notes on contact
august 4, 1997

Overall, I enjoyed Contact, and I thought Jodie Foster did a great job. But many of the basic premises of the movie didn't make sense, and some of them led to poorly integrated scenes that only stretched the movie's running time. Someday I'll check out Carl Sagan's original novel and see what it was like.

• Let's say there's an alien civilization that's advanced enough to build a spacecraft which can travel dozens of light years in a split (Earth) second. First, isn't it our great good fortune that all the materials required to build the thing exist on our little Earth? Second, why couldn't the Vegans have just sent the spacecraft plans in plain English? What's with the three-dimensional encodings and keys that only one man on Earth, the elusive Hadden, can break? And could even he break the code of a civilization so advanced?
• Would you really sink half a billion dollars into building a device which you didn't know what it really was, and which many people were opposed to? As James Woods's character pointed out, it might be a bomb that'll blow us all up.
• Now, would you build two of them?
• Let's say you're building the second, secret device in Japan. How in sam hill do you keep this $500 million project a secret? Is there like only one person working on the project? And how will the world react after finding out that their governments have secretly spent $500 million on something that was opposed by so many people?
• Let's say you're selecting an astronaut to fly to Vega. Nobody knows what the conditions are like up there. Flying in a spacecraft for several dozen light years is a pretty strenuous task. Wouldn't you maybe choose somebody who's been in space before, instead of either the director of the NSF or some slender astrophysicist whose only apparent physical activity is in bed with a "man of cloth?"
• How could you doubt that Ellie really visited Vega, given that you and the rest of the world have admitted you have no idea how the spacecraft contraption works?

I suppose some of these questions are "answered" by the Vegans, who most conveniently say that "this is the way it's been done for millions of years." It's also nice that the aliens look exactly like us. Thank goodness they don't look like Matthew McConaghey.

The movie ultimately tries to blur the distinction between science and religion. Most of us have never seen God nor any aliens, so why should we believe that either of them exists? This is a good question, but I don't think the issue of religion really fits into the plot of the movie. It just pops up suddenly and annoys you for a while before going away... kind of like Matthew McConaghey.