Don’t get me wrong, the movie is nothing less than brilliant. I really wish they would have left out the very last scene where the discuss the however many hours of static was left on the recorder.
I think it would have been better if they made the ending a little more ambiguous.
Imagine the debates such an ending would cause. 
It was actually much more ambiguous than the ending in the book. In the novel, Arroway is not alone in the pod but with several others, and they all have the exact same experience, except in seeing Arroway’s father they see somebody important from their own lives.
That was exactly my problem with the movie. The debate between religion and science, between faith and reason, is a very interesting debate, and is at the core of the movie (if I’m remembering correctly; I saw it once in the theater). But that ending stacked the deck and, within the movie universe, seemed to end the debate. It pissed me off.
The thing that bugs me is that, for some reason, every time I picture the movie, it’s Helen Hunt rather than Jodie Foster.
The lack of ambiguity I kinda liked, since most movies would have made it ambiguous, or made it unambiguously false.
I found the movie annoying and it further solidified my view that mushy “faith” concepts should not be indulged, humored or indeed subjected to less than strident dismissal when things that are actually important are at stake.
At the end of the movie, the only thing I could think was, “So, they spent $100 billion just so Jodi Foster could get closure with her dead dad?”
And an inexplicable length of static tape that perhaps indicates Foster was transported to another galaxy to interact with ageless alien intelligence…
Which benefited humanity, how?
You know who else had a minor issue with contact with Jodie Foster?
Ronald Reagan!
As someone who read the book, I was completely disappointed with how they dealt with it in the movie. To me, the point of the novel was to demonstrate what scientifically satisfying “proof” of a creator would look like. I feel that Sagan was saying “okay, so, let’s say there was a ‘creator’ or ‘creators’ of the universe, how could he/she/it/they make it known that they actually did create the universe in a way that was unambiguous?” and then he wrote a story of how it could be shown. It’s like saying “hey, all those religions don’t make any sense and have some kind of flaws in their arguments of a creator, here’s an example of what a creator could do that we could prove there was a creator.” The movie didn’t even get into that and crapped out on an ending.
Well, the book got a bit hammer-handed in places. The main character’s name, for example. Couldn’t have been more obvious if her first name was Randi.
I agree 100% with Shawn1767, while also agreeing that Sagan’s day job wasn’t “novelist.” I, for one, can’t say “Ellen Arroway” without sounding like a Monty Python Gumby.
a lot of the book was dumbed down for the movie audience. The very end for example, did not have anything about blank tape in the recorder. Instead, the book showed messages buried deep down inside the coding of the decimal digits of pi.
Nitpick: Base-11 digits, not decimal digits.