I have a soft spot for this movie. I think Jodie Foster is amazing in it. But almost everything in it is stupid.
Carl Sagan was best known, when I was a kid, of being a guy who was on TV all the time making astronomy cool. It was his idea to make a golden disk for the Pioneer space probes so that in a million years, if someone or something comes across it, there will be a (literal) record of who we were and where we came from.
We were optimistic about who else might be out there. Liu Cixin and his Dark Forest theory has changed my thinking on that subject. Old hotness: there is a galactic community out there waiting for us to find and join them. New hotness: older civilizations are interested in killing young civilizations before they can become a problem and attack as soon as they are detected.
Jodie Foster is a radio astronomer who detects a strong signal coming from Vega, a young star 25 light years from Earth. The signal initially appears to be a TV broadcast of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympics, but other signals embedded within that signal give instructions for building a mysterious machine that is intended to, they assume, bring a human through the light years to where they are.
Foster eventually goes on that machine, meets her dead father in Pensacola, returns, and nobody believes her. She is forced to admit that she is asking the world to take her story on faith, which she has rejected throughout the movie, as she is a scientist.
So that’s the movie. Here’s why I am angry.
But first, it’s funny to see Tom Skerritt in an antagonist role denying the existence of aliens. Because… he played the starship captain in the movie Alien… I chuckled.
Early on, Foster argues that Occam’s Razor suggests that a scientific explanation is preferred to a religious explanation for what is happening. That’s the principle that the simplest explanation is more likely to be the correct one — or it’s explained that way in the movie. I dunno. An invisible deity responsible for all creation and micromanaging everything seems like the simplest explanation. Stars? God did it. I bumped my knee? God did it. Someone died? God did it. Can’t get much simpler.
And in fact, when she meets Space Dad, he says that his alien race found the interstellar transportation there when they got there, and it might well have been God that did it (they imply). But she rejects that.
So here’s a bunch of things that made me angry.
- James Woods suggests a satellite was the source of the signals. No. Radio telescopes on opposite sides of the Earth pegged Vega as the source. A satellite couldn’t be the source unless it happened to be at Vega, or at least a few light years in that direction. In one of the first scenes of the movie, they specifically check to rule out satellites.
- Woods also suggests that assuming alien civilizations are friendly is a big ask. Foster dismisses that out of hand. But why? It’s legit.
- When Foster’s space machine is warming up, there are pronounced light, gravity, and spatial distortions. Yet Woods says that nothing happened. Something totally happened.
- Before Foster goes on her trip, she is reporting in real time the distortions she is seeing. These could easily be verified by running the machine again.
- Why didn’t they run the machine again?
- Some of the subcontractors building the machine were doing it in exchange for the rights to use the alien technology. Which, as we saw, does work. What happened there?
- The overarching theme to the movie (explicitly stated at one point) is that science and religion are two approaches to explain the same things, and both are valid approaches that should work hand in hand. So to keep this balance, they add evil scientists (Skerritt) and evil preachers (Jake Busey, Rob Lowe) so that nobody feels singled out. Couldn’t they just have actually worked together? I recently watched My Cousin Vinnie for the first time, and it was fun seeing a movie without any real antagonists. When Vinnie proves his case, the prosecutor immediately accepts the fact and drops the charges so that Karate Kid can get the heck out of Alabama. Herman Munster was the judge. It was a cool movie.
- The selection committee asks Foster what, if she were selected and met an alien, she would ask them. She gives an answer, but when she finally meets an alien in the persona of Space Dad, she does not ask the question. It was a good question!
I’m no scientist, not even a movie critic, but this movie just seems lazy. I really expected more from an actual scientist like Sagan. I have read the book, and it had some even more out-there stuff in there, like a message written in the digits of pi.
Dude. Pi is random digits. Every message is written in the digits of pi.
Anyway. Foster sells the movie, but remove her, and it just leaves all the problems.
Heh, I watched this on streaming a couple of months back and yes, the big reveal at the end about her camera does fall somewhat flat when you think “did you not see those readings on the machine?” and “okay, then run it again!”
So after I wrote this, I read other reviews. Everyone loved it. Changed everyone’s life. I am not immune to her tears at seeing her dad, even if it was an illusion. Jodie Foster is amazing. But I still say, take her out of the movie, you don’t have a movie.
The inverse square law says that any signal we send out would be lost in the background noise before it came anywhere near Vega. Turns out that the 18 hours of static contained an additional message — since the previous message was hidden in static, why didn’t they think of checking THIS static for another message?
The movie would have been better without the congressional hearing. And yeah, Woods said right before that he wasn’t running for Congress or anything, so why is he heading up a Congressional hearing, anyway?
Weirdly, as a massive Jodie Foster fan (I can see three pictures of her on the walls around me as I type) I have yet to watch Contact. I’m actually more interested in seeing it after reading this than I was before and I’ve always been interested in seeing it – just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I didn’t realise it had actual science fiction stuff in it. I thought it was all talk.
On the specific plot point failures, though, isn’t that… um… every Hollywood movie ever? When was any of them able to stand up to any kind of semi-rigorous factual analysis? I’m pretty sure if I watched any of my most-loved movies with my old college student hat on, looking to write an essay about why it made no sense, I’d have a bullet point list a yard long before the intermission. Not that movies have intermissions any more but I remember when they did!
Also, yes, My Cousin Vinnie is a fun movie. I saw it on TV expecting nothing and really enjoyed it. I should watch it again.
K, this is going to seem a little bit dishonest, but you really should see Contact. Foster is amazing in it — she has so many great performances, and her acting in this movie is why so many people are willing to overlook the flaws.
And those flaws… sure, there is a suspension of disbelief for any movie. I absolutely would give Contact its aliens and interstellar subway. But Sagan was a scientist, and absolutely KNEW all these objections, better than me. And decided to go along with them anyway to add a bunch of false drama that the movie didn’t NEED. It kneecaps what could have been a better film.
Making Foster’s character refuse to consider any position aside from aliens are friendly and religion is opium for the masses just to force an epiphany on her at an entirely pointless Congressional hearing is… lazy.
I watched Contact long ago.. I guess when it was new? This post kind of makes me want to watch it again so I can shake my fist at the TV and yell “Tipa was right!!”
Also, love My Cousin Vinny. Whenever I think of it, I think of Marisa Tomei standing on the porch stamping her foot shouting about how her biological clock is ticking.
Joe Pesci though… that dude has played some of the scariest characters and some of the funniest. He is just great. His character in Goodfellas just terrified me.
I don’t want to be all Neil deGrasse Tyson about it. I just wanted the movie to be better.
I hadn’t seen My Cousin Vinnie until recently. Everyone said it was good, but the movie picture looked like Legally Blonde or something. I’m glad I was finally convinced to watch it and I really liked it.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s original conception of Contact was much different. It began as a movie proposal back in the eighties but when offered to various studios for development, the core material was constantly tinkered with to make it a more commercial venture. Hence the original screenplay was adapted and reworked into a book by Sagan and Druyan.
The book rights were later acquired by Warner Bros. in the early nineties and Roland Joffé was hired to direct. He left due to various reasons and then George Miller of Mad Max fame, was brought in. He cast Jodie Foster and the screenplay then went through multiple re-writes. Miller left the project due to “creative differences” and Robert Zemeckis ended up getting the gig and tidying up all the loose ends.
All of which is standard operating procedure for most mainstream film studios. It’s hardly surprising that the film ended up the way it is. The religious elements seem somewhat contradictory and at odds with the source material but that’s Hollywood for you. It’s like hiring a renown country singer and then being surprised that they make country music and asking them to change it all.
I read the book a long time ago, probably after I saw the movie, and don’t remember much about it. There have been space movies without villains that have done well — Interstellar, Gravity, Close Encounters, but I’m not against villainy. I’m against paper villains that are just mean because they need someone to work against the protagonist. That’s not a law of nature, you don’t have to do that. It is lazy.