I’ve taken to watching it once a year, around the holidays or when I’m sick, or ideally both. I find it warm, hopeful, entertaining, stimulating, and quite moving. Jodie Foster is a very cool actor, but her character is also superficial reserevd so it’s a good role for her; Mostly I like it because it touches on two subjects–discrimination against atheists, and the love we have for dead people we remember warmly–that are dear to me. I often find myself weeping softly as the movie comes to a close.
The novel is good also–more complex–but i don’t re-read it. I don’t remember if in it, Tom Skeritt’s character is more hypocritical because he’s revealed to be an atheist before he spouts religious pieties to win the job of astronaut. That would have been more characteristic if the movie had established that, and it would have taken only a 30 -second scene or less. My other quarrel with the script is that Foster asks Palmer Joss, who’s a brilliant priest who has written books on theological subjects, if he knows what Occam’s Razor is, and he blankly asks her “Huh? Wuzzat?”
It’s fine, and the important thing is that it means something to you, but no, it’s not a great movie. Even if it didn’t have any other problems, the plot hole about the recording is too big, IMHO.
Contact is one of my all-time favorites. I think it goes back to the mood I was in when it came out…it was just the right movie at the right time. I also really enjoyed listening to the commentaries on the DVD on subsequent viewings.
Yeah, that was dumb. The problem is that most writers can’t write a character smarter than they are. It would have made so much more sense to have Palmer reply “The more simple explanation being the more likely? What about it?”
Everything that happens to her when she’s “making contact” – that didn’t work for me. I realize spirituality was one of the big themes of the film, but to think that an alien intelligence went to all the trouble to contact us, and the great time and expense involved in building that device, and all they wanted to tell Jodie Foster was something any psychoanalyst worth their salt could tell her?
For me, it was a massive letdown. I don’t know what I wanted to happen, but I wanted more than that.
The novel was a huge letdown for me as well, because it was too fucking stupid for its own good, right from the start. The idiocy took me right out of the novel already in the first chapter.
Anyway, the movie of course dispenses with Sagan’s incredibly poor-quality fiction narrative, but a lot of the silliness remains. All that yearning for a higher power to set us backwards humans straight – yawn. Go worship some god already, and don’t pretend that you’re offering real skeptics anything of value whatsoever.
It was okay; I’d watch it again. It was certainly far better than the book, which I dropped after a few chapters (exceptionally rare for me).
It’s been a while, but I think that Carl Sagan had some mystical government organization put a lid on the whole “received alien signal” thing. I guess he was a year or two before the global protocol on receiving alien signals, but the idea that a professional astronomical observer wouldn’t have collaborated and told a dozen people within the first hour was so unbelievable that I couldn’t keep reading.
With the movie, the idea that no telemetry survived the trip seemed annoying “and then I woke up” to me as well.
Not sure I got this. Weren’t they saying merely that there are hundreds and millions of other civilized planets, and it’s comforting to know we’re not alone? Where did you get any sort of spiritual mumbo-jumbo from this movie?
The recording device which came back with hours of blank space covering a seconds-long journey. I don’t remember the details well, it having been a while since I’ve seen the movie.
My second-biggest problem with the movie were the violins playing sad music as the little girl tried to make radio contact with her dead mommy. It was so cynically tugging at my heartstrings that I almost started laughing in the theater. I really don’t like cheap ploys like that. If they had to have that scene, it shoulda been played up close and uncomfortable, not sweeping and weepy.
My biggest problem was the eighteen-hours business. Up to that point, I thought the movie was making a really interesting point about how at a certain point, a scientist might privilege her own personal experience over scientifically acceptable data (i.e., data acceptable to the scientific community, data that is replicable and verifiable). This was giving me something to think about. But the movie spoiled it by verifying her experience with external data. Bleah!
I wasn’t bothered by that omission (she could have been distracted–in her testimony she was certainly distraught) though I didn’t understand their motivation in keeping that truth secret from Arroway and the public in general. The final scene–where she teaches the schoolkids about the possibility of ET intel was silly, too. Why would she spend her life searching for something she already knows to exist?
You know, it’s been so long since I even thought about this movie that all I remembered was the source of my complaint, not my actual complaint, and this is it: the “moral” of the movie is that some things you have to accept on faith, but, yes, they undercut it by showing the audience that there’s no faith necessary here, there is actual physical evidence, it’s just been covered up by the MiBs or whoever.
I remember disliking the movie a great deal. More recently, I read the book which was a little better.
“The President’s waiting, Mister Joss…” made my eyes roll. Why is Hollywood so cowardly that they can’t have a character who is a fundamentalist and polite and all that, but also fulla crap? It’s easy to have a fundamentalist who is bombastic and hypocritical and corrupt and sadistic, but heaven forbid we have a nice-guy fundamentalist who is just completely and determinedly ignorant?
I’m sure I’m not explaining this well. I’d just like to see a scene where some Jesus freak spells out his peace-and-love beliefs as justification for teaching creationism in school in a beatific nonjudgemental way, and have a scientist/academic type nod politely during the spiel, then respond calmly with “That’s complete crap. Get lost.” When we see religious types who are nice getting treated like schmucks, I’ll know Hollywood has some balls.
Minor rant, I know, but there was an episode of Numb3rs a while back that featured John Glover as a psychic and the math-nerd character went out of his way to be a jerk in dismissing Glover’s claimed abilities, which conveniently never were solidly proven or disproven, though the episode implied Glover had a gift of some kind. Math-nerd’s anger (as opposed to a more reasonable eye-rolling dismissal) made Glover look like some kind of sympathetic victim: awwww, how could that nerd be so mean to the poor widdle psychic? Obviously scientists are jerks!
Just once I’d like to see a show involving a prophecy that is completely wrong and believers having to come up with increasingly ludicrous rationalizations.
Anyway, the best moemnt of Contact was the initial decoding of the Vegan signal. I didn’t that coming at all, and yet it makes a reasonable amount of sense. Those are the kinds of surprises I like in movies. The rest of it was just… dumb.
It’s an OK movie. Sorry I can’t be as enthusiastic as i was in the “That thing you do” thread, but it was just alright.
There’s that part where McConaughey answers to Jodie Foster’s skepticism with the old head-slapping idiotism “you can’t prove that you loved your father”, and Foster’s character, an allegedly smart scientist gets baffled by that. That takes out some points.
On the other hand Zemeckis is an excellent director and Gary Busey’s son as crazy priest is a complete riot. So I give it a 6.3.
I suppose I am generically not fond of movies where the main character is subjected to a never-ending sequence of mistreatments and things-gone-wrong and never once gets out from under that.
I am also far from enamoured at the whole arcane equivocation between extraterrestrial intelligent life and woo-woo style pseudo-religious “they are wise and inscrutable and you must have faith and believe in them while the rest of the world thinks you are nutso” motif.
I did like the opening sequence with the radio broadcast rippling out (ever older ones farther & farther from us, etc).
