Contact (1997)

Contact is one of those rare science fiction movies that actually cares about science. They don't just make things up willynilly for the sake of creating a plot device or for making some force commentary. Of course, they make some leaps. Pretty much everything about the wormhole travel is theoretical in nature. Still, the science is pretty accurate.

The very opening is actually pretty cool - especially when you know a thing or two about science. Starting with a close up of Earth, the camera slowly pulls back and back and back, falling farther into the depths of space. While this is happening, we hear radio broadcasts that seem to be going back in time. The farther the camera pulls back, the further back in history the broadcasts go. Radio waves, of course, are electromagnetic waves similar to visible light from stars. Radio waves broadcasted earlier in time will reach a destination before radio waves broadcasted later. To see a cinematic telling of this fact was actually pretty cool. They do explain it later, but if you know science at all, you can appreciate that shot in the moment a lot more.

It then goes on to tell the story of our first contact with an alien civilization. The Drake Equation makes a bit of an appearance in the film, as Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) makes a statement about how unreasonable it seems to think we are alone in the universe. She sums up the equation (a bit off, mathematically, but the point remains): "There are four hundred billion stars out there, just in our galaxy. If only one out of a million of those had planets, and just one out of a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life; there would be literally millions of civilizations out there!"

And so, the film examines what would happen if we ever heard back. What these aliens did was take our broadcast, make some adjustments, and then shot it back. But the broadcast that we got back was apparently some radio broadcast of Adolf Hitler introducing the 1936 Olympics! Some people took it as a threat, but Ellie and the other scientists were a little more level headed about it. The 1936 Games would have been the first television broadcast strong enough really to make its way into deep space. Yet in 1997 (when about Contact takes place), that would have been about 60 years earlier. This helps to confirm their suspicion that the initial broadcast came from around Vega, a star about 25 light years away. (This is pretty tight science, actually. You usually don't see this in movies. If 1936 was the first broadcast strong enough to travel outside Earth, then it would have taken 25 years for anyone near Vega to even get it. It also means it'd take about 25 years for a response to get back to Earth. So communicating with Vega would mean you wait 50 years for a response!)

The world then comes together to build a machine after discovering there were schematics encrypted in the aliens' response. They assume that this must be some sort of device for interstellar travel. A committee is formed to find the right person to send as an ambassador for all of Earth (with Ellie initially loses out on.)

I think the main reason I liked Contact more than other typical "first encounters" is that it offers a much more realistic idea of what would happen: the alien fanatics would come out and celebrate, the overly religious would come out and protest, the governments would try to conceal information from the public. It's probably a much more realistic look at what would likely happen than any other science fiction movie out there! This doesn't just serve as simply a "what if?" It also serves as an interesting critique of our society.

There is a lot in Sagan's vision that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, that makes you think poorly of humankind as a species, but in the end, it actually is a pretty hopeful vision. In the end, he argues that religion and science are not enemies. Ellie finds herself in the exact position she ridiculed religious believers for: having an experience that acts as personal proof, but having no hard evidence to back it up. She finds herself victim to Occam's razor - that all other things being equal, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Indeed, as she gets grilled in hearings after her "failed" ride in the machine, Michael Kitz (James Woods) practically quotes Ellie verbatim from a conversation she had much earlier with Palmer.

The overlying theme though is about togetherness. At first, it is overtly about our status in the universe. Are we really a party of one? Is it possible that in a universe the size it is, life does not exist anywhere else? Wouldn't it be really something to know we belong to a galactic community? But in the end, that winds up being irrelevant. In the end, we already belong to a community here on our own planet with our own people who are so alike and yet so dissimilar at the same time. We have faith in science and in God, but we should also have faith in each other. Faith isn't a bad thing, and neither is logic. While it gets a bit preachy at times, it is executed well most of the film.

As for whether I believe we are alone in the universe? Well, I disagree with Sagan's assessment that there must be millions. I even think that conservative estimates - around the 10,000 range - seems a bit high considering all of the things required to happen for life as we know it. But it does seem absurd to think that given the sheer size of the universe, we are alone.

Otherwise, it sure is a waste of space.