Contact is a 1997 American science fiction drama film co-produced and directed by Robert Zemeckis, based on the 1985 novel by Carl Sagan. It stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway, a SETI scientist who finds evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make first contact. Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, Tom Skerritt, William Fichtner, John Hurt, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, Jake Busey, and David Morse co-star. It features the Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Mir space station, and the Space Coast surrounding Cape Canaveral.
Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, began working on Contact in 1979. They wrote a film treatment and set up the project at Warner Bros. with Peter Guber and Lynda Obst as producers. When development stalled, Sagan published Contact as a novel in 1985, and the film reentered development in 1989. Roland Joffé and George Miller planned to direct, but Joffé dropped out in 1993, and Warner Bros. fired Miller in 1995. With Zemeckis as director, filming ran from September 1996 to February 1997, while Sony Pictures Imageworks, Weta, Ltd. and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) handled the visual and special effects. Sagan died before the film was completed.
Contact was released on July 11, 1997, and received positive reviews, winning the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and two Saturn Awards. It grossed $171 million worldwide.
Plot
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Astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway arrives at the SETI program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The film's prologue reveals that she was encouraged to pursue science by her father, who died in her youth. In the film's present, Arroway studies radio emissions from space to detect signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. While in Puerto Rico, Arroway meets Christian philosopher, Palmer Joss. They have a brief romantic encounter, but Arroway does not contact him again.
David Drumlin, the President's science advisor, cuts SETI funding, deeming it futile. Arroway is furious and instead pursues and receives financial support from S. R. Hadden, a reclusive billionaire industrialist. Arroway re-locates her team to the Very Large Array (VLA) radio dish observatory in New Mexico.
Four years later, Arroway is about to lose access to the VLA satellite dishes. Before being evicted, she discovers a signal containing a sequence of prime numbers originating from the star Vega. Drumlin and the National Security Council, headed by Michael Kitz, arrive and attempt to federalize the facility. Meanwhile, Arroway's team detect a video embedded within the signal: Adolf Hitler's opening address at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. The Hitler transmission was the first to penetrate the Earth's ionosphere and reach Vega.
The project is put under federal security and its progress is monitored globally. It is discovered that the signal contains over 63,000 pages of encoded data, though it is undecipherable without a primer. Hadden breaches the government's computer systems and discovers the primer, providing Arroway the means to decode the data. It reveals schematics for what could be a transportation device for a single person. Multiple nations provide funding for the construction at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
An international panel is assembled to select a candidate to travel in the machine. An American is preferred, and Arroway is a leading candidate until Palmer Joss, a panel member, focuses on her atheism during the interviews. The panel selects Drumlin. During the first tests, a fanatical religious terrorist destroys the machine with a suicide bomb, killing Drumlin and several others. Hadden, terminally ill with cancer, is now residing on the Mir space station. He informs Arroway that the US government and Hadden Industries have secretly built a second machine in Hokkaido, Japan. Arroway, the only remaining American candidate, will use it.
In Japan, Joss and Arroway are reunited. Joss explains he voted against Arroway because he feared she would not survive the experiment. Equipped with multiple recording devices, Arroway enters a pod which is dropped through the massive machine's counter-rotating rings. She seemingly travels through wormholes and observes a radio array-like structure at Vega, signs of civilization on an alien planet, and a celestial event. Arroway finds herself on a beach similar to her childhood drawing of Pensacola, Florida. An alien assuming her deceased father's appearance approaches. He explains that the aliens detected humans' radio emissions and judged it worthy of a first step into the cosmos. Ellie is soon sent back through the wormhole.
Arroway regains consciousness inside the pod. The mission control team reports that the pod fell through the machine into a safety net and that the experiment achieved nothing. Arroway insists she was gone for hours, but her devices recorded only static. A Congressional Committee headed by Kitz speculates the signal and the machine were a hoax perpetrated by Hadden, now deceased. Arroway admits she cannot scientifically prove her experience and requests the committee accept her testimony on faith.
Joss tells the press that he believes Arroway's claim, and they leave the hearing together. Kitz and White House official Rachel Constantine discuss the confidential information and observe that Arroway's device recorded 18 hours of static. Arroway receives ongoing financial support for the SETI program at the VLA.
Cast
Production
Development
The scientist Carl Sagan conceived Contact in 1979. That year, Lynda Obst, one of his closest friends, was hired by the 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. Druyan said they hoped "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.
Sagan incorporated Kip Thorne's study of wormhole space travel. Tarter was a story consultant, and advised on how to portray career struggles of women scientists from the 1950s to 1970s. The writers debated whether Arroway should have a baby at the film's end.
Although Guber was impressed with Sagan and Druyan's treatment, he hired various screenwriters to rewrite the script. New characters were added, including a Native American park ranger turned astronaut. Joffé almost commenced pre-production, but dropped out. Zemeckis liked the script, but did not like the ending, which had "the sky open up and these angelic aliens putting on a light show". and Contact entered pre-production. Actresses including Julia Roberts expressed interest in the role of Ellie. Miller considered Uma Thurman before he cast Jodie Foster. He approached Ralph Fiennes to play Palmer Joss, and considered casting Linda Hunt as the US president.
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 to portray the pope as a key supporting character. Warner Bros. was hoping to have the film ready for release by Christmas 1996, but pre-production lasted longer than expected. Despite being diagnosed with myelodysplasia in 1994, Sagan remained 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. After arduous first weeks of location shooting in New Mexico and Arizona, production for Contact returned to Los Angeles for five months' worth of location and sound stage shooting that used a total of nine soundstages at Warner Hollywood Studios in West Hollywood, and Culver Studios. The art department created more than 25 sets. Sagan visited the set a number of times, where he also helped with last-minute rewrites. Filming was briefly delayed with the news of his death on December 20, 1996. Contact was dedicated to Sagan: "For Carl" appears on the screen at the fade.
Visual effects
thumb|right|The second Machine in operation at [[Hokkaido|Hokkaidō, Japan]]
The visual effects sequences were designed by eight VFX companies, including Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), Weta Digital, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Warner Digital, and Effects Associates, with Pixar's RenderMan used for CGI rendering. Weta Digital, in particular, was responsible for designing the wormhole sequence. Foster found working with blue screen technology for the first time difficult: "It was a blue room. Blue walls, blue roof. It was just blue, blue, blue. And I was rotated on a Lazy Susan with the camera moving on a computerized arm. It was really tough." Shortly afterwards, Clinton gave a speech about the Martian meteorite fragment Allan Hills 84001, which was used in Contact. Zemeckis said: "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."
The opening scene is a three-minute CGI sequence, beginning with a view of Earth from high in the exosphere and listening to numerous radio broadcasts emitting from the planet. The camera zooms backward, passing the Moon, Mars, and other features of the Solar System, then to the Oort cloud, interstellar space, the Local Bubble, the Milky Way, other galaxies of the Local Group, and eventually into deep space. As this occurs, the radio signals start to drop out and reflect older programming, representing the distance these signals would have traveled at the speed of light, eventually becoming silent as the distance becomes much greater. The sequence eventually resolves into the iris of young Ellie's eye as she is listening on her amateur radio base station. The scale-view shot of the entire universe was inspired by the short documentary film Powers of Ten (1977). At the time, it was the longest continuous computer-generated sequence in a live-action film, eventually surpassed by the opening of The Day After Tomorrow (2004).
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 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 father when the door closes.
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 did not 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 father absent from the shot, leading to the development of the mirror sequence.
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."
Early conceptual designs of the Pod were based, as in the novel, on one of the primary shapes in geometry: a dodecahedron, or a twelve-sided body. Eventually it was modified to a spherical capsule that encased the traveler, with a dodecahedron surrounding the sphere. Zemeckis and the production crew also made several visits to the Kennedy Space Center at Merritt Island adjacent to Cape Canaveral, where officials gave them access to sites off-limits to most visitors. Filmmakers were also brought onto Launch Complex 39 before the launch of the Space Shuttle, The full score is approximately an hour long, 44 minutes of which is on the CD, including every major cue. The CD track entitled "Good to Go" features a slightly different opening—a brief brass motif that is not in the film—but all other cues are identical in orchestration to the mix in the film.
The Region 2 Special Edition DVD release contains a 5.1 music score track, which presents the complete score (this feature, as with many isolated scores, is not mentioned in most product descriptions of the DVD).
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. 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".
Contact premiered on July 1, 1997, at the Village Theater in Los Angeles, California. It was released in the United States and Canada on July 11, 1997, in 1,923 theaters, earning $20,584,908 in its opening weekend, ranking in second place behind Men in Black. The film would hold the record for having Jodie Foster's highest opening weekend until Panic Room replaced it in 2002. It eventually grossed $101 million in North America and $70 million internationally, reaching a total of $171 million worldwide. Contact was released on Blu-ray Disc on October 6, 2009.
Critical reception
On Rotten Tomatoes it has a rating of 68% based on reviews 68 critics, 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." Metacritic calculated an average score of 62 out of 100, based on 23 reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert gave Contact three and a half out of four and wrote that it "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." On December 21, 2011, Ebert added Contact to his "Great Movies" collection. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said Contact carried a more philosophical portrait of the science fiction genre than did other films, but would still "satisfy the cravings of the general public who simply want to be entertained".
The critic James Berardinelli said that Contact is "one of 1997's finest motion pictures, and is a forceful reminder that Hollywood is still capable of making magic". Berardinelli likened its awe and spectacle to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, adding that "If Contact falls short in any area, it's an inability to fully develop all of its many subplots..." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle largely enjoyed the first 90 minutes of Contact but felt that Zemeckis was too obsessed with visual effects rather than cohesive storytelling for the pivotal climax. Rita Kempley, writing in The Washington Post, did not like the premise, which she described as "a preachy debate between sanctity and science".
Awards
{| class="wikitable sticky-header"
!Association
!Category
!Recipient
!Results
|-
| rowspan="3" |20/20 Awards
|Best Actress
|Jodie Foster
|
|-
|Best Adapted Screenplay
| James V. Hart & Michael Goldenberg
|
|-
|colspan=2|Best Visual Effects
|
|-
|Academy Awards
|Best Sound
|Randy Thom<br />Tom Johnson<br />Dennis S. Sands<br />William B. Kaplan
|
|-
|Annie Awards
|Best Individual Achievement: Effects Animation
|Jay Redd
|
|-
|ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards
|Top Box Office Films
|Alan Silvestri
|
|-
| rowspan="3" |Blockbuster Entertainment Awards
|Favorite Actor – Drama
|Matthew McConaughey
|
|-
|Favorite Actress – Drama
|Jodie Foster
|
|-
|Favorite Supporting Actor – Drama
|Tom Skerritt
|
|-
|Chicago Film Critics Association Awards
|Best Actress
|Jodie Foster
|
|-
|Cinema Audio Society Awards
|Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for Feature Films
|Randy Thom<br />Tom Johnson<br />Dennis S. Sands<br />William B. Kaplan
|
|-
|Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards
|Best Picture
|
|
|-
|Golden Globe Awards
|Best Lead Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama
|Jodie Foster
|
|-
|Hugo Awards
|Best Dramatic Presentation
|Robert Zemeckis<br />James V. Hart<br />Michael Goldenberg<br />Carl Sagan<br />Ann Druyan
|
|-
|Humanitas Prize Awards
|Feature Film Category
|James V. Hart & Michael Goldenberg
|
|-
|International Monitor Awards
|Theatrical Releases – Electronic Visual Effects
|Ken Ralston<br />Stephen Rosenbaum<br />Jerome Chen<br />Jay Redd<br />Sheena Duggal<br />David Jones<br />Debbie Denise
|
|-
|Jupiter Awards
|Best International Actress
|Jodie Foster
|
|-
|Motion Picture Sound Editors Awards
|Best Sound Editing – Sound Effects & Foley
|
|
|-
|NAACP Image Awards
|Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture
|Angela Bassett
|
|-
|Online Film Critics Society Awards
|Top Ten Films of the Year
|
|
|-
|Rembrandt Awards
|Best Actress
| rowspan="2" |Jodie Foster
|
|-
|Santa Barbara International Film Festival Awards
|Modern Master Award
|
|-
| rowspan="2" |Satellite Awards
|Best Visual Effects
|Ken Ralston
|
|-
|Best Cinematography
|Don Burgess
|
|-
| rowspan="7" |Saturn Awards
|Best Science Fiction Film
|Phil Benson & Randy Thom
|
|-
|Best Director
|Robert Zemeckis
|
|-
|Best Writer
|James V. Hart & Michael Goldenberg
|
|-
|Best Actress
| Jodie Foster
|
|-
|Best Performance by a Younger Actor/Actress
| Jena Malone
|
|-
|Best Music
|Alan Silverstri
|
|-
|Best Special Effects
|Ken Ralston<br />Stephen Rosenbaum<br />Jerome Chen<br />Mark Holmes
|
|-
|World Animation Celebration Awards
|Best Use of Animation as a Special FX in a Theatrical
|
|
|}
Reactions
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). 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:
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:
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".
NASA
The scene where the NASA scientists give Arroway the "cyanide pill" caused some controversy during production and when the film came out. Gerald D. Griffin, the film's NASA advisor, insisted that NASA has never given any astronaut a cyanide pill "just in case", and that if an astronaut truly wished to commit suicide in space, all they would have to do is cut off their oxygen supply.
Lawsuits
Director George Miller, who had developed Contact with Warner Bros. before Zemeckis' hiring, unsuccessfully sued the studio over breach of contract policies.
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, 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.
See also
- "The Borderland" (The Outer Limits episode)
- List of films featuring extraterrestrials
References
Further reading
- Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film (2nd ed. 2005) pp 69–72.
External links
- Visual effects analysis
- September 8, 1995 screenplay
- In-depth analysis of the realism of the film and novel
- SETI Institute - Contact the Movie
- On Location: Revisiting Contact - a Tribute to Carl Sagan