At the end of the movie, why did they trash Jody Foster’s reputation in that hearing?
They falsely claimed there was no evidence, but there was the blanked out (7 hour?) recording, which corresponded with her estimate of how long the experience lasted.
What was the hidden agenda?
They trashed her reputation because they believed she was asking for it because of the way she was dressed and because she was dancing in a sexually suggestive manner. Even Kelly McGillis didn’t think there was sufficient evidence at first but soon she she realized she had to come to Foster’s defense.
A couple of reasons come to mind, both having to do with public order. First, there was the hysteria which greeted the initial signal, even before anyone knew its real significance; confirmation that someone had met and talked face-to-whatever with an emissary of Them would have made it look like a Sunday school picnic. And second, concern about a backlash from religious groups at the very idea that a) there was a power other than {insert One True Supreme Being} at work in the universe, and b) humanity wasn’t, after all, the Pinnacle of Creation.
Of course, those hardly exhaust the potential rationales. Stay tuned.
They needed a scapegoat to take the blame for the gigantic cost of building the machine that, in terms of concrete evidence, didn’t work. As for the blank tape “That is interesting, isn’t it?”.
I was so WTF 
at this answer, then realized you’re talking about The Accused. 
James Woods character (Michael Kitz) did not like Foster. That’s the personal motivation.
As said by Baron Greenback, they needed somebody to blame for the public expenditure.
Shitty writing. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.
I watched Contact in the theaters, and I remember sitting there trying to figure out why they trashed Jodie Foster’s reputation instead of, you know, hoisting the little ball back up and dropping a 2nd scientist through the machine. It’s not like it was a one-time use thing, right? Here you’ve spent an obscene amount of money to build the thing, and it costs next to nothing to drop someone through it. So get more data points. If all your scientists report roughly the same thing, then maybe it’s worth investigating. If the next 10 people you drop through say that it was just a 30 second fall, then you can call Jodie Foster a liar.
And I was convinced that she was going to point out the obvious and then someone else would confirm her story, but no, the movie just ended and I left the theater sad and confused.
I don’t get why they couldn’t launch a second mission. They didn’t spend ~$300 billion for a one-shot, did they?
Plus, even aside from the mission itself, they got a huge return on their investment in spin-offs. Like, the machine required a large amount of some rare-earth element, and so the instructions for building it included an efficient industrial process for refining that element, which had previously been unknown to us. Supposedly, the message was chock-full of tidbits like that.
Because Cassandra is doomed to know the truth yet be disbelieved. Because a prophet is despised in his own country.
The screenplay does vary quite a lot from the book, particularly once the machine has been constructed. I’ll spoiler the next bit, because the book is worth reading in itself:
Ellie doesn’t travel alone in the book, but her experience is the focus. Turns out that there is a collection of galactic (inter-galactic?) societies of tremendous power and purpose. The machine is a conduit into a network that connects them, and pre-dates them. Anyway, Ellie is told by her father-avatar that the current focus of these great societies is to make changes to the structure of the universe, which has already been structured by entities unknown. Following the father-avatar’s advice, and after her return to Earth (and the Senate stuff), Ellie starts to find indicators of design in the deep digits of pi. The gateway to the wider society is still there, but it’s not a two-way thing, humanity must earn its place
That’s from memory, so corrections welcome.
Question about the movie/book difference. I saw Contact in the theatre and lost interest/took myself out of the movie right at the scene where Potential Love Interest confesses that he sabotaged Main Character’s chance at being on the mission for Some I-Did-It-For-Love Reason. Clearly I don’t remember all the details, except I distinctly remember a lack of scissors being plunged into his eye or other acts of extreme violence. In fact, I’m pretty sure things were largely shrugged off and the movie went on as if nothing really happened.
Is that anywhere near correct? And more importantly, was it in the book or handled differently?
Exactly how I remember the book as well. The movie had great visuals, great performances (especially by Jodie Foster, as usual), but was nonetheless terrible because of the unnecessary deviations from the book-- as you said, most critically after the machine is built.
As I recall, the film’s version of this sabotage was him publicly asking her “Do you consider yourself a religious person?” and she knew (and presumably the audience was to immediately understand) that this was meant to scuttle her, because religion is a sham that gets in the way, unless you’re willing to mollify stupid people with lip-service claims of respect for and belief in myth, as the Tom Skerrit character presents.
I too am disappointed in the lack of scissor-eyeball interfacing, accompanied by a detailed explanation delivered simulstabbingly that this mission represents a potential (probably critical) advance for mankind, while his soft formless mythology represents at best stagnation and possibly regression.
I don’t think our alien overseers want us to be stabby.
Five thousand quatloos that the newcomers are untrainable!
And because when she got back from being the first human to have a confirmed extraterrestrial contact and they asked her about it her response was to dance around with her shirt pulled up over her boobs and say “Chick-a-pay May lak a tay-ay in da winnn!”
I always assumed Angela Basset’s character didn’t realize it until some time after the hearing, then brought it up with James Woods. Whether or not that would come to light later I supposed was left intentionally ambiguous.
If they wanted to let the machine rust and never try another trip, they did the right thing. But if they wanted to continue funding and try again, then they seriously fucked up.
How likely is it that if humanity had concrete evidence of alien intelligence that knows how to find us, we would do our very best to pretend they don’t exist?
The film somewhat fuzzes the “aliens definitely exist” thing by implicating John Hurt’s character (and by extension Ellie) in a fraud, as far as I remember.