Review by John Schmidt

Carl Sagan died at the tragically young age of 62 when work on this movie was being completed. The movie was based on Sagan’s novel, but only about half of the novel could fit into a traditional Hollywood movie budget. I have never been able to escape the feeling that had Sagan lived another 10 years, we would have been blessed with the needed sequel. Ideally the sequel would have involved director Robert Zemeckis along with Jodie Foster (as Dr. Eleanor Ann Arroway) and Matthew McConaughey (as Palmer Joss), a trio that made the movie Contact a gem.

The book Contact deals with one of the great mysteries of the human condition. Can we ever know how our universe came in to existence? It may simply be a sad fact of life that we are forever cut off from knowing how our universe began. If so, this leaves beings such as ourselves free to speculate about the possibility that our universe was created by some form of intelligence. Is a universe the kind of thing that can be designed and created or did our universe just happen? These are the kinds of wonderful questions that appealed to the fertile mind of Carl Sagan.

Carl Sagan’s intuition about the nature of the universe suggested to him that it would be miraculous if Earth were the only planet with life. Further, it is hard to see why Earth should be the first planet in the universe to host intelligent creatures such as ourselves. So the movie Contact starts with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Jody Foster was a great choice to play the daring young scientist who ignores the stodginess of conventional astronomers and detects the first signal from outer space.

The movie depicts the people of the United States responding to the First Contact Message. President Clinton is shown calmly and rationally dealing with the discovery while millennial looniness sweeps the religious masses. Scientists like Dr. Arroway are shown decoding the message and applying all of our species’ young technology to build a Machine that will allow for physical contact with the distant space aliens. Palmer Joss is the rational face of faith, ready to stand at Ellie’s side as she relentlessly uses science to understand the “great booming voice from the sky” that she has discovered. We can only imagine the choices Robert Zemeckis would have made had the movie been filmed during the tenure of the current President of the United States. I can picture an alternative universe where Zemeckis incorporated into the movie the famous video a dazed Bush in the elementary school upon hearing of the 9/11 attacks.

Much of the movie is built around the stunning computer-generated visual effects of the Machine, but the plot is a rather contrived sequence of improbable events designed to position Ellie as the sole person to enter the Machine and be catapulted to the center of the galaxy where she makes contact with advanced beings. Along with the Machine itself, the depicted journey through a series of worm holes to the center of the galaxy is the part of the movie that comes closest to traditional Hollywood science fiction. The bulk of the movie is Ellie’s intellectual adventure and exploration of the larger human endeavor to KNOW, either by science or by faith.

When Ellie returns from the center of the galaxy she has no physical evidence that she has met aliens. She is left to function as a prophet, proclaiming that it was revealed to her that we are not alone. Palmer Joss believes her because she is saying what he has “known” all along through his faith. At the end of the movie, Ellie is shown continuing her scientific work and searching onward for more and better evidence.

This is where the needed sequel would have continued the story. In the book, when Ellie returns to Earth she brings a hint from the aliens. The hint is that there is scientific evidence to be found showing that the universe was created. Ellie goes on to find this additional evidence, and this time it is the kind of objective evidence that everyone on Earth can observe. We no longer have to just take it on faith that the universe was created: science finds a way to reveal the signature of the creator. The book Contact strongly suggests the idea that intelligences such as ourselves can harness the forces of nature to create new universes; we could be part of a chain of created universes the residents of which each create their own daughter universes.

So the original Contact film was a great movie, but only the first half of Sagan’s story. Enjoy the film, read the book, and hope that someone can pull enough strings to produce a second Contact movie that will finish the story.