I recently rewatched this movie after having previously seen it about ten years previously and enjoyed it as much as the first time.
However I have a question regarding the ending, does humanity make it to the stars or not? When I first watched it I thought that the NSA man was successful in keeping the fact that the trip was real a secret but on rewatching I’m not so sure. I formed the conclusion that perhaps after the first public use of the machine the worlds governments, or just the Japanese and American governments would operate the machine for their own purposes.
One last thought though, in most respects the NSA man was right they were building this machine with no real idea of what it could do or whether the aliens intentions were hostile or benign.
I think they successfully kept it a secret. The kids in the tour group still wonder whether there’s life on other planets, and presumably if the truth of Ellie’s trip had been made public, there wouldn’t be speculation on this point.
That doesn’t meant that the government isn’t using The Machine for its own purposes, but I’m not sure there would be a point to it; all it seems to do is take the traveler to a specific way station in space. The alien in the form of Ellie’s dad strongly implied that while this may have been the first step towards communication, any real relationship between “us” and “them” would be moving extremely slowly. “Small moves, Ellie. Small moves.”
True. Part of the greatness of the film (and probably the book, but I haven’t read it yet) is that no one – with perhaps the exception of the president’s religious adviser and the loon who blows up the first iteration of the Machine – is presented as 100% wrong. NSA shmuck does have a point in being wary, Dr. Drumblin has a point in preferring to focus on ‘practical’ astronomy rather than SETI, and Palmer has a point that Ellie’s risking her life for a very improbable theory. Meanwhile, Ellie’s not always rational, fair or right. The movie’s genius is that there’s so much left open to debate about all their positions.
That and its beginning, which is the best film opening ever.
In Contact, James Woods’s character, Michael Kitz, did not work for the NSA (the National Security Agency). He was the National Security Advisor. Similar names, but as anyone who knows the U.S. government hierachy can tell you, the two things aren’t really even very close.
In my mind, it’s an open question on whether they “make it to the stars” at all. The machine may be an FTL communications device rather than a travel device.
But, I’d say they “go” again. The US might have successfully hidden the evidence of a “real” experience from the Japanese, but they’d probably have to share it in order to convince them to use the machine again.
The question in my mind is what kind of information the aliens would be willing to give out, and under what conditions. My guess is that if the next “traveller” is a CIA agent or NSA operative, the aliens might just say something like, “We won’t tell you anything you’re unwilling to share with the whole world.” Obviously they can read the minds of the humans, so deliberate deceit is out the wondow. But it would be an interesting question whether they could tell if a human was duped into believing everything would be shared.
Note that I can’t imagine the US or any other government wouldn’t at least try to hoard any new knowledge/technology for its own use.
The book is a bit more nuanced overall than the film. At the end of the book Ellie finds the start of a series of messages hidden in the umpty-billionth digits of pi - a message that the father/alien was trying to tell her about.
Strange, when I read the Book I wondered, was Carl Sagan an advocate for Intelligent Design? It was an unexpected conclusion for someone with a scientific outlook on the universe.
‘Read the book.’ I would read it again if I knew which box it was in! So many books, so few shelves!
I think the Machine was used only once. Ellie (and the others, in the book) went to the ‘way-station’ and found what they found. After that it’s ‘little steps’, the pace of which would be set by the aliens. I think the aliens would have to supply a new ‘key’ for the Machine to be used again. But it’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen the film and ten or eleven years since I read the book, so I don’t know for sure.
Yeah, I’ve heard this, and this is actually why I’m sort of wary about reading the book. I love Carl Sagan. And I love Contact. I don’t want to find out that Sagan’s book was postulating a grand ol’ intelligent poobah that put pretty pictures inside pi.
Not that what someone puts into a work of fiction is necessarily something s/he’s advocating. If I write about murderers and disturbed individuals, that doesn’t mean I think they’re the tops. But I prefer the ambiguity of Contact to remain … well, ambiguous. I likes me some ambiguous ambiguity.
Yeah. What kind of sense would that make, anyway, to control such a thing? Like the great designer is able to sit around thinking “Hm, should I make 7 even or odd this time?”…
I think it’s pretty well established that Sagan did not believe in Intelligent Design. In the film the alien says that their interstellar transit system was there before they were. While this might imply a supernatural Creator to some, to me it implies that there was an earlier race (or races) of beings that either died out, or evolved to a point to where they became inter-dimensional or else can make themselves unfindable for their own reasons. I think that this fits well with the film. The alien doesn’t say ‘God made it’; he says that they don’t know who made it. This is a central thing in science; admitting that one ‘doesn’t know’ when there is not enough evidence to ‘know’.
