Contact (1997 American film)

Contact
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by	James V. Hart Michael Goldenberg
Story by	Carl Sagan Ann Druyan
Based on	Contact by Carl Sagan
Produced by	Robert Zemeckis Steve Starkey
Starring	Jodie Foster Matthew McConaughey James Woods John Hurt Tom Skerritt Angela Bassett
Cinematography	Don Burgess
Edited by	Arthur Schmidt
Music by	Alan Silvestri
Production company	South Side Amusement Company
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date	July 11, 1997 (1997-07-11)
Running time	150 minutes[1]
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$90 million[2]
Box office	$171.1 million[3]

Contact is a 1997 American

Dr. Ellie Arroway works for the SETI program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. She was inspired to pursue a career in science, starting with amateur radio, by her father, who died in her youth. Her work involves listening to radio emissions from space in the hopes of finding signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The program loses funding after David Drumlin, the President's science advisor, deems it futile. However, Arroway receives financial support from S. R. Hadden, the secretive billionaire industrialist who runs Hadden Industries, which enables her to keep working at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Four years later, when Drumlin is about to terminate the SETI program at the VLA, Arroway discovers a signal containing a sequence of prime numbers that appears to have originated from the star Vega. This announcement leads Drumlin and the National Security Council, headed by Michael Kitz, to attempt to seize control of the facility. Upon further investigation, Arroway's team discovers a video hidden within the signal: Adolf Hitler's opening address at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. Arroway and her team believe this transmission would have been the first to have been strong enough to penetrate the Earth's ionosphere, travel to Vega, and then be sent back to Earth.

The project is put under tight security, and its progress is monitored around the world. Arroway discovers the signal contains over 63,000 pages of encoded data. Hadden meets with Arroway and provides her with the means to decode the pages. The decoded data reveals schematics for a Machine that may be a form of transportation for a single individual. Multiple nations provide funding for the construction of the Machine, which is built at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. An international panel will select a candidate to travel in the Machine. Arroway is a leading candidate until Christian philosopher Palmer Joss, a member of the panel with whom she briefly had a romantic relationship in Puerto Rico, draws attention to her atheism. This makes the panel select Drumlin, for supposedly being a better representation of humanity (despite having never professed any faith prior). During the first tests, a religious terrorist destroys the Machine with a bomb, killing Drumlin and several others.

Hadden, now residing on the

Arroway loses consciousness, and upon regaining it finds herself lying in the pod, while the mission control team repeatedly tries to contact her. She learns that from the outside, the Machine only appears to have dropped the pod into a safety net. Arroway insists that she was gone for about 18 hours, but her recording devices show only static noise. A Congressional Committee headed by Kitz is convened, who speculates that the signal and machine were a hoax designed by Hadden, who has since passed away. Arroway requests that the committee accept the truth of her testimony on faith, declaring that while her testimony cannot be proven scientifically, it has impacted her humanity. In a private conversation, Kitz and White House official Rachel Constantine discuss the confidential information that although Arroway's recording device only recorded static, it recorded approximately 18 hours of it. Arroway reunites with Joss, who professes faith in her story, and she receives ongoing financial support for the SETI program at the VLA.

Cast

• Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Ann Arroway
  • Jena Malone as young Ellie
• Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss
• David Morse as Theodore Arroway
• Tom Skerritt as Dr. David Drumlin
• James Woods as Michael Kitz
• John Hurt as S. R. Hadden
• William Fichtner as Kent Clarke, a character derived from Kent Cullers^[4]
• Angela Bassett as Rachel Constantine
• Jake Busey as Joseph the terrorist
• Rob Lowe as Richard Rank
• Geoffrey Blake as Fisher
• Max Martini as Willie
• Steven Ford as Major John Russell
• Jay Leno as himself
• Larry King as himself
• Ann Druyan as herself

Production

Development

Carl Sagan conceived the idea for Contact in 1979. That year, Lynda Obst, one of his closest friends, was hired by film producer Peter Guber as a studio executive for his production company, Casablanca FilmWorks. She pitched Guber the idea for Contact, and he commissioned a development deal.^[2]

Sagan and Ann Druyan (who were later married) finished their film treatment in November 1980.^[5][6] Druyan explained:

Carl's and my dream was to write something that would be a fictional representation of what contact would actually be like, that would convey something of the true grandeur of the universe.

They added the science and religion analogies as a metaphor of philosophical and intellectual interest in searching for the truth of both humanity and alien contact.^[7]

Sagan incorporated Kip Thorne's study of wormhole space travel into the screenplay.^[8] The characterization of Ellie Arroway was inspired by Jill Tarter, head of Project Phoenix of the SETI Institute; Jodie Foster researched the lead role by meeting her.^[9] The name Ellie was short for Eleanor, which was taken from Eleanor Roosevelt whom both Sagan and Druyan adored; Arroway was selected based on both Voltaire's real name (Arouet), and that Ellie "was going to travel like an arrow through the cosmos", according to Druyan.^[10] Tarter served as a consultant on the story, realistically portraying career struggles of women scientists from the 1950s to 1970s. The writers debated whether Arroway should have a baby at the film's end.^[11] Although Guber was impressed with Sagan and Druyan's treatment, he hired various screenwriters to rewrite the script. New characters were added, one of them a Native American park ranger turned astronaut.^[2] Guber suggested that Arroway have an estranged teenage son, whom he believed would add depth to the storyline. Guber said:^[2]

Here was a woman consumed with the idea that there was something out there worth listening to, but the one thing she could never make contact with was her own child. To me, that's what the film had to be about.

Sagan and Druyan disagreed with Guber's idea, and it was not incorporated into the storyline. In 1982, Guber took Contact to

In December 1993, Warner Bros. hired George Miller to direct,^[12] and Contact commenced pre-production. Miller cast Jodie Foster in the lead role, approached Ralph Fiennes to play Palmer Joss and also considered casting Linda Hunt as the President of the United States. In addition to having aliens put on a laser lighting display around Earth, another version of the Goldenberg scripts had an alien wormhole swallow up the planet, transporting Earth to the center of the galaxy. Miller also asked Goldenberg to rewrite Contact in an attempt to portray the Pope as a key supporting character. Warner Bros. was hoping to have the film ready for release by Christmas 1996, but under Miller's direction pre-production lasted longer than expected.^[2] The studio fired the director, blaming pushed-back start dates, budget concerns, and Miller's insistence that the script needed five more weeks of rewriting. Robert Zemeckis, who previously turned down the director's position, decided to accept the offer. Warner Bros. granted Zemeckis total artistic control and the right of final cut privilege.^[2] The director cast Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss; McConaughey dropped out of the lead role in The Jackal to take the role in Contact.^[15] Despite being diagnosed with myelodysplasia in 1994, Sagan continued to be involved in the production of the film. For the cast and main crew members, he conducted an academic conference that depicted a detailed history of astronomy.^[2]

During the development of Contact, the production crew watched

Designing Contact's visual effects sequences was a joint effort by eight VFX companies, including

News footage of then-President Bill Clinton was digitally altered to make it appear as if he is speaking about alien contact. This was not the original plan for the film;^[2] Zemeckis had initially approached Sidney Poitier to play the president, but the actor turned the role down in favor of The Jackal.^[19] Shortly after Poitier's refusal, Zemeckis saw a NASA announcement in August 1996. "Clinton gave his Mars rock speech", the director 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."^[2]

One notable feature of Contact is its use of digital color correction. This approach helped solve continuity errors during the location shooting at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. "The weather killed us, so we were going back in and changing it enough so that the skies and colors and times of day all seem roughly the same", commented visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston.^[20]

The opening scene is a three-minute

One sequence, with young Ellie running upstairs to try to retrieve her father's medicine, appears to have Ellie running just behind a camera as they move into the bathroom, but the shot resolves to show that this was part of the medicine cabinet mirror's reflection, pulling back to have Ellie open it. It is noted as one of the film's most impressive visual effects due to the seamlessness of the transition. According to Carin-Anne Strohmaier, first assistant film editor, the shot was created through three different plates and digitally manipulated in CGI to create the effect: one plate was from the cameraman leading Ellie, the second of Ellie opening the cabinet door (which was a blue screen instead of a mirror), and the third of the reflection of the photograph of Ellie and her dad when the door closes.^[22]

In the sequence with the death of Ellie's father, they planned to use an effect similar to bullet time from The Matrix to show him stopped in time as he died. As the movie was filmed, they found the approach didn't fit the casting or the direction the film was going. They decided it would be most effective to create something distressing but with Ellie's dad absent from the shot, leading to the development of the mirror sequence.^[23]

The decoding of the extraterrestrial message, with its architectural drawings of the machine, was created by Ken Ralston and Sony Pictures Imageworks. It was Zemeckis's and Ralston's sixth film collaboration. Imageworks created more than 350 visual effect shots, using a combination of model and miniature shots and digital graphics. On designing the Machine, Zemeckis said, "The Machine in Sagan's novel was somewhat vague, which is fine for a book. In a movie, though, if you're going to build a giant physical structure of alien design, you have to make it believable... It had to be huge, so that the audience would feel like it was bigger than man should be tinkering with. It had to look absolutely real."^[8] The machine was then designed by concept artist Steve Burg, reusing a design he created as a "time-displacement device" for an unused scene in Terminator 2.^[24]

Early conceptual designs of the Pod were based, as in the novel, on one of the primary shapes in geometry: a

The climactic scene depicting the mysterious beach near the galactic core where Arroway makes contact, in particular, called for major visual innovations. The goal was an idyllic seashore with a sky blazing with stars that might exist near the core of the galaxy. Ralston said that "the thought was that this beach would have a heightened reality. One that might make the everyday world seem like a vague daydream."[11] To keep the question alive whether any of it was real in Arroway's mind, elements such as ocean waves running in reverse and palm tree shadows swaying with sped-up motion were applied.^[11]

The Hitler newsreel also required digital manipulation.^[11]

Music

The

The Region 2 Special Edition DVD release contains a 5.1 isolated score track,[26] which presents the complete score (this feature, as with many isolated scores, is not mentioned in most product descriptions of the DVD).^[27][28]

Themes

Contact often suggests that cultural conflicts between religion and science would be brought to the fore by the apparent contact with aliens that occurs in the film. A point of discussion is the existence of God, with several different positions being portrayed.^[11] A description of an emotionally intense experience by Palmer Joss, which he describes as seeing God, is met by Arroway's suggestion that "some part of [him] needed to have it"—that it was a significant personal experience but indicative of nothing greater. Joss compares his certainty that God exists to Arroway's certainty that she loved her deceased father, despite her being unable to prove it.^[11]

Contact depicts intense debate occurring as a result of the apparent contact with aliens. Many clips of well-known debate shows such as

Although the revelation at the end of the film that Arroway's recording device recorded approximately 18 hours of noise is arguably conclusive proof of the fact of—if not the experience of—her "journey", several coincidences and indications throughout the film cast doubt on its authenticity. Director Robert Zemeckis indicated: "The point of the movie is for there always to be a certain amount of doubt [as to whether the aliens were real]."[29] These indications consist mostly of visual cues during the "journey" that echo Ellie's experiences earlier in the film (which Ellie believed to be the result of the aliens "downloading [her] thoughts and memories"), but the timing of the message's arrival and its eventual decoding are also highly coincidental: the message was first received shortly before Arroway and her team were to be ejected from the VLA facility and was successfully decoded only by S. R. Hadden (Arroway's only sponsor, who was close to death from cancer) after weeks of failed attempts by the team at the VLA.^[29]

At the end of the film, Arroway is put into a position that she had traditionally viewed with skepticism and contempt: that of believing something with complete certainty, despite being unable to prove it in the face of not only widespread incredulity and skepticism (which she admits that as a scientist she would normally share) but also evidence apparently to the contrary.^[29]

Zemeckis stated that he intended the message of the film to be that science and religion can coexist rather than being opposing camps,^[29] as shown by the coupling of scientist Arroway with the religious Joss, as well as his acceptance that the "journey" indeed took place. This, and scattered references throughout the film, posit that science and religion are not nominally incompatible: one interviewer, after asking Arroway whether the construction of the machine—despite not knowing what will happen when it is activated—is too dangerous, suggests that it is being built on the "faith" that the alien designers, as Arroway puts it, "know what they're doing".^[11]

Release and reception

Contact's release in July 1997 rekindled public interest in Sagan's 1985 novel. The book remained on The New York Times Best Seller list from July 27 to September 21, 1997.^[30][31]

Box office

Contact

On the basis of 68 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, 68% of critics gave positive reviews, with an average score of 6.9/10. The critical consensus reads, "Contact elucidates stirring scientific concepts and theological inquiry at the expense of satisfying storytelling, making for a brainy blockbuster that engages with its ideas, if not its characters."^[35] Metacritic calculated an average score of 62 out of 100, based on 23 reviews, denoting "generally favorable reviews".^[36] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.^[37]

Roger Ebert, who gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, said that "Sagan's novel Contact provides the inspiration for Robert Zemeckis' new film, which tells the smartest and most absorbing story about extraterrestrial intelligence since Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). "Movies like Contact help explain why movies like Independence Day leave me feeling empty and unsatisfied", Ebert commented.^[38] On December 21, 2011, Ebert added Contact to his "Great Movies" collection.^[39]

Rita Kempley, writing in The Washington Post, did not like the film's main premise, which she described as "a preachy debate between sanctity and science".^[43]

Awards

Controversies

Bill Clinton

In 1984, a meteorite called Allan Hills 84001, thought to be from Mars, was found in Antarctica. Twelve years later, an article by NASA scientist David S. McKay was published in the journal Science, proposing that the meteorite might contain evidence for microscopic fossils of Martian bacteria (later, a disputed interpretation).^[44][45] The announcement made headlines around the world, and the following day, on August 7, 1996, during a press conference about the news, the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, made remarks that were in places sufficiently generic in nature to allow fragments of his videotaped statement to be included in Contact, implying that Clinton was ostensibly speaking about contact with extraterrestrial life, congruent with the film's story:^[46]

Good afternoon. I'm glad to be joined by my science and technology adviser ...[words cut by film editors]... This is the product of years of exploration ...[words cut]... by some of the world's most distinguished scientists. Like all discoveries, this one will and should continue to be reviewed, examined, and scrutinized. It must be confirmed by other scientists. But clearly, the fact that something of this magnitude is being explored is another vindication ...[film scene performed over recording, with dialogue obscuring Clinton's remarks and creating a gap]... If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far reaching and awe inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental. We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our people's future. Thank you.^[47]

Later in the film, a separate fragment of generic remarks by President Clinton, speaking about Saddam Hussein and Iraq at a different press conference in October 1994, was lifted out of context and inserted into Contact:^[48]

I would encourage you not to inflame this situation beyond the facts. Let us deal with this on the facts. We are monitoring what has actually happened.

On July 14, 1997, three days after the film opened in the United States, Warner Bros. received a letter from White House Counsel Charles Ruff protesting against the use of Clinton's digitally-composited appearance. The letter made no demands, but called the duration and manner of Clinton's appearance "inappropriate". No legal action was planned; the White House Counsel simply wanted to send a message to Hollywood to avoid unauthorized uses of the President's image. Zemeckis was reminded that official White House policy "prohibits the use of the President in any way ... (that) implies a direct ... connection between the President and a commercial product or service".^[49]

A Warner Bros. spokeswoman explained: "We feel we have been completely frank and upfront with the White House on this issue. They saw scripts, they were notified when the film was completed, they were sent a print well in advance of the film's July 11 opening, and we have confirmation that a print was received there July 2." However, Warner Bros. did concede that they never pursued or received formal release from the White House for the use of Clinton's image. While the Counsel commented that parody and satire are protected under the First Amendment, press secretary Mike McCurry believed that "there is a difference when the President's image, which is his alone to control, is used in a way that would lead the viewer to believe he has said something he really didn't say".^[49]

CNN

Shortly after the White House's complaint,

During filming on December 28, 1996, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. and Sagan, who had died the previous week.^[50][51] Coppola claimed that Sagan's novel was based on a story the pair had developed for a television special^[52] back in 1975,^[50] titled First Contact. Under their development agreement,^[52] Coppola and Sagan were to split proceeds from the project, as well as from any novel Sagan would write, with American Zoetrope and the Children's Television Workshop. The TV program was never produced, but in 1985, Simon and Schuster published Contact, and Warner moved forward with development of a film adaptation. Coppola sought at least $250,000 in compensatory damages and an injunction against production or distribution of the film.^[50]

In February 1998, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ricardo Torres dismissed Coppola's claim. Although Torres agreed that Sagan violated some terms of the contract, he explained that Coppola waited too long to file his lawsuit, and that the contract might not be enforceable as it was written. Coppola then appealed his suit,^[52] taking it to the California Courts of Appeal (CCA). In April 2000, the CCA dismissed his suit, finding that Coppola's claims were barred because they were brought too late. The court noted that it was not until 1994 that the filmmaker thought about suing over Contact.^[51]

NASA

The scene where the

• "The Borderland" (The Outer Limits episode)
• List of films featuring space stations
• Wow! signal – 1977 narrowband radio signal from SETI
• List of films featuring extraterrestrials

References