, eventually revealing the workings of some machine which allows for one human occupant inside a pod to be dropped into three rapidly spinning rings, but its exact purpose unknown.
The nations of the world come together to fund the construction of The Machine at Cape Canaveral, and an international panel is put together to select one of nine candidates (including both Arroway and Drumlin) for the first run. While Arroway is one of the top selections, her lack of religious faith is called out by Joss, one of the panel members, and Drumlin is ultimately selected. During the first test run of the system, Joseph (Jake Busey), a religious fanatic that has outspoken on the evils of technology, sneaks onto the Machine and detonates explosives he carries, killing himself and many members of the Machine crew, including Drumlin, and completely wiping out the machine. With the rest of the world unable to justify the cost of rebuilding the Machine, Arroway dejectedly returns home to find another message from Hadden, who has now taken residence on the Mir space station for medical reasons. Hadden shows Arroway that a second Machine was secretly constructed at Hokkaidō, Japan at a much more secure facility, and that Arroway is the top candidate to travel in it.
In Hokkaidō, Arroway is prepared for her journey, and outfitted with several recording devices. The Machine is successfully brought to full power and the pod is dropped into the center. Arroway experiences travels through a series of wormholes, separated by a brief period of time where she can observe the outside environment, including a radio array-like structure at Vega, and signs of a highly-advanced civilization on some unknown planet. Arroway eventually finds herself in a surreal landscape similar to one of her childhood pictures of Pensacola, Florida, and approached by a blurry figure that resolves into that of her father. Though initially shocked by his appearance, Arroway regains her thoughts and recognizes him as an alien taking her father's form, and attempts to ask several questions about the aliens. The alien doesn't answer these but simply points out that this journey was humanity's first small step to joining other intergalactic species, and more steps will come later. As Arroway considers these answers, she falls unconscious and finds herself at the bottom of the pod, with the control team trying to figure out if she is okay. As she is recovered, she learns that from all external vantage points, she or the pod never traveled anywhere and simply dropped through the Machine, despite Arroway insisting she was gone for 18 hours, and that her recording devices only show static.
Kitz resigns as the head of the NSA to lead a Congressional committee to determine if the Machine was all a fraud by Hadden, who had the resources to set up an elaborate hoax but has since passed away. Arroway is accused of collaborating with Hadden to waste trillions of dollars, but she asks them to accept her testimony on faith. As she leaves the committee, she is joined by Joss, and is cheered on by a crowd who believe in her story. As Kitz discusses the case with the White House chief of staff Rachel Constantine (Angela Bassett), Constantine notes that Arroway's recording devices contained 18 hours of static. Kitz concedes that Arroway's story may be true, and together, they give Arroway continued grant money for the SETI program. As the film closes, Arroway is shown at the Very Large Array describing the universe to a group of schoolchildren, telling them to believe what they want to believe, but that if the universe was just composed of us, it would be "an awful waste of space".
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.[3] 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 he had talked with Francis Ford Coppola about "the possibility of making a film about alien contact,"[4] 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."[4] 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?"[5]
After years in limbo (Obst lost control of the project in the early 1980s, and she 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. had 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.
Although the film remained 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, creating a dramatic situation where the single traveler is selected. 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 sabotage, while in the film this is dramatized to be a suicide bombing by a religious cult leader identified as "Joseph." This character may be based on a fundamentalist religious leader from the novel, Billy Jo Rankin, who vigorously opposed the construction of the Machine on theological grounds.
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. The end of the novel does hint at the possibility of a relationship between Ellie and Palmer for the future. 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 (a pendulum in the novel and a compass in the movie). McConaughey, who is religious, refused to deliver his character's line "My God was too small," telling Druyan that it was sacrilegious.[4]
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."[4] 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.
The Machine itself underwent a radical redesign from its novel counterpart:
Since construction of the novel's Machine takes so long, and requires new technologies and materials to be developed, world industries are revolutionized during this time, including the formation of several Earth-orbit space stations which contain thousands of individuals each. In contrast, the construction timeframe is much narrower in the film and there is no mention of the benefits of using alien technology in other applications.
Things that are consistent between the novel and film Machine designs-
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Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (December 2008) |
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, garnering nominations for several awards, including a Saturn Award and Annie Award, and winning the 1998 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The film also received a nomination in the Academy Awards for Best Sound. Among the film's more notable effects scenes:
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