 Starring: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, David Morse, Jena Malone, Tom Skeritt
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Year Of Release: 1997
Plot: While many scientists think giving Eleanor Arroway time on major telescopes to listen out for signs of alien life is a waste of time, she shocks the world when she finds regular pulses coming from the heavens, which when deciphered give details of how to build a mysterious alien machine. While some worry about what will happen if the machine is built – is it going against God? Will an army of aliens pour out? – the project goes ahead, but what will happens when it’s switched on with Ellie inside? |
I absolutely adore Contact. It’s a wonderful film full of incredible visual touches, but more than that, I can’t help but love a film that’s more about ideas than anything else. The film’s been attacked by some because they feel its finale isn’t spectacular enough, that they’d watched for two hours only to be fobbed off towards the end (and if you’ve seen the film, you’ll know what I mean), however considering the themes the film is dealing with, it’s perfectly fitting, and to be honest if they’d done it any other way, it’d likely have come off as stupid.
Contact is probably a timelier movie now than it was in 1997. It’s a film about the point where science and religion meet in the human desire to understand who we are and what the world around us is all about. Most of the time nowadays science and religion are treated as two competing entities, with a massive dividing line between them. It’s presented as an either/or equation, but Contact dares to suggest the lines are more blurred than many would like to suggest, and that religion and science, while differing on many points, share points of similarity.
While it’s sometimes a bit heavy handed in how it treats both religion and science, the fact is Contact takes both seriously and attempts to debate them (albeit through the veneer of a blockbuster popcorn), which is pretty impressive for a big $100 million Hollywood flick. It’s thoughtful and wants to ask questions more than it wants to make us go goggle-eyed over things exploding and aliens invading.
And I love the fact that that while most movies treat the laws of physics as a sandbox and present the utterly implausible are real, Contact largely tries to deal with how wondrous the real possibilities are. Many scientists tear their hair out over the way their disciplines are treated on film. In fact many suggest that the popular idea of science is based more on the inaccuracies presented in entertainment than the reality. For example, much of the debate between science and religion seems based not on the day-to-day reality of most scientists and religious people, but how they’re presented to the public in both entertainment and the news, which tends to be skewed towards the extreme ends of the spectrum (even in the evolution vs. creationism debate, its rarely mentioned that most of the major Christian denominations, including the Catholic Church, have no problem with Darwin).
Bad representations of science really are the bane of many scientists life. For example, a recent BBC report rated the disaster movie The Core as the worst screwing up of science in cinema (and I’ll be Movie-A-Day-ing that flick next Monday, as it is one of the most gloriously stupid movies ever made), with one scientist commenting that "it's almost deliberately wrong just to irritate the scientists in the audience." As with most things, Hollywood is generally less interested in the reality than what they think is entertaining (of course, films are always going to somewhat bend the laws of physics, but they often present things as possible that are patently ridiculous to those in the know).
However Contact posits a more feasible type of science fiction, particularly in regards to contact with aliens. This is perhaps not too much of a surprise, as it’s based on a book by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, known for his seminal science series, Cosmos. Both in the book and during preparation for the film (he died just before shooting began), his main concern was ensuring Hollywood didn’t screw up the science.
The fact is, if we do discover alien intelligence, it’s more likely to come in the form of signals from the stars rather than a spaceship landing, purely because of the distances involved and the pesky difficulties of the speed of light.
Although it takes a few small liberties, most of Contact could happen (although it’s pretty unlikely). People are indeed listening out for alien radio messages, the maths involved in the film is feasible, as are the wormholes. It shows that it is possible to make a good, commercial movie without presenting science in a completely unfeasible or whacked out way.
It also pays attention to why people would devote themselves to science. For arty farty types, it’s often difficult to see the attraction of science, largely because it’s often presented badly, or just seems to be about difficult maths where it’s tough to see how it actually relates to everyday life. For a start, most people don’t notice how much of our lives are now utterly filled with the advances of science, from mobile phones to microwave ovens (yes, your microwave is reliant on quantum theory). Incredible things have been discovered and invented in the last century, but it’s rare that non-scientists realise how much modern life relies on these things, or even consider that it is actually science-based.
Rather than dismissing scientists as nerdy types who are only interested in things that allow them to express their near-autistic desire for order, Contact says that the passions that govern them are far more real and understandably than that. That it’s a wonder at the intricacies of the universe, the chance to push back the boundaries of mankind, to make something better or understand things in a new way. And all this is tied up with who they are as people. They may not spend their evenings as Ellie does in Contact, hoping to reach their dead father on a CB radio, but the film takes the impulse of discovery and understanding very seriously. It says that while art may try and explore and understand the human mind, society and the world around us (as well as entertaining us, of course), it’s not that different to the scientific drive toward unlocking the secrets of the universe, whether that’s distant galaxies or finding a way to make a vacuum pick up dirt better.
I wish there were more films that took science seriously and really looked hard at what it’s all about, rather than assuming it’s too dry, technical and boring. Actually I wish there were more films that took religion seriously as well, as most make it look like all religious people are either lunatic fringe fanatics who believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old and blow up abortion clinics in their spare time, or else they’re exorcising demons from small girls. Both science and religion are fascinating subjects, riven with big ideas, grand emotions and ultimately driven by the desire to know who we are, whether that’s as part of the plan of a man in the sky, or as autonomous creatures in a universe governed by laws we’re trying to uncover through empirical research. Different factions may disagree on the ultimate truths, but they come from a similar desire in the human psyche.
Between them, they try and answer the biggest question of all (although in different, sometime complimentary, sometimes opposing ways, and much science is to do with more mundane things) – what’s it all about? As a result you’d think film would treat them with a bit more respect, rather than just dismissing both and misrepresenting them because they don’t really understand them. That’s not to say they shouldn’t question or challenge them, just that they do them, and us, a disservice by ignoring the fascinating realities and/or ideas they raise.
Contact may not be a major philosophical treatise on the point where science and religion meet (and having Matthew McConaughey as a groovy preacher/love interest was just dumb), but it’s about the best Hollywood has done recently, and it’d certainly be good to see it done more.
TIM ISAAC
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