Contact (film)

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Contact
Image:Contact ver2.jpg
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 minutes
Language English
Budget $90,000,000[1]
Gross revenue $171,000,000[2]
All Movie Guide profile
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 Arroway, Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss, James Woods as National Security Advisor Michael Kitz, and Tom Skerritt as Dr. David Drumlin.

The story follows the relentless efforts of the film's the main protagonist, Dr. Arroway, or "Ellie," to advance research with the SETI project and search for evidence of the existence of extra-terrestrial 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 was 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.

Contents

[edit] Plot

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 a vast, silent universe.

The main protagonist, Ellie Arroway, is introduced as a child, fascinated by amateur radio. After Ellie asks her father whether humans can talk to other planets, and whether there are other civilizations, the scene changes to Arroway in her late 20s, a brilliant scientist and researcher working on the SETI program. While working at Arecibo, she meets Palmer Joss, a theology student researching a book on science's impact on the Third World. Despite her commitment to the SETI project, Arroway is ridiculed by her former teacher, Dr. David Drumlin, who shuts down the project.

Ellie spends the next thirteen months trying to find a new source of funding for her research and succeeds in obtaining a large grant from the reclusive billionaire industrialist S. R. Hadden (John Hurt). Leasing time from the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, Ellie and her colleagues spend the next four years combing the skies until she detects a powerful signal of exterterrestrial origin coming from the star Vega composed of prime numbers, something which could not have happened randomly in nature.

Image:Contact screenshot.jpg
Arroway sees the Hitler footage from Vega.

Government and military officials descend on Ellie's project, intent on taking control of it and displeased with the open announcement of the discovery. During arguments, one of Ellie's team members finds a complex interlaced data structure woven into the sequence of prime numbers. They discover that a sideband of additional data is interlaced with a television image, with video footage of Adolf Hitler making his opening speech at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin; apparently an extraterrestrial intelligence had received this early human broadcast and transmitted it back to earth.

The team also discovers that what was thought to be background noise amongst the frames of the Hitler footage is actually tens of thousands of pages of data written in an alien language. For some time the team is stumped by the language, but S.R. Hadden supplies Ellie with a way to decipher the language in three dimensions which reveals blueprints for some sort of mechanical device. Later, Ellie travels to a White House Cabinet meeting to discuss theories on what the machine does, and whether or not it should be built. Ellie believes the machine is a communication or transport device which might take a person to Vega, while several officials worry that the machine is an alien weapon or Trojan Horse. Ellie finds support from Palmer Joss, who has become the personal religious adviser to President Clinton, who decides to authorize the building of the machine.

Construction begins at Cape Canaveral on "The Machine," supported financially by an international lobby. A committee of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and politicians is formed to select a candidate for the journey. Dr. Drumlin and Dr. Arroway become the main American contestants for the "machine seat." During questioning, Ellie is forced by Palmer to reveal her atheism, and as a result, Drumlin is eventually chosen to make the journey. However, during the day of the Machine's first test, a religious fanatic infiltrates the site and commits a suicide bombing, killing dozens including Drumlin and completely destroying The Machine.

Later, S.R. Hadden again surprises Ellie by revealing to her the existence of a second Machine, secretly ordered and built by his corporation in Hokkaidō, Japan, and tells her that the International Machine Consortium still wants her to go on the journey.

Image:Contact-Machine.jpg
The Machine in operation.

Ellie travels to Hokkaidō, where Palmer 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. Ellie enters the Machine and it is activated, creating a massive energy vortex in the core of the machine through which Ellie's transport pod passes. Inside, Ellie travels at immense speed through a series of wormholes, eventually losing consciousness. She awakens on a beach that resembles childhood drawings she had made of the beach at Pensacola. An entity approaches her which slowly takes the form of her deceased father. Ellie realizes the experience is not real, and that the aliens have created the environment after downloading her thoughts and memories. She talks briefly with the alien, who explains there are many more civilizations in space. Ellie wants to take proof back with her to earth, but is told this is the way it has been for billions of years. When the alien senses Ellie's desperation, he comforts her, adding that in the immensity of space, "the only thing we've found that makes the loneliness bearable, is each other."

Ellie wakes up inside the transport pod and is told that the pod had simply dropped through the Machine without going anywhere. Opinion divides over whether she had actually made the journey or hallucinated it, and an enormous political firestorm erupts. Later, at a congressional hearing led by Michael Kitz, Arroway admits that she has no evidence but asserts that the journey really took place. The congressional panel appears unmoved, and Ellie leaves the hearing with Palmer. Later, in private, Kitz and the White House chief of staff discuss the interesting fact that Arroway's video headset, which she had worn during her journey, contained blank static, but had recorded approximately 18 hours of static, the same amount of time Arroway claimed she was gone. Though the information is suppressed, Kitz is pressured by the chief of staff and agrees to continue to fund Ellie's SETI work. Ellie returns to the radio-telescope array back in New Mexico, and is seen sitting in the desert during sunset.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Production

[edit] 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.[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?"[4]

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.

[edit] Adaptation

Image:Carl Sagan Planetary Society.JPG
Carl Sagan, author of Contact

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."[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.[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.

[edit] 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, lasting approximately three minutes, of the entire Universe. 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.[5][6]

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 composited over each other.

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.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Cover story: Making Contact. Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly (1997-07-18). Retrieved on 2007-02-06.
  2. ^ Contact (1997). Box Office Mojo. Retrieved on 2007-09-24.
  3. ^ Sagan, Carl. Contact: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. p. 432.
  4. ^ a b c d e Davidson, Keay. Carl Sagan: A Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
  5. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20031105101908/
  6. ^ http://www.parascope.com/articles/slips/fs_184.htm

[edit] External links

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