"In 1979 I had some questions, but this time it was even more clear that the movie ends in enigma and paradox..."

Do you mean 1997?

Ebert: Fixed. Nasty typing fingers transposed the numbers.

I was extremely disappointed by the movie "Contact." I knew that Carl Sagan was writing his first novel, and I was curious to see how a brilliant scientist solved the problems of best-selling fiction.

Ellie could have been a spokesperson for Atheism. A religious zealot blew up the first machine. Wouldn't it have been plausible to have an Atheist say, "Religion takes you into a delusional state of mind, so it's no surprise that zealots will set off bombs to keep their beliefs from being challenged and proven wrong."

But Ellie (there's a female character named Elle on "Criminal Minds" and I'll try to keep the names straight) fell in love with a New Age minister (Joel Osteen stole his look) and she refused to say "Faith is nonsense" because it would drive him away.

Ellie went on a trip... but the trip was fiction. It wasn't an insight into what might be out there. It was standard SF boilerplate.

The plot makes you think... but if it had been better thought out, it could have made you THINK. What if there is NO GOD. What if a woman is denied her seat on a space ship because she refuses to lie and say she believes in a God. Well, that happened. And then, the skeptic gets proof of a life we can't explain,... yada, yada, yada.

During her trip, an implication that the wormholes traveled a specific route, and she had to change trains at one point. Ties into Sagan's catch phrase of "billions and billions and billions..."

Sagan told the story his way... but I would have preferred to see a religious type and an Atheist argue it out with statements that aren't biased toward delusional and irrational Faith.

I'm a huge fan of this film too, and glad to see you also think it's a Great Movie. ;-)

The message I took from the ending was the importance of ruthless, unflinching honesty in the pursuit of science. Had Ellie kept insisting that what she experienced was objective truth, in the absence of hard evidence, she would have been just as irrational as the religious types who insist that their faith is objective truth. To be true to the science, and to herself, she had to back off, relax, and go back to work doing real science. I don't call that a defeat of any stripe.

In the beach scene, I remember her "father" telling her explicitly that he was an alien, and that he was not actually her real father from Earth. He chose to appear in the form of her father so that she would not be frightened when she awoke after being knocked unconscious during the trip. He also told her that the "beach" she was on was not real and was just a simulation they had created for her so she would be more comfortable.

I'm pretty sure all of this was explicitly stated in the book as well (although the book was slightly different because there were other scientists there besides Arroway). As far as I remember there was never any ambiguity as to whether they were having a supernatural experience or a genuine encounter with a member of an advanced alien species. The latter was always clearly the case.

I don't recall if it was mentioned in the movie, but in the book she did in fact travel via wormholes. The alien beings spoke to her through a vision of her father, told her about some of the research they are presently doing, etc. I interpreted the movie based on this.

>If all movies had to withstand the test of logic, where would that leave us?

It would leave us with movies that used sentimentality like salt in a cookie recipe. The movie doesn't even give faith or new age-y stuff a good shake, because the 18 hours was known to everyone at the time of the Big Deposition, but they forgot to mention it. The point of the characters doing this is so that the movie can seem mysterious in a way that it isn't.

It's entirely possible to have a movie that admits how smart it is, and still leave us curious. (say, 2001 A Space Odyssey) It's also possible, as a side note, to pay homage to a great movie like 2K1ASO without simply remaking large portions of it.

(Did anyone else watch the movie as though Ellie was many times surprised to see famous actor Matthew McConaughey?)

My big frustration with the plot in this movie:

Why didn't they send another person through the machine?

They say it costs half a trillion dollars, and maybe it would be too tedious to get into how much of that is the sunk cost of the physical equipment (which appears to basically be left undamaged & unconsumed in the course of using it), and how much of that is the marginal cost required to send one person through. Admittedly, maybe that's a 50-50 split, and sending another person through would cost $250 billion dollars, which is staggering.

But as it is now, they've already spent a trillion to just come up with unsatisfied questions. If they spend $1.25 trillion to send another person through to corroborate Arroway's story, wouldn't that go a long way toward satisfying questions about whether what happened was "real" or not?

The way the film ends, it seems to close the book on ever using the machine again to answer the questions that were raised. I've always found it baffling that this was apparently not up for consideration within the movie's storyline.

Mr. Ebert,

I too love "Contact", but what I most love about the ending is something you didn't mention. Specifically, Ellie's answers to Kitz - that she has no real proof, and that she might be wrong - beautifully illustrate the difference between science and religion. It's one of the main things about the film that I think beautifully honors the memory of Carl Sagan.

-S

The answers to your questions, as well as much richer questions without answers are found in the book. The movie is one of my favorites, but the book has so much more.

My take was that the 18-hour stretch of tape was real evidence Ellie had been gone - presumably passing through a wormhole and away speaking with Vegans (though not necessarily meeting them *at* Vega. The alien she encountered, in the "form she could understand" of her father, mentioned a kind of universe-wide wormhole highway. Vega may just have been a convenient stopover in that system from which to pass signals to and from Earth.) And then, as I saw it, Ellie was returned after 18 hours to the exact spatio-temporal coordinates of her departing spot.

On that interpretation, there's much more than whatever "woo-woo" takeaway Ellie might have had personally. We humans would be bestowed with much more than a cockamamie machine - but rather a device whose reverse-engineering could teach us a library's worth about the nature of physics and spacetime. If that's so, the aliens weren't either spoon-feeding us, or sending us empty new-age platitudes, but giving humanity a friendly, scientific boost that we'd have to work out on our own.

Anyway, that's at least what I'd always thought was happening....

CONTACT is one of my favorite films. I remember how absolutely transfixed I was when I first saw it in my teens, and seriously triggered a consideration into a career in astrophysics and becoming an astronaut.

I always thought that the machine created a portal in the space-time fabric and that the pod dropped into another space/time, and then was returned instantaneously. In earth time, the pod dropped straight through. In pod-time, Ellie had an experience that lasted 18 hours. The 18 hours of static proves that.

"Do the 18 hours of static prove anything? Yes, I suppose they must. Please explain them to me."

18 hours of static would back up the protagonist's assertion that she had been gone for 18 hours. It also would imply that at a bare minimum (assuming the recording mechanisms were not tampered with, etc,) that time did progress for 18 hours, which would be an amazingly glaring mystery and worthy of scientific inquiry alone.

Which is why Contact is a good movie, but hardly representative of how things do progress. Even a casual look at the "Arsenic-vacuole bacteria" brouhaha shows that there are defenders on either side of the dismissive aisle -- the amount of vitriol and passion often would demand /more/ evidence thereof, not less.

I believe the implication of such a scene is to comment on cynicism, not skepticism, as a skeptic would be all over the "18 hours of static" bit while questioning the conclusion of non-human interference.

However, where a cynic fails is where a skeptic succeeds -- even if there was no further information past that, the possibility of such remains and is left unassailable, albeit unlikely (as most things without evidence are considered "unlikely").

Once more information comes in, though, one side fades away while the other grows and becomes dominant -- until unceremoniously unseated and improved.

Ebert: "Presuming that Ellie seemed neither to herself or anyone else to be away for 50 years, we can assume that she did not travel to the distant planet."

It seems obvious to me that we are expected to assume she did travel to another part of the galaxy. The film specifically mentions wormholes, which are a standard sci-fi element to allow faster than light travel (while still being consistent with known real-life physics).

Also, the film makes it pretty clear that the "father" on the beach is not really her father in some kind of afterlife, it's just a convenient way for the aliens to communicate with her ("We thought this might make things a little easier").

I loved this movie so much. It still gives me goosebumps today.

Dear Mr. Ebert,

Most of these questions have answers, or at least hints, in Sagan's excellent novel. (The movie also misses a superb denouement in the book, where Ellie finds mathematical evidence that the universe was created by intelligent beings.)

Most of the paradoxes in the movie are explained by "wormholes", tunnels of space-time that could permit faster-than-light travel, at least in theory. Einstein himself laid the foundation for the wormhole concept-- a synonym is the "Einstein-Rosen Bridge".

In fact, the movie itself mentions wormholes and "some sort of transit system". In the book, the travelers go through tunnels which they presume to be wormholes, then have stop-off points where they orbit stars until they run into another wormhole entrance. The movie appears to follow this pattern too.

Wormholes are made of severely deformed "space-time", and the usual definitions of space and time do not apply. The warping of time in the movie is hinted at by Ellie's flashbacks and "flash forwards" as she journeys.

With such distorted time, it would not be surprising if Ellie's journey was milliseconds or instantaneous while Ellie experienced 18 hours. Again, Einstein himself introduced the idea of "time dilation" during near-lightspeed travel; a person on board a spacecraft that took a round trip from Earth to Vega would take 50 years from Earth's perspective, but from the spacefarer's perspective, it could take 25 years, 10 years, or 10 seconds, depending on the speed. Ellie's experience seems to be the opposite of this.

In the movie (and the book, if I recall correctly) the traveler(s) see a giant antenna array around Vega, supporting your guess that the machine-designers don't live there, but merely monitor and transmit from there. Vega is a good choice, as it's a bright star and noticeable for many light-years around.

I enjoyed both the movie and your review. Thank you for reading!

-Bryan

I have read the book more recently than seeing the film (both of which i like) and right up until the final act with the pod etc they are very similar but then they dramatically diverge on most of the important parts.

I think it is wrong to say the film is Sagan's vision, the book is really interesting and asks fundamentally different questions and looks at possibilities that the film does not.

*Book spoilers*
Fundamentally different aspects like there being 3 crew members, being told the people they meet with are aliens who have pojected themselves to appear as loved ones to ease them into the situation and that they are in a wormhole transport network that the people using now only found, and some cool stuff about stars being thrown into black holes. They are then sent back and essentially told it's up to you now but while there is doubt and they cant prove what happened that there were 5 of them and people accuse them of fabrication as the reader you are in not doubt as to what happened.

There is a bit of new age woo and it is a personal journey but the idea of an afterlife just isnt there IMO. The bit about binary being written into the fabric of the universe in pi is the main nod to something greater. The afterlife and much if not all of the new age woo is Zemeckis alone.

I do like that complete doubt and that 'there's 18 hours of static' bit from the film though, it is a wonderful touch. The video is just wiped in the book due to magnetic interference.

A great article, about one of my favorite movies.

What she finally discovered, I submit, is New Age woo-woo.

Other than restating the by-now obvious, I'm...a bit lost as to your point. 0_0??
Are you trying to dig up old arguments from fourteen years ago about Contact being a "pro-faith" boogeyman to good, smart scientific rationalists, and trying to point out the fatal scientific script inconsistencies (there, that'll show it!), or...?
If you're looking for a good argumentative scrap, think you may have arrived a decade or two, not to mention a few well-deserved South Park jokes, too late--As the movie pretty much since went the way of Jodie Foster's career, and for the same ponderous/self-important reasons.

At this point, I was sort of expecting one more 2011-wrapup thingy, but when we get the cosmic-philosophical and only nominally-movie-tied columns out of nowhere, that's when I find myself checking Illinois's medical-marijuana laws, just to be sure.

Book Spoiler Alert: there's a very nice surprise at the end of Sagan's book. Ellie runs an analysis on the irrational number pi (3.141592653599...) in base-5 (at the suggestion of the alien life) and discovers the beginning of a hidden message written into the Universe itself. The film wisely left this part out to preserve the message of faith and reason, but the book ending was a Carl Sagan personal touch that grokked with my favorite quote of his, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be know." and also his edict that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Roger, I share your admiration for this movie. Having read Sagan's novel, I know everything that the movie only hints at... but I know the movie is supposed to stand for itself, so I won't compare the two.

Still, knowing what I know, the New Age woo-woo and the hypotheses of an afterlife aren't what Sagan was driving at. The clues are there in the script and in the images, but perhaps it's a failure of direction that they lend themselves to where your guesses ended up. The aliens, wanting communication but knowing that an overwhelming experience for Ellie might preclude that, present themselves in an environment (beach) she finds pleasant, and in a form (her father) she will find friendly. Whether her mind, or her soul, does any physical traveling is indeed open to interpretation in both the novel and the book, but it's clear in both that the aliens can read minds and use Ellie's own thoughts and memories to communicate with her.

The 18 hours of static aren't exactly irrefutable proof of anything... but they do suggest that time inside the pod was not the same as time outside the pod. Ellie spends some time sleeping in the novel before her "father" appears to her... perhaps the change in time (or the distance traveled?) necessitates a rest. Communicating with tired minds can't be easy on a long distance line, so to speak.

I was under the impression that she made contact with an intelligent life form who appeared in the form of her father because that was the most accessible way for her to understand it. I didn't think it was the "spirit" or essence of her father. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The thing is that it's just the opposite of a journey to the center of the mind: the point here is that it's Ellie's first real journey to (get ready for it) the center of her heart. As you noted, Ellie's earliest depicted fascinations are scientific - specifically the distance of radio communication; this cerebral fascination draws her upon the longings of Ellie's heart: Mom.

"I don't think even the biggest antena could reach that far." Says Dad, and what is the rest of Ellie's carear, but the pursuit of bigger antenas (the shot of her stepping into the scope of that massive thing in South America; Ellie sitting beside the rows of giant statlite dishes in the American South West) This is a person engaging her heart exclusively through her mind. Why, after all, is she so intent on the "waiting for E.T. to call"? Science is interesting for being science, to some people (lots) but this is a very particular field of science and it's compelling to her in a very particular way.
Ellie's mind is, by one way of thinking, too agile, elaborate and demanding to consciously engage spiritual faith (that's not to say faith is necessarily the refuge of low IQ's; it just seems to frustrate this character as such) but she still has human needs and her only way to pursue them is through what her mind finds rationally merrited.

To me, the 18 hours of static just flat out points (while no proof) to Ellie's experience being scientifically valid. The important thing, however, is that Ellie does not get to know this, and so is able to experience an aspect of her heart (soul, however you'd like to approximate it) that Palmer expresses while they're in bed together: that inexplicable, beyond intellectual merrit, totally improvable human sensation of ... what some would call New Age woo woo.

I'm telling you: to be preoccupied with the factual nature of Contact's narrative is to miss the point of it. I understand the questions and really liked your brief discussion (these things obviously aren't nitpicks; they're part of the fabric of the story, in lots of ways), but they're not going to deliver the point of Contact in there own right any better than radio astronomy its self was going to bring Dr Ellie Arroway to catharsis, if you want the opinion of someone who's loved this movie dearly for over a decade.

I know that a movie has to stand on it's own, but in the book by Sagan she did in fact travel around our galaxy through wormholes. But she didn't go alone, four other scientists went with her and they all experienced different things. Ellie saw her father while the others saw their own personal "visions".

But as I say, a movie has to stand on it's own and while some of the book's ending is in the film, it's not totally explained. Maybe it shouldn't.

Though it has some flaws I still count this among my favorite films. One of Sagan's original suppositions was that our understanding of the universe is myopic at best. Our belief that nothing can travel faster than light is based merely on science as we understand it currently, and as we all know current science is evolving all the time. My takeaway from the film was that the "cockamamie machine" used principles of space travel far beyond our understanding, thereby making Ellie's trip to Vega – and beyond – entirely possible. As for the "big price tag," I imagine the reverse-engineering that would be possible from such a machine would ultimately make it worth its cost.

Roger, you asked this question: "Do the 18 hours of static prove anything? Yes, I suppose they must. Please explain them to me."

Since I have read the novel and seen the movie, I can try to offer a tiny bit of insight here. The purpose of the video recorder was to act as an impartial observer to whatever events occurred. Now the way that the recorder was described was that once it was turned on, it could not be turned back off again. So while the trip appeared to be subjective to Jodie Foster's character, and only lasting perhaps a millisecond or two from the perspective of people on earth, as far as the recorder was concerned, 18 hours of elapsed time did occur from its perspective. The fact that it did not record anything is only part of the overall plot to the storyline. Additionally, the fact that the recorder was operational for 18 hours was not mentioned until after the hearings, not during them.

Also remember that when the "launch platform" reached full operational speed, that there was a gravitational pull that was seen on screen (the command ship being suddenly tilted in the direction of the platform) and that there was a... well, call it a quantum singularity for lack of a better term that was created. She's released, travels through the singularity, and comes out the other side... at which point suddenly the gravitational pull has ceased.

I realize that doesn't really answer any of the questions the movie (and the novel) postulates, but it is the way that I saw the sequence of events, and what happened to her.

Not a paradox ... she travelled through a wormhole. Once there, the alien intelligence used her memories to make her comfortable.

Much as I like a lot of this film and went into the theatre desperately wanting to love it, I had problems with some of the dramatic choices Zemeckis made. In Sagan's novel, the President is a woman who is a former general, while Zemeckis (mistakenly, IMHO) "casts" Bill Clinton and uses news footage instead of an actor, instantly dating the film and limiting some of the dramatic possibilities Sagan explores in the novel. The Clinton footage also comes off as a gimmick, much as some of the weaker historical "cameos" in "Forrest Gump". Casting an actor would've worked better - IMDb mentions Linda Hunt and Sidney Poitier being either considered for or announced for the role of the President; I pictured Ellen Burstyn or Olympia Dukakis when I read the novel. I also felt McConnaughey was miscast (someone like William Fichtner, who's in a minor role here, would've been better), and the Tom Skerritt character was made into a one dimensional villain instead of a more complex one in the novel.

That being said, there's a lot to like once you get past the flaws: the opening scene is brilliant, the scenes you describe are well executed, and Foster is great as always. There are also moments when the sense of wonder that Sagan tried to convey in the novel come across. Not quite a great film, but one that falls into the "good but flawed" category. You have to wonder what someone like Coppola (who was going to adapt this, for TV if I remember correctly), Ridley Scott, or a later director like Fincher would've done with this.

No matter how good a film is most of the way; if the ending is disappointing (which I firmly believe applies to “Contact”) I will end up hating the whole thing. The same occurred with “Shutter Island”, “Black Swan” and “Fight Club”, three fascinating films (for most of the way) which eventually went for the “the whole thing was just a hallucination” explanation.
I realize the same does not apply to you and frankly, I admire your ability to appreciate movies with questionable endings if the rest of the feature was good.

Wow. Surprised by this one. I thought the movie was terrible, largely because the thinking in it -- both scientific and religious -- is so sophomoric. Ellie isn't credible as a good scientist (surprising, given the author), and the clergyman is completely noncredible as a clergyman.

It's not entirely clear what denomination of Christianity the character is supposed to represent, but he's pretty clearly had a seminary education. Yet we're supposed to believe he doesn't know who William of Ockham is? Seriously? Ockham is a major figure in the history of Christian theology. He is in every "History of Religious Thought in the West" or "History of Christian Theology" course, everywhere in the world; even the introductory surveys. So far from needing to have the Razor explained to him by Ellie, he would be able to explain to Ellie the larger system of Ockham's thought, and how the Razor fit into it.

Look, my sympathy in the film is with the scientific viewpoint, but having an astronomer have to introduce William of Ockham to a trained clergyman is as silly as having a clergyman have to introduce Johannes Kepler to an astronomer. Sorry, but no.

It's so terrible a blunder, the whole script collapses under it.

I didn't take the ending to be as ambiguous as you did. Supposedly it would be possible to travel great distances in short amounts of time through a wormhole, if wormholes actually exist (having been well-theorized but never observed), and I think the movie tried to make it pretty clear that she was going through one. Also, virtually as soon as she meets her father's facsimile, she says something like, "This isn't real. You must have downloaded my brain and formed this out of my memories," and he replies, "That's my little scientist; We thought this would make it easier for you." These aliens might be incomprehensible or imperceptible to humans or other species in their natural form, so to carry out first contact in the mind of the contactee seems reasonable. At some point she asks him if there are "others," and he tells her there are many. I also remember him saying something like, "This is the way it's been done for billions of years," so it seems pretty clear that we can eliminate the "afterlife" theory. I suppose what remains are either the theories that either 1) she has visited a real place and real beings are tapping into her mind, or 2) she is hallucinating the whole thing. At the very end when we learn the camera recorded the same amount of time she reported she experienced subjectively, I think it makes it pretty clear what actually happened. A person can hallucinate experiences of passing time, but I don't see how the camera could record 18 hours of video instantaneously, even if it is static. It might be possible with a digital camera, but that still seems like pretty striking evidence. I felt it was, if I may be so bold, totally unambiguous in terms of the facts, although perhaps it was very ambiguous in terms of the subjective experience. The fact that the inquiry didn't have all the evidence was frustrating but probably realistic, and I think it suggests something about the ending. The film seems pretty clear to me that the journey was real, but the ending is really about people's reactions to something so contrary to what society's expectations of it were, as first contact with aliens almost certainly would be.

You note that Contact is "an inspiring film, an expression of Carl Sagan's hope that life and intelligence exists elsewhere in the universe," and immediately add, "Some viewers interpret it as proof of an afterlife."

This is the key to the power of alien contact SF stories: They provide a "secular spiritualization" of existence, a metaphorical deity-thing that (at least in the non-Cold War/Social Darwinist manifestations of such tales) bestows a benign Figure--in "Contact," an actual Father Figure--who affirms not only a sense of wonder about existence but a reassurance of a Plan that, while not detailed, is definitely eschatological. Gene Roddenberry is the king of this: his Star Trek universe substitutes for an actual god all kinds of bio-physical attainments--always in human terms--that offer us either hope (fulfillment through crossing frontiers/"upward" evolution) or a warning (pride goeth, etc.).

I knew a guy who hated "Close Encounters" for this; he felt it urged us to look outside ourselves for a sign of greatness. In some ways, his rejection of this SF myth was a bit New Age-y/Me Generation--he preferred to look within to see all you need; but he had a point--or I've extracted my own: We need that deity, that "higher power" that makes big promises, however vague, and that looks down on us and smiles radiantly. Lacking religious faith, we substitute various E.T.s. Past cultures invented a past to build their myths; we invent a future.

That's fine, but we may find the SF version to be in the end a pale stand-in (that "woo-woo" you mention) for old-school Power & Glory.

There are two conversations taking place during Ellie's journey, just as there are throughout the film.

Ellie's experience is real and as depicted in the film; this was no dream or illusion. The 18 hours of static recorded on the camera proves it. And, while the speed of light is a barrier under Special Relativity, Sagan was too smart to get the physics wrong: the pod travelled through a traversable Einstein-Rosen bridge, a distortion of space-time that can connect two widely separated points in the universe with a much shorter path. This is allowed in General Relativity and is even suggested by Ellie as the phenomenon she experienced.

What's fascinating about Contact is that Ellie, who rejects the claims of religion, who dismisses matters of faith against cold, scientific reason, is put in the position of having to recount a transcendent experience to others who haven't had that same experience and to whom she cannot prove it. The Congressional committee looks on her with the same skepticism she gave Palmer earlier in the film. And just as Palmer showed there were limits to scientific inquiry ("Did you love your father? Prove it."), he's there in the end to say that he believes her testimony. Science and faith manage to find common ground.

It's a great movie and I'm glad it's going in your Great Movies collection, Roger.

If you want to analyze this movie for failing to be realistic, let's start with why the American military didn't take over this program, classify it as top secret, build 20 transporters at double the cost and send in the invasion.

I disliked the end of "Contact." It made it seem like the point of the entire movie was to create a situation in which a scientist has to rely on faith. This is ridiculously contrived. Then you hear about the "18 hours of static," which show that the movie lacks conviction in its entire point. Apparently she doesn't need faith after all.

I didn't really care for the book either. The whole thing seemed like a way to reconcile science and religion, and even combine them together. Not a feasible undertaking imo.

Contact is one of the few movies that is great, but really isn't "good." The first half-hour tread water for too long to build up a payoff that was disappointing. I too felt that the alien scene, and it was an alien scene, told her stuff that she already knew and wasted lots of money and time--not just the scientists' time, but mine.

In between the first half-hour and the last, though, was a perfect, self-contained movie about humanity staring at the overhaul of reality as we know it, set parallel to a tense and infinitely interesting scientific procedural.

Ellie is in a worm hole. Therefore speed of light is not a factor. Space is being "bent" therefore it is not a straight distance x speed equation.

Mid trip of her "tunneling" she slows and sees Vega and even remarks so. She then continues on.

Vega is but a terminal on the way to the destination. Therefore the alien she met need not have any association with a Vegan.

Unfortunately Zemeckis did as Howard did with the DaVinci Code...they attempted to straddle the line to make the movies less confrontational to American that are 90% "religious". Box Office rules the day unfortunately.

As far as the 18 hours...it's a canard. Those that want to believe in God can dismiss and the rest of us are supposed to be sated.

Something puzzling in the above clip of the traveling scene; at 11 minutes into the clip Ellie is looking at the star she assumes is Vega. Then, turning to the right, there is a long object close to the pod. We only see it for a second before the sound of the spinning rings returns and another period of acceleration begins for Ellie.

What was that object?

Maybe the alien spacecraft that transmitted the signal to earth;

maybe the satellite that, according to Michael Kitz, was launched by S. R. Hadden and sent the signal to perpetuate the hoax;

maybe the support structure of the machine...which would put Ellie in two places at one time.

I always assumed the 18 hours of video proved Ellie traveled not only through space, but through time. Kind of like how Marty McFly had the chance to return to 1985 at the exact moment he left in "Back to the Future."

The movie leaves its simple lesson out in the open for all to see: you have to have a little faith. Not religious faith, but faith in yourself, in your fellow humans, faith in the science of our world and the greater universe.

Stripped of its religious regalia and drudgery, faith is a wonderful magical thing--a miraculous thing that does not require belief in a deity, yet can deliver miracles firing on all chargers.

You just have to open your eyes and see it.

I think it is important to separate "Contact", the book, from "Contact", the movie. We shouldn't combine the two. Let's let the movie stand alone.

Here's my interpretation of the movie:

"Michael Kitz" is right.

At every important juncture, Hadden's hand is at work.

Hadden funded Ellie's project. Hadden was in the perfect position to know just how to fake a message that Ellie would believe.

(An aside here: Everything that Ellie sees during her trip appears earlier in the film as pictures and posters at various points in her life, starting with her childhood drawing of Pensacola. Watch the film again).

His people decipher the message.

The first Machine is destroyed by a lunatic sneaking into what must be the most heavily secured device on earth. How did he manage that without outside help? Who could provide the help? Hadden.

The second Machine facility is completely under the control of "Hadden Industries". The equipment used by Ellie (including the video recorder) is provided by Hadden.

How hard would it have been to insert "18 hours of static"? In fact, "Hadden Industries" probably was selected to study the DVR for the congressional inquest.

Ellie's pod just falls through the Machine. She is not lying - she truly believes her journey occurred. But Occam's Razor tells us that a Hadden conspiracy was probably at play.

Here's two things I thought about:

1) After Ellie wakes up on the alien beach, she reaches out to touch what looks like a small galaxy floating in the air. She then realizes there is some sort of barrier surrounding her and we can figure that the beach is simply an illusion being artificially drawn by this strange force or barrier, one that is sort of interrupted when she pokes it. Isn't the beach also the same as the one from the drawing Ellie makes as a child just before her father's death?

2) When Ellie is traveling through space in the wormhole, she seems to stop at a few spots. One I think is Vega where another identical machine with spinning spheres seems to activate and send her along, and another is outside an unknown planet where she sees the bright lights of an alien civilization. Wouldn't the seconds that are ticking away during these brief pauses also be ticking back on Earth where time is supposedly standing still as she passes through "the core"? What about her time spent on that beach? Maybe her whole trip is spent inside the wormhole. Maybe time passes differently when you're so far away.

Since there's no absolute conclusion when it comes to whether it's in her mind or if what she experienced was real, I choose the latter because that's what I want to believe. Great movie.

I read Sagan's book Contact some 20 plus years ago. I had been a big fan of Sagan's since I watched Cosmos the series and subsequently read the book in elementary school. I still have my original copy of the book. It's seen better days. I had read it so many times that the paperback is almost in tatters. Astrophysics was my original dream vocation. Alas, it wasn't to be due to some of life's aimless meandering. I have to settle for being a private fan of science and keep up with it through reading when I can.

I was directed to read Contact by my older brother. We share an interest in astronomy. He thought that the conclusion would challenge my skeptical opinion regarding religion. The irony that it would come via the pen of one of the people I admired most was certainly not lost on him. Interestingly, I didn't come to the conclusion that he seemed to think I would. I didn't see a treatise elevating faith over reason. In fact, I found the opposite.

At the end of the book, omitted in the movie, the alien which has taken the form of Ellie's father explains that they have discovered that if you take pi out to enough places, it eventually turns into 1s and 0s. The alien in the book interprets this as some sort of binary encoded message from the people who 'created the universe'. He indicates that even they, meaning the aliens, hadn't yet cracked its code. He also explains that the wormhole transport system that was used to convey Ellie (and the other travelers absent in the movie) was not created by the aliens themselves but had been constructed by some other more ancient creatures. If this information had been included in the movie, then I would suspect there would be less people debating whether Ellie's experience was subjective or representative of a real journey.

As a skeptic and atheist I know, as Ellie does, that the easiest thing in the world to do is ascribe phenomenon that you don't understand to a a superior being. In fact, this exact human tendency is what brought about religion in the first place in all of its various forms. Ellie is being completely consistent by refusing to draw any scientific conclusions based on her subjective experience alone. There is no way for her to even internally analyze her experience objectively. It's the textbook definition of a subjective experience. It can be said to be no more real, in a scientific sense, than the hallucinations of a schizophrenic or for that matter the revelatory experience of one who thinks they have felt God's presence. However, in the book we are given no reason to believe that the trip did not occur, only the fact that the event cannot be independently corroborated. Unfortunately, the movie plays a little loose with this and creates more doubt than is necessary. I wish Zimeckis had been bold enough to stick closer to the book, especially in regards to the conclusion. The way the film turned out, skeptics like me can see it as a triumph of science over faith while believers can conclude the opposite.

As for whether it is physically possible for Arroway to travel 25 light years in a nanosecond, this is immaterial because it would be just as impossible for an alien race that exists at least 25 light years away to read an Earthling's thoughts, reconstruct a memory, and send it back down to be implanted in the subject's mind instantaneously. After all, information transmission is also subject to the speed light. Thus, if the velocity of light is accepted as the inviolable speed limit, it would take at least 50 years for Ellie's thoughts to be read, transmitted to the aliens, transformed into a vision, and then beamed back to the machine for reinsertion. The only explanation that is completely consistent with traditional physics is that Ellie has imagined it all. If we do not accept this interpretation, then we must admit that some exotic technology must be involved that either transmitted Ellie physically or her thoughts in information form at faster than the speed of light.

On a more philosophical note, it's helpful to consider how one would interpret the appearance of aliens with vastly superior technology. Would we think it was God? What test could we devise to tell? Could we ever be sure of our conclusion? The answers to these questions are what drive my skepticism. Not only can a superior being not be disproven by science, it cannot be proven by science. Knowing this, why bother speculating as you are almost guaranteed to be wrong and in any event could never know if you were.

Though the message could have been clearer, I enjoyed the movie. I know it's cliche but I would recommend anyone still unsure to read the Sagan book for a more thoughtful examination of the pandora's box of ideas hinted at in the movie.

It is explicitly explained in the movie (and book) that Ellie actually travels to Vega. The alien TELLS her that they used her memories of her father to provide a friendly face for her to communicate with.

I believe that the scene before the panel at the end of the film was for the benefit of Ellie, to show her the point of view from Matthew Mcconaughey's character. However, Kitz contacts her in private about the missing 18 hours, and all but concedes that something must have happened.

I really do love that scene on the beach. I like how the aliens admit that they don't even know who built the transit system, it makes the whole thing even more awe-inspiring.

Hi roger, i have a couple points that i hope prove useful in your uncovering of this film.

Firstly, I watched the end of the movie and noticed that when the command center regains visual with ellie in the capsule, she is lying on the ground and the chair contraption is broken. Two ways to look at this... when the capsule fell into the safety net the chair device broke (although the landing did seem pretty soft), or the broken chair corroborates with her experience in the capsule (which means some of what she saw must have been true, it could not all have been a dream or vision).

Secondly, When she's travelling (or perhaps not traveling) through the 'worm-hole' there are close ups of a holographic image of her face jutting out of her actual face (this occurs around 11:30 of the youtube video you posted). The image says things like "i had no idea", "they're alive," "oh god." I wonder what those lines are referring to, maybe something said earlier. somehow i think this is important.

I also think you need to revise your assumption that she couldnt theoretically travel to vega, a wormhole would allow for faster than the speed of light travel... theoretically in science fiction that is. Sagan didnt know current research, but he was aware of Hawkings' theories. At any rate, this discussion is a lot of fun.

Did it really happened on Vega? Did it only happen in her mind? Lacking evidence, Ellie is forced to eat a slice of humble pie regarding her views on faith and evidence, and the story draws to a close

I suggest a different angle: in the absence of evidence, does it even matter if it "really" happened or not? The experience could have come from within or without. It could have happened on Vega, or in Heaven, or in the bowels of Ellie's overexcited prefrontal cortex. The "contact" could have been with aliens, Ellie's father, or some part of her own mind from which she'd sealed herself off. Perhaps the experience was a product of the objective universe or simply that of a human brain struggling to make sense of input it didn't understand. It was an experience all the same.

Perhaps if someone has an experience that cannot be independently confirmed, then the "reality" of the experience is irrelevant. All the stuff that happens to us in our lives has an effect upon the way we think, feel, and behave. That includes both the stuff that really happens AND the stuff that only happens to us in our imaginations. Perhaps when there is no evidence, one is just as good as the other.

This problem also presents itself, albeit unsatisfactorily, in The Matrix. ("If 'real' is what you can feel, smell, taste, and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."). Unfortunately, it is only addressed in a tossaway comment by the Judas of the group. ("I think the Matrix can be more real than this world.") Soon, the Judas is killed and so is the issue.

Back to Contact. The film seems to ask us: are the 18 hours of static vindication for Ellie or are they just an improbable malfunction of human technology? My answer is that Ellie's life-altering experience needs no vindication.

Thank you for another thought-provoking blog entry, and, of course, for the killer tune. To this day, Ted Nugent still claims he had no idea that the lyrics were about drugs. Now THAT'S a claim that strains credibility.

P.S. On the subject of the use of wormholes to travel faster than the speed of light, I believe Hawking has speculated that any physical object entering a wormhole would quickly obliterate itself in a sort of matter-energy feedback loop. Bad news for prospective interstellar travelers.

Contact strikes me as being thought-provoking without being as mysterious as some think. Anyway, I have to like anything that reminds me of the cheerfully atheistic Carl Sagan. May 10,000 Buddhas immortalize him in all worthy hearts and minds.

Mr Ebert...considering that you are a movie critic with decades of practice, I find it amazing, how time and again you manage to completely miss dialogue that drives a story and then build entire arguments around what you perceive as lack of information, mystery etc.
The movie (and not just the novel) makes it quite clear (by way of dialogue and acting), that the person encountered by Foster is NOT her father, but an alien who simply uses his image to approach Foster in a non-threatening way. Its furthermore clearly stated, that the beach is a memory of the Foster-character, of where she spend some time years ago, including the name of the state. Her father is a memory, nothing more, there is certainly no implication made of an afterlife whatsoever.
The planet itself, again clearly explained by the alien character in a piece of exposition, is just the location of a sensor relay which said alien (or "his" species) stumbled upon and is now using to, well, make "contact". The amount of static footage is the final evidence clarifying, that Foster did indeed make the encounter, since it matches the perceived time of her journey. Its pretty obvious at that point to just about anyone actually following the story, that the device is essentially employing some means of transportation that lies outside of our understanding of time as a linear construct (the observation outside the device vs whats happening inside).

There...simple story, and I watched this movie only twice and years ago...

Atheists fuel themselves on a delusional artificial intelligence; pontificating their non-belief, they're every bit as annoying as evangelists. I applaud CONTACT for its ambiguity, it provokes us to think (none of the platitudes of HEAVEN CAN WAIT but "life beyond" doesn't erode into empirical complacency). I've already experienced signs of life-after-death (none of which are your business). Quite subtle, which pretty much matches the content of this very underrated movie. Thank you, Mr. Ebert, for the comeback.

I must admit that I was disappointed in "Contact". While certainly not a bad film, it didn't do justice to Sagan's book and ideals, at least to me.

One thing that I do believe, and I will echo some of the posters here, is that to think that "our" conventional ways of traveling (i.e., at warp speed or at the speed of light, even though we've yet to accomplish that) are the ONLY ways of traveling is both naive and arrogant. I believe one point of this movie, and of the book (and, indeed, many science fiction novels) is that things in the universe are truly unknowable to us at this point. If we were to make contact with alien life forms, and if we were to travel in a contraption that they gave us guidance to engineer, would we expect them and their technology to conform to earthly standards? I would think not. Things that we couldn't even conceive with our little human minds would become possible, such as travel through wormholes, or another mode of transportation which we may not even be aware of. My point is, I don't think that it is fair to use our earthly perspective when contemplating or understanding what else is out there in that broad, timeless thing we call the universe.

Which brings me to my final point: LOVE the Amboy Dukes' video! You absolutely read my mind, Mr. Ebert! When I saw just the title of your blog, that song immediately popped into my mind, and it was playing in my head (my little human brain) throughout my reading of your blog. Then imagine my surprise at the end when I saw the entry for the video! You and I are so on the same wavelength here (at least about the music) that it is scary!

A very thought-provoking and enjoyable blog, Mr. Ebert!

Roger, thanks for re-reviewing this great film. You asked some questions in your review, or made what seemed to be a few assumptions which I think have clear answers provided for in the film.

The issue of Vega's distance does not factor into Ellie's journey because that is not the location of her destination. It was explained (if not in the film, then in the book) that the "wormhole" was build by beings long ago - not whoever was impersonating her father - and as such, being wormholes and all, tunnel interdimensionally through our space, bypassing the speed limit of light. Therefore she could exit the wormhole (that the machine created/harnessed) as soon as she entered it. This makes her subjective experience of traveling and visiting longer than earth's experience of her absence. Similar, I suppose, to time-dilation, where, as Sagan explained in Cosmos, a brother could travel briefly near the speed of light and return to find his brother and old man. Which subjective reality is more true? Having faith in the validity of either need not require "woo," as you say. Merely our inability to intuit the true nature of reality beyond what our ancient pre-scientific ancestors needed to survive.

The 18 hours of static only represents the time recorded inside the wormhole which Ellie experienced. That is the biggest joke of the film, that the message and the plans for the device weren't enough evidence of ET's, that her dropping straight through it would serve to disprove it. Why James Woods would ignore the 18 hours of static suggests a cover-up. Ooh, Hollywood loves those conspiracies!

Also, if Hitler's broadcast was in 1936, then it was RECEIVED by Vega, 25 light years way, in 1961. 25 years after that, the time it took the Vegan message to get back to earth, would be 1986. Either this is the year the characters in the film receive the message, or the aliens took a few years to reply.

Finally, the explanation of the 2001-ish recreation of an environment for Ellie is clearly prepared when we see one of her childhood drawings, which depicts the same bent palm tree on a beach. The aliens were not only accessing Ellie's childhood memories, but the director was accessing the audience's memories of earlier in the film.

I love this film but I always had one major problem: why didn't they simply send someone else in the machine? You think it would be a simple matter, and then they would have a second person that could report back on what they saw.

I really think she went somewhere, but what happens when she gets there was all in her head. But in the words of Albus Dumbeldore, "Of course it is all happening in your head...but why on Earth should that mean it's not real?"

I saw Contact as an examination of the relationship between faith and reason, religion and science. The 18 hours of static is proof that something happened that somehow expanded time - it is evidence that is ultimately denied to exist but for what purpose - certainly to undermine Ellie's claims. Hiding the existence of that evidence implies that those in power will cheat and lie to obfuscate reality. (Duh!) But the underlying argument is about the relationship between "truth' and "Truth" - scientific reality vs "faith".
Not all scientists need worm hole voyages to conclude things about the vastness of space - but wonder or dispair seem equally valid emotional reactions to it. That Contact argues for the "wonder" is certainly uplifting. But the aliens gave a "wait and see" response to the meaning of it all. Looks like we're still waiting.

Roger, I know you're a movie guy, but if you have not already, please read the book. Please.

I'm so glad you posted this blog, because then I can post my thoughts here as opposed to the e-mail I just sent to answerman :) ....

"Contact" is a great movie - one of the handful that truly "moved" me. But the book is even more profound, and it is my favorite novel. I urge everyone who liked this movie, particularly you Roger, to please read the book.

When I first saw the film, I was completely mesmerized for 2 hours, particularly the spectacular opening sequence. I loved the movie for all of the reasons you've mentioned here and in the Great Movies review. And I also had some issues with it, most of which you mentioned. I remember pondering these issues for quite a while after seeing the movie.

This is not about bashing the movie in favor of the book. Of course I'm aware that books are often "better" - I'm aware of the caveats about movies, how you and others often say that we shouldn't judge the movie by the book (and I agree). Like I said, this is not about that. I am simply trying to do you, and everyone else, a favor by urging you to read the book, to get something even more profound out of your experience.

The book addresses all of the questions and weak points about the movie, and then some. The Busey character doesn't exist. Palmer's character is actually an amalgam of two characters from the book. James Woods' character is not as much of a dick, and neither is Drumlin. Ellie is much more articulate and confident in her defense of her atheism, and during her interrogation upon her return from the trip. In the book, 5 different people, representing all different corners of the globe and different philosophies, go on the trip - and their discussions with each other are fascinating. Sagan also goes more into the interesting math and science and theory behind everything, not in a dry way, but in a very interesting way, from the perspective of those doing the discovering, so that it's as if we're discovering along with them.

Most of all - in the book - there is definitely that push and pull between science and religion, and it's addressed very nicely ... but there is not the cheesy conflating of the two that Palmer tries to suggest in the movie, and which throws Ellie off a bit. In other words, in the movie, Palmer tries to present the science of the cosmos as the same thing as faith ... which is, what I consider to be, a silly, simplistic thing to say - and something that would never convince a confident scientist. The book is much more profound about it than that, and thus the discussions are much more worth pondering.

All of that said, the movie is still great .... and just the visuals of it makes it worth it. Also, the SOUND of the message is haunting - a great movie moment that can't be captured in the book.

p.s. just got your memoirs for the holidays, and am looking forward to reading it.

The movie worked for me with the exception of Palmer Joss-- Matthew McConaughey couldn't pull it off. At no point did I believe his character. How did character get all that access?

I didn't understand why they questioned Ellie's experience. The technology was not understood at all--what was the purpose of the machine and how did the machine do it?

Great line I missed, but caught in the clip:

Alien (Dad): "You have your mother's hands."

People keep talking about the "absense of hard proof." Yet, Sagan built in the "hard proof," as in life, where we didn't expect to find it: he tells us that the onboard record of static is 18 hours long.

This is Sagan's way of reminding us that the evidences of science sometimes must be inferred; that it's the instruments of science, less easily deceived than our senses, that give us the ability to check our direct observations. That it must be inferred or interpretted doesn't change the fact that it IS "hard proof"; it just underscores the observable fact that no proof is ever 100% "hard."

Roger,
Have you ever read Robert Lanza's theory of Biocentrism? It's an interesting prism to look at this movie.

Sights, sounds and colors do not exist... they are simply our minds interpretation of stimuli around us. Thus, who is to say that what the mind dreams is any less real than what we process during wakefulness? I would submit, therefore, that Ellie may have taken a journey within her own consciousness that is just as real as everything else experienced during the movie.

A couple more thoughts after reading everyone else's ...

As other posters said, there was no ambiguity. And as I said in my other post, the book is much more profound and complex in discussing these topics, and does not descend into New Age Woo-Woo.

The interesting thing is that, as Sagan puts it in the book, the awe of the universe is amazing unto itself, without the need for god. That even the most advanced species in the universe doesn't have it all figured out. Someone who can at least sense that awe in some way, will feel the same thing that many people equate to "heaven" or "god" - but that doesn't mean they are equivalent. The awe exists because of things that really are.

That said, you could argue, then, there is no difference between the two -- that the feeling that there is something "more" or "higher" is somehow comforting and necessary, no matter how you get to that spot. Maybe if we ever knew all that there was to know, it would be like "Restaurant at the End of the Universe," by Douglas Adams, and our brains would just melt from the knowledge. But this is an interesting thing to ponder, and is done so much better in the book than in the movie, where they try too hard to equate this to a religious experience -- i.e. that Ellie just has to have "faith" that she actually saw what she saw.

Then again, to many, the vastness and "awe" is too daunting, and as the alien says, the only comfort they ultimately find is in the feeling that there are many beings in it together. And that, then, is their motivation for bringing everyone together. "Humanity." This doesn't have to be a religious concept.

In some ways, Zemeckis did Sagan a disservice by making the movie more ambiguous (although not as ambiguous as Roger stated). But I give Zemeckis a pass, because he did such an amazing job with the visceral experience of it, thanks to his moviemaking skill.

I also endorse Marc Wilson's comments above. Bryan also mentions the book's denouement, and I completely agree it is cool and awesome and thought-provoking.

I echo @sam mills question.

It always lingered as to given the nature of what the Govt in the end privately new (18 seconds vs 18hrs) and the obvious technological advances of the device/specs and the legitimacy of the transmission.....why not go back?

Any Government would privately try to send one person through again, Even if they pretended to the rest of the world it was all a hoax by Hadden and that "Half a trillion" is oh so much(this makes me laugh).

Only a civilization vested in remaining ignorant would cover it up and just forget about it. Or the vegans designed it to be a one round trip affair and would put a safeguard to prevent another human travelling through the E-R bridge.

Who knows maybe third project probably got cancelled when a subsequent Administration took a "Faith based Initiative". ;)

I suppose that in the future the premise of Contact will seem a beautifully absurd notion. As the constraints of mathematics and archaic logic fades...a whole new understanding of our world, our Universe, even who we are, will present itself. Humanities best ideas will seem as quaint as mid-day tea.

Roger,

I'm glad you added the postscript, because it was frustrating to read your misunderstanding of a fairly straightforward plot. It almost seems like you willingly ignored dialog that established the "universe" of the story.

Plus the use of wormholes was blisteringly obvious.

As someone mentioned above, you have this knack of missing important establishing facts. Unfortunately, you sometimes use that misunderstanding as a jumping point to be impenetrably obtuse. The universe of this movie was well established with very simple themes.

No afterlife, no woo-woo. The inclusion of these themes would have been a dishonest abuse of Ellie Arroway (and the viewer). The deeper point was that she didn't need them to experience sincere wonderment at what she experienced. To say otherwise cheapens the whole thing in my opinion.

This happens to me all the time. I have a favorite movie I really love because it has great characters and a compelling story and then people tell me what it is "about."

Ellie began as a scientist and ended as a scientist--one who looks for evidence. When the evidence gets better, she'll know more. Unlike people of faith, she uses her brain.

My guess: The Vegan machine allowed time to be suspended for the tiniest fraction of a nanosecond to those outside the sphere, but which lasted 18 hours from Ellie's perspective inside the machine. Use wormholes to explain the rest. That's why I like sci-fi so much.

I believe that those 18 hours of static ruin things just a bit. Most great films have an overriding theme that holds the movie together from start to finish and often times are the reason for the film's greatness in the first place. Some examples: Pulp Fiction - Respect. The Silence of the Lambs - Covetousness. 2001 - Evolution. Chinatown - well, it's Chinatown, really ("you think you know what you're dealing with, but you don't").

This movie is not about aliens or science or government spending. The theme here is clear: Faith. Ellie's is in science, Palmer's in God. There are things about each one that cannot be proven and must be "taken on faith." Hers is both shaken and steeled by her experience. As a viewer, we are in the end also asked to go with what we believe. We are not given clear answers. And I believe the end results would have been better if the filmmakers had simply left it to each of us to decide on our own. Those 18 hours of static give us too much of a crutch to side with Ellie. We don't need to rely on our faith anymore. It may not be 100% overriding support, but that fact makes it clear that something happened. I probably would have landed on Ellie's side anyway, but the static-laden tape only served to remind me that I was watching a movie.

So while Ellie and Palmer's faiths are acknowledged and legitimized at various points, this extra information tells us that ours is not needed.

Can anyone tell me why Ellie blurts out "They ARE alive!" as she hurtles through the wormhole? She doesn't seem to be aware that she says it herself.

You humanoids never understand anything, you are all living a Monty Python skit and don't even know it, what I explained to the author, but "of course" it was edited out of the film was, everything tha[t y)o[u kn[]o\}[]w...[}\][{][]\}\][][...[}|]][{[[][]}}]\]....

There, completely explained, everyone understand now?

Happy New Yea[r!

Did anyone else read the book?

The last chapter was not in the movie... I think it provided answers.

Just in case no absurdly pedantic readers have said it yet, I do want to let you know that wormholes have nothing to do with how the Enterprise travels (except for a few episodes where they find wormholes, of course). Warp drive may be fictional, but it sure doesn't use wormholes.

Of course, this is not particularly important.

Ebert: I'm not a Trekker, but...does Warp Drive avoid the limitation of the speed of light by just going real, real fast, or what?

@Chris Devers: You point out my exact argument for why Contact is so frustrating. Why didn't they just send another person through to corroborate Ellie's experience? Half a trillion dollars seems like an awful lot of money to spend to come back after mere seconds with no answers.

What's fascinating about Contact is that Ellie, who rejects the claims of religion, who dismisses matters of faith against cold, scientific reason, is put in the position of having to recount a transcendent experience to others who haven't had that same experience and to whom she cannot prove it. The Congressional committee looks on her with the same skepticism she gave Palmer earlier in the film. And just as Palmer showed there were limits to scientific inquiry ("Did you love your father? Prove it."), he's there in the end to say that he believes her testimony. Science and faith manage to find common ground.

Andy H, yes! I read through all these posts wondering if anyone else saw the same movie I did. (Also to Ken, who mentions Ellie's eating humble pie)

I saw the movie as pointing out the common ground between reason and faith. Ellie, who casually dismissed God when there was no evidence, is forced to admit that she believes in something she can't prove. She learns that there is a place for faith in our lives.

Then the movie winks at us and says "Yeah, there were the aliens. But don't tell Ellie."

I think the ending interrogation scene shows that science and reason can take us far, very far...but there are just some things that require faith. For example, there is no way to prove that another person loves you. They may say and do things that show love, but there is no way for you to know for sure the feelings inside of that other person. You can only have faith that they love you.

Ingest the spice. Fold space. Forget the wormholes, worry about the worms.

I believe the date of the film explains clearly the theory of travel used in the movie. In 1995 the M-String theory was clearly defined, and remains as a credible theory for how matter behaves and could be a part of a "unifying" theory of matter and space. In essence, it would allow Ellie to exist in two places at the same time, and space would in essence be "folded" in a 2 dimensional manner rather than existing in a strict 4 dimensional state (with time as the 4th dimension). If, in fact, this M-String theory would "unify" with Relativity, perhaps it could also explain the 18 hours of static.
I think it's too great a coincidence that this movie came out shortly after that theory was elaborated clearly in 1995 (and more greatly defined in 1997) for it not to be the basis for the travel. She was in the sphere, but also at the distant location at the same time. This would also explain why a machine was not needed at the distant location, since she never really "left" Earth, but merely was able to be a subject in the "folding" of space so that she could exist in more than one place at a time.

"Can anyone tell me why Ellie blurts out "They ARE alive!" as she hurtles through the wormhole? She doesn't seem to be aware that she says it herself."

She was looking down at an alien planet at the time, and saw a functioning city for a split second before being sent into the next branch of the wormhole network. Hence, there was alien life down there.

I AM a Trekker, and I tried to write a reasonable explanation of warp speed. I failed. Suffice it to say, the warp drive does something that allows the real rules of physics to circumvented.

Instead, I will offer a quote from a Star Trek "technical manual":

"Early in the series, Patrick Stewart came up to us and asked how warp drive worked. We explained some of the hypothetical principles described in this volume, but added that such a device is far beyond present-day physics. We emphasized that no one has any real idea how to make a ship go faster than light. "Nonsense," Patrick declared. "All you have to do is say 'Engage.'" And he was right..."

My question to Roger is this: why do you seem to have respect for Sagan's "cherished hope that we are not alone" and disregard for people who cherish a hope in a God? Is believing in the possibility of a higher power any more difficult or any less hopeful than believing in unknown life forms? Is there something I'm missing that would cause sense of hope found in one unknown to be admired while it is mocked if found in another unknown? My guess is it might have something to do with the lack of people trying to evangelize about the existence of aliens, but I'd genuinely like to know Roger’s feelings on why he seems to view one as more pure than the other. The concepts seem like they would be equal in their woo-wooness to me.

Ebert, I'm glad you decided to put this film into the great movies section, but I'm surprised at how much you and your readers put down religion as nonsense just because religious people believe in absolute truth. I myself am a Christian, and thus believe in a meta-narrative. If science is the only way to explain the universe, then science itself is also an absolute. It seems to me, in todays age, it's either one or the other, but it doesn't have to be so. If there is no absolute, why are there standards of moral behavior embedded in everyone? How can laws of gravity and inertia derive from something that is, in sciences opinion, never fixed? The law of inertia states that something, let's say, the big bang, stays at rest unless acted upon by what? AN OUTSIDE FORCE!! If we have those laws now, shouldn't we have always had them? And if there is no absolute truth, why should I wake up and go to work tomorrow? Or continue to live? Why would I ever feel bad about killing a weaker link? If we believe in survival of the fittest, how can we justify our sense of right and wrong? Do you see the trouble I have in all this? Contact is a great movie though. Keep up the good blog......

The first paragraph of your new essay on CONTACT says "...an alien intelligence transmits an image of three pages of encrypted symbols." It was much more than three pages.

Jodie Foster says "...we've uncovered over 10,000 already." (8:20 into the clip linked below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyYdJ_YgUmQ&feature=related

Ebert: We saw three to begin with, which were rotated together. What was their purpose?

"End of quotes. What she finally discovered, I submit, is New Age woo-woo. Nothing that she (and we) experienced proves anything about how tiny and insignificant Man is in the Universe. We know that, because it is true, but what Ellie found was not fact but feeling. She might as well have been on an acid trip."

You've just, in effect, unceremoniously dismissed mysticism. The entire phenomenon, a phenomenon which I doubt you've taken any trouble to study, from any point of view, on any terms. How unscientific of you. I'll stick with the James's and Huxleys of the world, the open-minded people, the intellectually humble geniuses, thankyouverymuch. You can keep your cold certainties that really aren't very certain at all.

The purpose of the three pages was to illustrate how they fit together to form a three-dimensional page. That is what Mr. Haddon provided; the recognition that the pages were more than flat sheets, but elements of a three-dimensional structure that contained, within itself, the key to deciphering the whole message.

The "father" clearly states that he is an alien taking this form to make it easier for her to accept. It's quite as clear as it is in the book.

Love when the elevated being says "You are an interesting mix."

David Morse kind of reminds me a bit of Bette Davis, in that he either plays really sweet and innocent, or super-evil, and you never know what you're going to get from him. This added some extra tension to the scene for me, because I wasn't sure if he was going to turn into an alien at any point and rip her apart!

For a guy who makes his living reviewing movies, at times you seem to be doing it without the benefit of having paid attention to what you were watching (at least twice, in this case). I saw "Contact" when it first came out, once, years ago, and could answer most of your questions from vague memory, as many other commenters have already done. You displayed a similar inattention to detail in your reviews of "Thor" and "The Usual Suspects" and at least one other which I can't recall at the moment.

I suppose I've missed things in a lot of movies also, and in my paid work too (much more so as I passed the age of 55). All I can say is what I tell myself these days: before you assume something is missing, double or triple-check before you go on record about it.

Marc Leonard & Andy H are correct.
Back to the main story, the "father" makes clear his alien identity in both book & film, and makes clear that they meet in "the way these things always begin" as many other species have preceded us and established working traditions.
I find no reason to believe that the contact ends with the film's end; quite the opposite.

The literary world is a business, like movies. "Contact" had some unique aspects as a book proposal.

First, the author was Carl Sagan, who had become a media celebrity. They knew he wasn't a Christian. (No one in their right mind could take Tim Tebow's Blind Faith in a football savior seriously, any more than we can believe Tom Brady is God's nephew. When it comes to working miracles, even Spielberg's War Horse was beaten by Alvin and the Chipmunks 4 this weekend. Faith is just a pretense for people who don't want to face reality.)

But, this is a fiction book, and Sagan is creating a Story World.

The topic is the first Contact between humanity and an alien civilization. Can't veer too far away from that basic concept. No aliens shaping the course of human evolution. The story is about the first Contact, and what we can expect.

OK, seriously, when First Contact occurs, the aliens will have been living on earth for a long time, in disguise, to make sure they know how our civilization works. And, considering everything, I'm guessing they're not here yet.

There has to be Elation. Our first contact with an alien civilization would be a Great Moment in human history. Christianity, Islam and other religions based on revelation are going to end, so a lot is going to change. Sagan correctly showed that nobody wants to accept Ellie's story. It would require them to give up too much, would call for "childhood's end" as Heinlein put it.

"Contact" has not aged well, thanks to the "Stargate" TV series. SF fans are familiar with wormholes and how they form a freeway system through several galaxies.

So, Elation, and a feeling that mankind has to give up childish notions... and that the aliens arrive here with a plan to create an observation post, so they can learn everything about human civilization, and dang it all, the place they set up shop is the place that Iran decides to detonate their first nuclear warhead.

They don't have the same respect for human life that we do. In fact, it's more like the Old American West, where they intend to put us on a reservation with the worst possible land.

By comparison, "Contact" seems nebulous. It's just a short "Hi" to welcome us to the neighborhood. I think that was the major failing of Sagan's novel. It didn't offer enough insight into the alien civilization. It was a Prologue to a terrific story that we never got a chance to read.

Oh, yeah, there's a modern trend to start stories with the hero having a need or weakness, so we feel elation when it is overcome. That's why the death of Ellie's father gets such a prominent place. It's not that the aliens are ghosts or have anything to do with a human afterlife... but that's not a bad story, not a bad story at all.

One big problem for anyone with any background at all in physics is that the film touches on some big physics ideas (time dilation, traveller's time) and then it misses an obvious problem.

In order to give us an X-Files style, don't-annoy-people-of-faith ending they try to have us believe that there wasn't a super-accurate clock put on board the craft!

Also, is there really any way that a man of the background and education of McConaughey character doesn't know what Occam's Razor is? (That's up there with Jurassic Park, and Laura Dern's postdoctoral researcher being a dimwit when we needed some exposition of "chaos")

Ebert: I'm not a Trekker, but...does Warp Drive avoid the limitation of the speed of light by just going real, real fast, or what?

The answer is contained in the name. The Warp Drive warps space such that the current location and the desired location are close enough together to be reached in reasonable time at sub-light speeds.

This takes ginormous amounts of energy, provided by a contained matter/anti-matter reaction.

It's also hinted at that those long nacelles on each of the warp-capable craft have something to do with creating the warp field, but that's not made completely clear.

Do the 18 hours of static prove anything? Yes, I suppose they must. Please explain them to me.

There's a flaw in the significance all the other commenters have been making about the 18 hours. Give me the memory card from your video camera, and in a few seconds I can put a file on it that would take hours to play.

Certainly folks who can design The Machine could do something similar.

Face saving: When Sagan wrote the book (1997) he could only speculate on the nature of a portable video camera and its storage.

Do you think that Contact has any similarity to Atlas Shrugged? The compass reminds me of the bracelet.
Haddon reminds me of Galt.
The Machine reminds me of the motor.
Perhaps the small moves of pure research are like the industry inventors.
Perhaps the function of the space exploration is like the development of the rail road?

To me, the mystery is why people think there's a mystery. They receive a signal from outer space, and it's a plan for a machine. Therefore, we're not alone. The movie's over. If the thing they built from it had been a Buick, that's still all the proof you need. Even if the Buick didn't run, it still wasn't a random event.

The rest of the movie is just The Wizard of Oz in outer space. "There's no place like home." (No kidding.) Does it make scientific sense? I don't even care because it works about as well either way. What ever happened to her was by design of alien intelligence. She didn't figure it out and it doesn't matter. Nothing at stake, therefore no mystery. That is to say, either way it left me wishing I could have that two hours of my life back.

They could have saved it maybe by cutting to two alien teenagers watching on tv and giggling. "Gosh, I can't believe they actually built it!" "Yeah they're really dumb, but why did you put eighteen hours of static in the camera?" "Well, it's my eighteenth birthday, right? We'll do another planet next year and make it nineteen."

[B]Ebert: I'm not a Trekker, but...does Warp Drive avoid the limitation of the speed of light by just going real, real fast, or what?[/B]

Warp Drive is faster than light travel. Space travel in Science Fiction necessitates faster than light travel, otherwise it would take forever to get anywhere.

"Contact" was two movies for me. You wisely emphasize the first movie -- about space/time travel; What is out there? Is there an afterlife -- in this blog.

But the second movie almost (not quite) ruins the whole film for me: that awful, dreadful, painfully lame "love story" between Foster's character and Matthew What's-His-Name. I read Sagan's book, and this aspect was also a weak point of the novel. Sagan knew his science, but when he tried to get inside the woman's head and orchestrate a romance ... he had billions and billions of problems.

In the book I recall they send a whole bunch of people through the machine. I think trying to cram that into the movie would have been just too much, and left the audience with more to ponder.

I know everyone wants this movie to be some big axe to grind down faith via Reason, but it'll never be so simple. You can't "prove" most of what makes life worth living: Art, beauty, music, love, relationships. Like the particle that disappears when you try and pin it down, all these things, faith included, become something else and less than when analyzed and dissected.

Alas and alack, it was 15 years ago this month that Carl Sagan entered the ultimate wormhole. Did you know he named CONTACT protagonist Eleanor Arraway after two people: Eleanor Roosevelt, a wife Ann Druyan favorite, and Voltaire, whose last name was Arouet?

Dear Roger;

You would be a better judge than I but Carl Sagan was such a wonderful writer.

He managed to be both elegant and down to earth.
I Loved "Broca's Brain", "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and of course "Cosmos" the Book not just the TV series.

Like John Lennon his was one of those rare celebrity passings that affected me deeply.

Seth MacFarlane of all people is apparently working with Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan on remaking "Cosmos". I'm sure he's mostly writing checks. Let's hope that they find away to keep Segan's beautiful prose alive for generations to come.

One of my favorite films. The only thing I don't understand is the pun on Esarhaddon, an 8th (or 7th possibly) century BCE Assyrian king. Is it because he supposedly funded building projects? I don't recall any from my reading.

Really Roger - you simply must watch more than the first 8 minutes of a film...

A number of people above have commented on the novel, suggesting that it "clarifies" or "explains" the film. This is a suggestion often made about books that have been made into movies.

But shouldn't a movie stand on its own? Why should I have to have read a novel in order to understand or appreciate a movie? And, for that matter, is a film-maker under any obligation to make a faithful adaptation of a novel?

"(As you know, a mysterious tycoon funds a duplicate vehicle, as a backup.)"

The government paid for both machines, I think. The rich guy says something like, "Why make one when you can make two for twice the price". Or even 'the government made two for twice the price".

I appreciate the corrections or notes you've added onto the page already to please the concerns of others. I was thinking of adding very similar comments to this note also.

"What she finally discovered, I submit, is New Age woo-woo".

"Other than restating the by-now obvious, I'm...a bit lost as to your point. 0_0??. . .I was sort of expecting one more 2011-wrapup thingy, but when we get. . . only nominally-movie-tied columns out of nowhere, that's when I find myself checking Illinois's medical-marijuana laws, just to be sure".

By Eric J

Are ya giving Roger a taste of his own medicine or something? To attempt to answer your question myself, the phrase 'new age woo-woo' is an attempt by Roger to show he's an equal opportunity disser?

Perhaps it might be better to quote someone else however on this matter, 'There's no absurdity one won't stoop to in order to defend another absurdity"?

18 hours, huh?

Good thing nobody ever needs to go to the bathroom in the movies.

Roger and friends,

Implicit in the discussion and contemplation of this movie is the notion that a valid or authentic experience must have some verifiable correlate in the "really real" world. To make the cut, it seems, an experience would need to be observable and verified in all its important aspects by someone standing next to you while you had the experience. To echo Dr. Noisewater's comments above, I think this is somewhat limiting.

I am reminded of a conversation with a friend. She had a dream one night in which she experienced a very rich and fulfilling relationship with a man, then broke up with him. In the dream, she experienced all the joy, all the heartbreak, and all the personal growth that comes from living through such an experience. Upon awakening, she was deeply disappointed to find that "it hadn't really happened." But, I offered, the memories were "really" there, the neural pathways solid enough to allow her to recount the entire experience. What's more, what she took from it and learned from it is all "in there." She was changed.

Perhaps the most powerful weapon against loneliness and the most powerful force for change is the imagination?

Being a scientist myself, data and numbers and verification and skepticism are my stock in trade. And I don't trust any of it. Science is done by fallible passionate human beings, is fueled by beliefs and faith and imagination, and is only one mode of appropriate inquiry into the richness of existence.

May we all imagine a better year ahead, and then realize it.

The principle behind warp drive is that it "warps" space in such a the ship can ride it like a surfer on a wave. The reason you can circumvent the speed of light that way is that you're not actually moving relative to the space around the ship.

That's the principle at least (I think). I doubt you'd be able to find many scientists that think it could physically work. I remember reading in high school that someone did a calculation saying it would take all the energy of the universe to move an inch at warp speed. Guess that's where the antimatter comes in.

Here's something else that defies logic - a lesbian (Foster) and Matthew McConaughey fall in love.

Here's something else that surpasses the speed of light - the propagation of silly opinions on the internet.

Of course, I think this film Contact is not even close to great, or even good; it's ridiculous. It seems silly to discuss this fictional hooha in terms of logic at all. What a waste! I did enjoy the design of the alien structure and the idea that they sent along a formula for energy to prove their good will. But the humans involved - godawful and adolescent, the blame for which I lay at the writer's feet and if that was Sagan, then for shame.

OK, maybe that alien formula for cheap energy came from a different movie - Species I think.

Whenever I hear about supersmart aliens probing our minds in order to construct a world that meets with our familiar, I shudder at the thought. Based on every dream I remember, the contents of my includes some pretty weird stuff.

The other night, I dreamed the Cartwrights of "Bonanza" had merged with the Barkleys of "The Big Valley." They were encamped somewhere out in the wilds. It seemed there was no more work to be done that day, but Ben couldn't abide the prospect of his sons being idle, even for an evening. I could see it in his stressed, grimacing face. He ordered LIttle Joe (this time played by Canadian rocker Bryan Adams or maybe Woody Harrelson, but definitely not by Michael Landon) to pull an empty carriage around the campsite all night, just to keep busy. Little Joe was obviously unhappy about this, but, spiritless, he obeyed his domineering father without a hint of protest.

I doubt there's anything unusual about my mind in the strangeness of its contents. Everybody has weird ideas and images deep in their unconsciousness. How would aliens tell dreams from nightmares? I would dread having aliens probe me and then have to live in their idea of my dream environment. I think I would prefer even Alice's Wonderland or Dorothy's Oz to my own.

I hated hated HATED HATEDDD!!!!! this movie!!!!

(In borrowing the great Mr. Ebert's own book title, ha ha!)

This was one of my worst movies ever. For the entire film, Ellie acts like an immature spoiled brat, huffing and puffing anytime anyone else had anything to say. She screws poor Matthew McConaughey, then leave him, like all those men women hate do. I almost cheered out loud when Angela Bassett shut her up in the big meeting room!

For the entire film, faith, religion, and people of religion are treated like crazed lunatics, or scummy lunatics, and the skeptics and atheists are the wise members of humanity. Fine, I understand many atheists have that arrogance, so I wasn't surprised the movie would be that way. The space travel scene happens, she has no proof - and then she's like "Oh, you HAVE to believe me, because I'm right!" I was like "Woah woah WOAH!" Lady, you just huffed and puffed and pouted by a third grader this whole time, and now we have to just take your word for it? If I was on that panel at the end, I would have wondered if one of her people put in that 18 minutes of static..... (In the movie, it was minutes, not hours - no big deal, no arguments get changed.)

It's the concept of "It's not wrong when I do it." Tom Skerritt was the glory hound - fine....but Ellie wanted to be the glory hound also...but it's not so bad, because she's the star, see, see! So we have two glory hounds, we just happen to be following one around, so we side with her. I'd love to see a Contact movie where we follow Tom Skerritt around, and he has to put up with the villain, this "Ellie" character who's spoiled and immature!! Ha ha! I was so disappointed in that end, I wanted to boo when it was over. I enjoy my hard science fiction movies, and we certainly need MORE, but boy, this was probably the most hypocritical movie ever created.

First-time poster, long-time listener ....

The 18 hours bit always fascinated me, too. Indeed, that information seems to have been deliberately suppressed and kept from the public. I went to IMDB and re-checked the conversation that Rachel Constantine and Michael Kitz have at the end of the film.

CONSTANTINE: I assume you read the confidential findings report from the investigating committee.

KITZ: I flipped through it.

CONSTANTINE: I was especially interested in the section on Arroway's video unit. The one that recorded the static?

KITZ: Continue.

CONSTANTINE: The fact that it recorded static isn't what interests me.

KITZ: Continue.

CONSTANTINE: What interests me is that it recorded approximately eighteen hours of it.

KITZ: [leans forward so he is looking directly in the camera] That is interesting, isn't it?

What's going on here? With just a few sentences of dialogue, is Bob Zemeckis implying a conspiracy to keep the truth of Ellie's journey a secret?

At the very least, this dialogue does state that the 18 hours of static was kept confidential. Why? That's the bit that's always puzzled me. There are always skeptics and the news of the 18 hours wouldn't prove beyond a doubt to those people that Ellie's journey took place. There would always be people who wouldn't believe it no matter what hard evidence existed, just as there would also be people who would believe it with absolutely no evidence.

After a long movie where ideas such as faith and reason are put in diametric opposition, Zemeckis finally seems to be saying, "Take a leap of faith and make up your own minds." That sounds counter to Carl Sagan's ethos of using scientific fact and reason on which to base our understanding of the universe.

Anyone agree? Or am I inferring too much from a few snippets of dialogue?

BTW, Mr. Ebert -- this is a terrific post and (as usual) a phenomenal comment thread. Thanks (also as usual) for providing a nice sandbox for us to play in.

Thank you, Roger! What a great time I'm having going over the clips and comments--Priceless.

When I was finished Arthur C. Clarke's words came to mind:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

And, boy, I enjoy the Magic :)

I read the book long before I saw the movie. The movie was disappointing - for in the book, she brings something back with her. I don't know why the filmmakers thought it would improve upon the story by leaving that out.

Mr. Ebert,
Thanks for revisiting this movie that I dearly love, your comments on it then and now, and thanks to all the readers for their takes.

This has been and still is one of my all-time top ten, but honestly I'm pretty indifferent to a lot of the analysis here. The most important things to me were that it made me care about the characters, that it was a fun, intelligent (in my eyes), thrilling, and moving science-fiction story.

I read "Contact" back in 1985 or 6, then reread it after seeing the 1997 film. I agree with a lot of the earlier comments that Carl Sagan expresses his ideas more clearly in the novel than does Robert Zemeckis in the film. On the other hand, Sagan and Ann Druyan had written a film treatment of the story years before Sagan expanded it into a novel, so, unless someone has access to the original treatment, we don't really know how many of the differences between the book and the movie are Zemeckis' and how many are Sagan's.

Those who are claiming that the movie ends up promoting faith, I think, are missing the point of the climactic Congressional hearing scene. When the committee attempts to trap Ellie into asking them to take her story on faith, she does not take the bait that a weaker character, or a weaker film, would have taken. While remaining true to her life-changing experience, she also remains true to her scientific principles and does not cross the line into the realm of faith or "woo woo."

One thing I noted on the topic of the President, is that, in the movie, the Chief of Staff played by Angela Bassett presides over the same meetings and says many of the same lines as does the female President in the book. They could have easily cast Bassett as the President, had the movie been set in the near future as the book was.

Like so many films based on books, Contact loses much of the detail needed to make the story richer and more intellectually impressive. While I loved the movie, I was very disappointed that it did not end as the book did. Toward the end of the book, we read of an experiment being conducted using a supercomputer to calculate the value of pi to and incredibly vast and heretofore unimaginable degree. Deep within this calculation, the digits of pi are found to contain a binary representation of a perfect circle. Since this could only be a sign of "intelligent design", it was portrayed as God's signature on the universe He had made.

At the time I read this, it totally blew my mind. However, I have since realized that if one goes further enough into the calculation of pi, one can find a digital representation of anything: a perfect circle; a Beethoven symphony; a picture of Jesus, or Lady Gaga; basically anything we can conceive of now or ever. But even so, Sagan's idea of science finding proof of God in such an unambiguous way without the need for "faith" in anything other than Man's intellect could have been powerfully portrayed in the film

Found an interview with Ann Druyan that pertains to some of the questions in this blog.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/DRUYAN+COMES+INTO+%60CONTACT%27+WITH+SOME+PAIN.-a083873283

This movie was the reason for my obsession with a neighbor's large satellite dish on a hill after I saw the movie, re-watching it several times even though the religious and philosophical arguments as well as the whole alien as father thing went right over my head until after I heard it referenced on "South Park" (Garrison: (being asked if he saw 'Contact' after plastic surgery; throws up) "Sat through that whole movie to see the alien that was her god damn father!") I haven't seen it since, but I want to see it again though I want to make time to read the book it was based on first. A friend recommended it to me, noting that more than one person took the journey to Vega or wherever including a blind man, which leads me to ask: after the Jodie Foster character's experience, why didn't they send someone else through the machine to see if they have a similar experience? I can't recall if they came up with a convenient excuse for why they didn't do this.

Different note: those two guys who accompany her to the platform dressed and acting like casket bearers at a funeral, strap her in and then bow while she skeptically nods her head because she can't move her upper body must be the oddest scene of the movie; they ritualized a complex scientific experiment, and she clearly missed the dress rehearsal; still enjoyed it though.

Just a quick comment on the science behind this-- relativity tells us that if Ellie had been moving at anything close to the speed of light, time would have felt far slower to her. This slows every process, including the chemical/mechanical ones of the videotape. Both she and the camera could have traveled many light-years away and returned, while only experiencing the passage of 18 minutes of time. Of course, this doesn't explain away the issue of no time passing on earth in the interim, so you still need some invented (or at least, unproven) phenomenon like a wormhole to make the journey work out.

After reading additional comments I realized that Arroway's inability to convince others of the veracity of her account can really be seen as an indictment of absolute truth and thus faith. Whereas science never claims absolute truth and religion always does, Ellie's principled position declaring her experience subjective also indicts all fact-less suppositions as equally subjective, namely religious faith.The problems come when religious folks try to take religious belief out of the subjective and pretend it to be objective.

Even if a entity taking the appearance of a deity appeared before me right now and performed miracles right before my eyes, I would have no way of knowing that it was God, a very-skilled magician, or simply an alien possessing of sufficiently astonishing technology. Similarly, I can measure all measurable things about the universe to a high precision and still not be sure that it isn't all being controlled by the wand or hand of supreme being. Knowing this, not only is faith not part of my life, it can never be a part. Observation is all we have. That is why the only valid reason to possess religious belief is due to personal revelation in the form of a epiphany or other subjective experience. I could never argue with someone that came to religious belief by a revelatory experience. However in reality, I suspect, the vast majority of believers are simply engaging in the simplest and most common form of wishful thinking.

I love this film, Roger, and I am glad you like it too.

I think the reason why the aliens would go through all the trouble of actually sending Dr. Arroway through wormholes would be that they hope we would examine what evidence is left behind, so that WE would have to take the next steps in order to meet all the other species.

The ancient aliens are just smart enough to make the rest of us have to want to meet them, in our own time, by our own hand.

Carl Sagan was a good man. He is the closest thing we have to a secular saint in some ways, although he'd have hated to be described that way.

While this movie is on my list of the top 100 I can watch over and over again, the playing of religious faith versus science got boring at times. Maybe it was the casting of Matthew Mc. as the religious guru.

Sometimes I also like endings not to be vague, yes she actually made "Contact", case closed. I know it goes against the grain of the theme

Something of an intelligent life is out there and I do not think they are necessarily rubbing elbows with us in parallel universes. We just have to be patient.

Happy New Year to those of us here and the others out there.

Mike

Great piece, Roger, as usual. I think you downplay the importance of recognizing how insignificant we are which causes us to also be rare and precious. Life is as we perceive it. This may be a cliche, but it is one because it is so true and, I maintain, so important.

"It's also hinted at that those long nacelles on each of the warp-capable craft have something to do with creating the warp field, but that's not made completely clear."

I've read somewhere that the nacelles "cut through" space like surfboards cut through waves. The rest of the ship is really just hanging on.

Roger,

I have been mulling over some of the comments on your page, and your post, and the movie in general, and I have some thoughts.

First, let me say that I teach Astrophysics for a living, and thus I am certainly biased in how I view the world. I routinely speak with individuals who have a deep personal relationship with god or some higher power that they perceive. That perception I think is the key to understanding what Ellie went through in the movie. As humans, we believe our sensations, and more importantly, we believe our feelings. When we sense a presence in a dark room, with hackles on our neck, we KNOW that there is something there. At least, that is what our perceptions tell us.

The problem is, our perceptions are really bad at getting at the reality of the world. The reality of the world is what science deals with, and this is the barrier that I encounter when talking with people who have deep personal connections with some supernatural higher power. They have HAD these experiences, and their perceptions tell them something specific. I am often asked if I have had these experiences, and I have not. But, an experience like Ellie's in the end of Contact would be precisely the kind of experience that I would require to become a believer. And I think that’s the point.

I don't think that scientists are willfully hateful or disparaging of experiences that convince, I think that’s their whole point, they just have different, or stricter criteria of what constitutes a wholely convincing experience.

Ellie believes truly in her experience, of travelling to Vega and beyond (to paraphrase 2001). She does not believe that it was a hallucination, although she concedes that it’s a possibility. She is convinced of the reality of what she experienced. This is no different than those convinced of the reality of whatever experience led to a belief in a supernatural higher power.

When I have conversations like this with my students or anyone else about these kinds of experiences my reaction is thus: "Who am I do deny the reality of another, however, who are they to try to convince me of their own reality." So, I don't deny their reality, but neither do I embrace it. My own reality is created just as sequentially and causationally as theirs.

What kind of experience would cross my own personal threshold into belief in a supernatural higher power? It would have to be truly transcendent, nothing short of Ellie's, to be sure. I actually envy those people who are more convinced by lesser experiences. What it would be like to know, with conviction, that god existed. Of course, that kind of defeats the general argument about faith, but I honestly believe that there really is no such thing as faith. Each of us is convinced of our beliefs in one way or another. We prove it to ourselves, or have it proven to us. I think there is little that is truly believed on blind faith. Perhaps we prove things to ourselves irrationally, but not without some kind of evidence, valid or not. That, in essence, then is what I think science really does, is it gives humanity a tool to sift through what is good evidence and what is not.

Best,

Miles Blanton, PhD

Ebert: Often people cite reasons that are "self-evident" as proof of God (such as a sunset), when they are evident only of themselves.

I HATE THIS MOVIE. It mangles Carl Sagan's message badly, in the same way that Will Smith's I Robot was an astounding example of the very same thing ("Frankenstein's complex") Isaac Asimov denounced in all of his writings (the feeling that "these ugly robots must be up to something, I tell you"). Here, Robert Zemeckis teaches us how religion is necessary, even when it doesn't seem reasonable. Matthew McConaughey, playing a character that was nowhere to be seen in the novel, appears to lecture Foster (at least you admit in your review how ridiculous it is to see him show up everywhere), and at the end of the story you learn that sometimes, "you just have to believe". Sagan would weep if he could see this movie.

The movie strongly hints that what Ellie travels through is a wormhole or "Einstein-Rosen Bridge." From Wikipedia: "In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that would be, fundamentally, a 'shortcut' through spacetime." So the speed of light would not be a factor, and there's no expectation that 50 years would pass in any location during any part of the trip would.

Michael Kitz's demands at the end make little sense (which is appropriate, I think, for his character). No, Ellie cannot prove that what she experienced is real, but that's no reason for her to withdraw her testimony. Would an eyewitness withdraw her testimony in a criminal case just because there is not sufficient evidence to convict? A truthful account of the events Ellie experienced is a valid input, regardless of whether it is sufficient to prove anything.

Given the things that are provable in the movie (transmissions from space, plans to build an amazing machine, etc.) I don't think Ellie's experience "might as well have been on an acid trip." Out of context, if she were a random person on the street and the rest of the movie never took place, sure. But in context, as the sole human inside this machine based on a space transmission and with 18 hours of static recorded in less than a second of earth time, I think her account, while still proving nothing, carries a bit more weight.

Here's my take, and what I think it's pretty clear that the movie is trying to say. The machine transported Ellie through a wormhole into a space transit system built by unknown precursors to the current aliens who sent the device plans to earth. (None of these aliens live near Vega; it's just a transit hub.) The plan-sending aliens introduced themselves and comforted their visitor by creating an environment and communication vessel based on Ellie's memories and emotions. But everything they told her is true: this is how new beings are brought into the fold of interstellar travels; it's a gradual process; this is just the beginning; more later. Now back you go to earth. I'm not sure how the movie could have been more clear.

The great thing about the end of this movie is that both religious and secular people come away from it believing it was meant to reinforce and confirm their beliefs. Only one group is right.

Somehow Contact seemed like the explained version of 2001: Space Odissey so is kind of surprising that there is room for debate over its contents. The key sequence in Contact is when Allie goes trough the wormhole and screams "Oh my God!"

This is the feat: if whatever Dave Bowman or Allie lived was part of a very acomplished plan made by a divinity or aliens millions of years ago (multiplying to the infinite the chanches of a single human being tripping into it), or a new age hoax either done by an excentric millonaire or the contents of their individual brains and some pot, it does NOT matter. What matters is that IT happened and the event CHANGED their very human escence.

The evolution of the human mind towards a higher state of conscience is the point, and whether you take it from Thomas de Aquino, Plato or Carl Sagan, all of them agree that the rational mind and its technological achievments are hardly a meassure for human evolution considering we, as a species, still have the suicidal urge to exterminate ourselves.

"Klaatu barada nikto"

All I know is that the spaceship is coming for me and David Bowie very soon...(well, listen to his lyrics and even just the obvious song titles let us know what is on his mind about an existence beyond Earth).

Really though, we do know that it has be proven by researchers that all the elements necessary to birth and sustain planetary life, exist in other parts of the universe(s). Depending on whether or not you are into string theory or not, the odds increase with stacked universes.

At the risk of sounding esoteric, I sometimes believe that things like art, popular culture and other human genres reflect greater truths before we actually know of their actual existence or reality, in proven or material form. Run through your mind some iconic books and movies etc...and maybe you will get what I mean.

Well, I don't know what to do, here. I'm doing everything right on my end -- I worked at a computer & 'net help desk awhile -- but my postings aren't showing up at all even after a few days. I don't often check back, but now that I have, quite a few haven't showed up over the weeks and months.

The mystery thickens this morning. There's ONE genuine scientist who's posted, but his didn't stay long enough for me to have caught his name. His post ended that as a scientist, variables and statistics are his stock and trade, and he doesn't trust any of them.

That's the kind of scientist I know and communicate with routinely.
His post is now missing... despite the fact that my 2 month old computer, several tries, browser maintenance and rebooting and everything else on the 'net that I use is working okay.

What's disturbing is that these blowhard posts, all full of fundamentalist-religion style "certainty" about a science in which they clearly have no actual part, never seem to go missing.

Roger says he doesn't kill anybody's posts. Somebody must be.

What IS going on here?

Happy New Year anyhow.

In 2012, we will witness a crowning event in our history. I wonder who will notice? Within months, Voyager 2 will pass the last of our Sun's photons and enter the void. Soon to be joined by sibling Voyager 1, and then the Pioneer twins, any or all of these human creations could wander interstellar space for eternity.

It is doubtful the probes can leave the Milky Way. That would require a massive speed boost by one of the giant stars (or possible wormhole) they are destined to pass on their various trajectories. Voyager 2 will fly near Sirius, our brightest sky star, in about 298,000 AD and could get a good enough jolt to blast it to Kingdom Come, literally. The Pioneers could get like acceleration on their separate and distinct journeys, as they respectively pass mighty Aldebaran and a massive star in the constellation Aquila in a few million years. But who knows?

Voyager 2 is now some 11 billion miles from earth, cruising at a comfortable 35,000 miles an hour, and will never rust or decay in the constant 3.2 degree above absolute zero environment of the void. Of course there is always the unexpected. They could get destroyed by something unforeseen, or discovered by aliens. The odds however are better that they survive alone, long outlast humankind, the solar system, maybe even our Sun itself. Things should really heat up when and if a voyager, as scheduled, reaches Andromeda near the time that galaxy collides with our Milky Way in 5 billion years or so. Now that will be one helluva show.

I take pride this New year's Day in the awareness something this amazing was created by my peers in my lifetime. I also find it a bit ironic Voyager 2 will most likely enter the abyss before I do. And finally, I am wistfully pleased with the knowledge that Carl Sagan's Golden Record will most likely endure long after ALL of us are gone and forgotten.

Ebert: Here's a naive question. After enough time passes, are the spacecraft simply eroded away by friction with space dust?

Roger,

I just finished listening to your memoir on audio cd with my wife as we traveled to Elk Mountain in Pennsylvania from our home in New Jersey. It was very interesting learning about your background and life experiences up until now. Thank you for sharing.

This morning when we were listening to the final chapters which touched on what you referred to as "life and the meaning of it all," something in my mind directed me to think about the film "Contact" and its protagonist, Ellie Arroway. I assume it was because the film raised many of the questions posed in your memoir. I remember being deeply moved by the film. Regardless of the reason, I was amazed when I visited your website today (a daily routine for me) to find that you had written a recent piece about "Contact." What, if anything, this means is beyond me. I thought it could not hurt to share the experience.

Reply to Roger: "Will our sentinels in interstellar space gradually erode away?" (Dust to dust, so to speak)

Hell, that's a good question. I dunno.

You do know the movie is meant to be one big metaphor for the debate over faith in God, and the different ideas and schools of thought surrounding that, right?

Wouldn't the Aliens already have to know something about our technology in order to build a machine to detect TV transmissions? Not only that, but the physics of beaming a signal into space is subject to all sorts of possibly catastrophic interference, such as intense radiation from stars, stuff floating around in space, planets, and not to mention gravity. So detecting the signal in it's original form is extremely unlikely (and so is our attempt with SETI as well). The odds of detecting an intelligible signal that has been traveling through space for 50 years has got to be something like 1 in infinity. But it also makes you wonder if all the static crap we usually pick up isn't just a bunch of garbled signals from other worlds?

I always believed that Ellie never took the journey, physically. But the contraception was simply a communication device. And who knows when it was built. It could've been on auto pilot and the creators have long been extinct.

Mr. Ebert,
Thank you for reminding me how excellent this movie was. I saw it when it first came out and have not revisited it since.

It's funny, when I was in school, I was terrible in science and math, but now, in middle-age, I am opening up my mind to science, and discovering Carl Sagan for the first time, who makes you feel like anyone can understand science if someone like Carl can take the time to explain it to them.

My one complaint about Contact is, that during the marketing campaign for the film, if I'm not mistaken, the trailers clearly showed Ellie was the one chosen to participate in the voyage. Since whether or not Ellie's going is such a huge piece of suspense in the film, I was surprised they decided to reveal this particular piece of information.

It destroyed any suspense I had as a viewer on whether or not Ellie would be chosen. My only theory as to why the marketing people let this slip, is because they were afraid to mention, as you stated in your review, that the film deals with two hot topics: religion and politics.

Anyway, I still really enjoyed rewatching Contact. I was amazed how good Jodie Foster was in it. I hadn't seen her in the movies in the longest time, and forgot how talented an actress she is. Man, she's great in this!

I’m not sure “Contact” was a great movie, but, for me, too, it was uplifting and I thought it had some superb movie moments. The whole sequence about Ellie’s journey was not one of them, in my opinion, other than the line “…should have sent a poet…” which occurs to me in various forms whenever I see some beautiful display of nature. I find myself hoping there is an artist, writer, or poet seeing this, someone who can capture it and replay it in its true glory the way no photo or video ever seems to be able to do. As you say, Roger, “…what Ellie found was not fact but feeling.” Having read the book “Contact” and other works by Carl Sagan, I think you are probably right in saying that “Contact” was an expression of his hopes. Not his beliefs or his faith. Those would probably be more along the lines of: it is a worthy goal of humankind to find out whether life exists elsewhere, and to do so with intelligence using the scientific method. We can probably never disprove its existence, but there are ways to go about finding it if it exists. There is neither need nor any point to taking it on faith -- and certainly no use, and probably danger, in rejecting the possibility as a matter of faith.
As Ellie says: “…I wish, that everyone, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope…”. The exploration of our universe, whether in the subatomic realm, the uncharted corners of our own planet, the nature and origin and even definition of life, wherever that leads, is one of the best potential sources of uplift for human beings across time and space. It will help a lot to have poets along for the ride. And film critics.
As for the superb moments in the movie the list is so long, from the excellent casting, to the subtle and well-timed humor, to the CGI, to the location scenes, to the scenes of young Ellie and her father. I may have mentioned this here before, but just before seeing “Contact” I had seen Arthur C. Clark do a streaming video from Sri Lanka with you and a panel in Foellinger Auditorium that was eerily similar to the scene where John Hurt contacts Ellie from a space-station to tell her about the backup. This was years before we’d be doing this routinely with Skype. And, as others have mentioned here, the book has a much more fascinating post-journey story about Ellie’s continued search for evidence of some designing hand in the fabric of the universe itself. In fact (book spoiler alert), Ellie is not even alone on the journey in the book.

I can't believe that, so many years later, you inspired such a fascinating conversation about a film that I've loved since its release. (I am also pleasantly surprised you consider it a Great Movie.) Sagan's book (all of his books) deserve our continued attention. It's certainly impossible to include all of the detail and science in Sagan's book, but my goodness--this was a Hollywood film starring Jodie Foster and then it-guy Matthew McConaughey--the moviegoer was treated to far more depth than they could expect. Contact was one of the few times in recent years we were treated with respect by a mainstream film.

Postscript: Mr. or Mrs. Ebert, this post has stirred up another long-held desire...I would be honored to send a proper letter with regard to what you have meant to me over the years. Will such a letter reach you if I sent it care of the Sun-Times?

Charlie Sheen is an awful distraction, but "The Arrival", I think, is on par with "Contact". As I recall, you were one of the few critics who gave it a glowing review. For the most part, it's hard sci-fi, which is what the genre sorely needs now. What stands out most in my head about "Contact" is the look of wonder on Jodie Foster's face as she first peers out into the cosmos. It also has one of the few special effects sequences that is actually thrilling. I remember loving the wormhole. Can't wait to see it again. Because of the conservative ideology behind "Forrest Gump", I don't think there's a lot of critics who are quick to proclaim "Contact" as being a great movie. This film, however, transcends politics. It's probably Robert Zemeckis' best film.

Some commenters have brought up a certain South Park joke.

They are correct to do so.

Mr. Ebert if only you watched documentary "Mars Underground" about decades long battle of Dr. Robert Zubrin to put man on Mars with "low" cost.

I'm with the readers who inspired the postscript. For me, the movie is very clear--not ambiguous at all. And lately I've begun to think of that as the film's one weakness.

Some minor tweaks could have given us an ending that forced us to decide whether we were on the side of faith or the side of hard evidence. Instead, the interrogator at the hearing is so one-dimensional that we HAVE to root against him, placing the audience automatically on Elie's side of faith. THEN the movie cheats and gives the side of faith some evidence, so even the people who would have come down on the side of hard evidence despite James Wood being a jerk have an excuse to leave the theater uplifted, on the side of faith. Just a teeny bit too easy.

I absolutely hated this movie!
Why?
Because after Jake Busey's religious nut character destroys the device, it turns out they were secretly building another identical device in Japan.
Now exactly how do you build something that gigantic [at least 1000 feet tall, although the size is never stated in the movie] in secret?
You can't do so in an open society like Japan.

It's obvious that the first device was built solely to be destroyed, which is not only stupid, but renders the entire plot as ridiculous.

At the end of Terence Malik's "The Tree of Life," everyone, living or dead, meets on a beach. Could he have gotten this idea from the beach scene in "Contact"?

Having read Dr. Sagan’s novel at least twice before seeing the film, the latter seemed, for me, to have lost its way and, as a consequence, was somewhat disappointing. It missed the novel’s subtle (and not so subtle) dialog between hardcore science and hardcore religion, as well as the fact that the language of the Universe is mathematics. In defense of the film’s direction, it is interesting to note that Dr. Sagan acted as a consultant, but died before the film’s completion.

I haven't seen the movie since it was in theaters, but wasn't the beach scene a replica of a picture Ellie drew as a child? I remember loving the movie, especially the ending where the tables were turned and she had to rely on faith, and then try to defend that faith with reason and logic. Discussing the ending reminds me of The Life of Pi.

Another great thing about this movie that it contains one simle truth-- all the expierence of our lives are locked inside our restless minds. We can never share it. Like Ellie who runs her own world, creates her Universe, her circumstances, we must remember that our wishes come true-- as we do really want something-- and though there is no such thing as objectivity in our perception of life, our faith, our Universe can change other Universes and finally the Real World.

I feel the need to correct one point in the original article: all camera's are subjective.... If you see an image from a camera, you are never certain of the shutter speed, aperture, film speed etc... A photographer I know said of photographic evidence in court that the photographer but always come in and testify about how the photo was taken.

Yes, I've loved this film since it came out, too. I watch it around once a year, not least to connect myself again with what I thought was great about Sagan - despite his unflinching honesty, he was nonetheless not unsympathetic to the views of those who believed in a spiritual world, even though he could not share their beliefs. (That last title card dedicating the movie to him always makes me burst into tears, no matter how many years pass since his death.)

My takeaway from the big courtroom scene is how beautifully it states the film's conclusions about the idea of "faith". In this scene, the word itself becomes a linchpin of the story, what all it revolves around. What does "faith" actually mean? It's one of those strange, plastic English words, that can change its meaning depending on who is using it. Here it becomes apparent that it can be accurately used even in the context of scientific knowledge, because Ellie's experience is not repeatable in any practical sense. (There is no guarantee that any other traveller would experience what she did, or even that the machine would ever work again.) Ellie KNOWS what she saw, with the same intensity and conviction that Palmer displays when describing what he saw in his experience of seeing God, but because no one else can ever see it, it will always be a matter of "faith" as far as anyone else is concerned.

I thought that was an extraordinary admission for a film that is so firmly set on the side of science and rationality to make, and that above all is why I love the film - because it admits that not everyone sees reality the same way, and that even a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist can come to some kind of sympathy for those who think differently, if only because she now knows what it's like to be looked at with skepticism despite knowing the truth. But of course, it's HER truth, not anyone else's, and that's the conflict that seems close to driving her crazy in the film's first moments after her return. Foster's horrified, near-mad cry of "I can't!" when, weakened and shaking, she is asked to explain the footage of her descent through the machine is a fantastic moment of acting. (Rarely has a lead character been paired with such a perfect actor to perform the role.) I've always been intrigued by the idea that she and Palmer apparently stay together, that he supports her despite their differences, and wondered what their conversations afterward were like.

It's a beautiful film, gorgeously made and deeply touching. A pity that such intelligent films are so rarely produced, and a great pity that Sagan did not live to see it. I think he would have been pleased by what was made from his wonderful story.

YES!!!

I was blown away by this movie when I first watched it years ago, and it still gave me the "uplift" when I saw it last year on HBO so I bought the original novel right after it!!!

And thumbs up to the performance of Foster, Morse & Fichtner! Also to Sagan for such brilliant story and to Zemeckis for staying true to the original. And thumbs up to Ebert for listing it as a great movie!!!

I didn't like the fact that Michael Kitz and Rachel Constantine kept the 18 hours of static secret.

Well, here I go, all on my own, with just my feelings. No citations to authorities in the field, no reference list, no peer review.

I really liked that movie. I liked it because it tried to grapple with some ideas.

Movies that don't do that are not far to seek and they escape rigorous examination precisely because so little was ever expected of them in the first place that digging for meaning is purposeless and futile.

Contact, on the other hand, is rich in possibility. I don't care about its science even as I admired it for the ways it spoke about science. The movie had to hold a popular audience. It was made because it seemed to somebody that it would make a profit. Would a documentary on the same subject (say, an examination of current technology that could ever lead to development of systems that would allow human beings to travel through wormholes in space; juxtaposed with the feelings "the religious" have about that) have said more, asked better questions, been more "true?"

I'm sorry. I just don't care. I thought it was a good movie and a better book and I admired them because they tried. If I could make a stronger case for liking it, I would. For example, the book spent a little of its energy discussing the ways women often suffer a kind of invisibility as scientists, given the traditional preponderance of men in science and engineering, and I really appreciated that, especially Sagan's discussion of how Ellie came to speak in a "science voice," I believe he called it. He knew whereof he spoke and he seemed fair-minded. I didn't expect that material to survive when the book made the transition to film, and it didn't. I didn't mind. Again, they tried and I appreciated it.

Gosh Ebert, are you sure you even watched this film?

Ebert: How else could my errors be so well-informed?

Carl Sagan was associated with the US space program from its inception.

"The chances of aliens contacting the Voyagers in the vast emptiness of space are small, some say infinitesimal, but we took our jobs seriously. From the moment Carl first broached that project...it felt mystic."

Ann Druyan (April 28, 2011)

Voyager, The Love Story
science.nasa.gov

Isn't one of the messages that she takes away from the trippy-trip the knowledge that the universe is criss-crossed with portals/wormholes/whatever, and the twirlie-whirlie machine is but a method of inserting a pod into that transit-system?

After all, she didn't just go Ping! and pop out the other end; she was shunted from place to place before finally ending up on that beach.

Granted, the aliens could have, you know, mentioned that in the footnotes attached to those blue-prints, but they didn't. Someone had to make that trip to find out that the universe is, indeed, open for business.

And if the dude had problems accepting her uncorroborated testimony then isn't it easy to corrobate it i.e. just power it up again and send Someone Else through, and then ask them what they saw

Contact is one of my favorite films. I went to see it -- taking time off from work -- the day it opened. There were maybe ten people in the theater. Carl Sagan had died only a few months earlier. The opening scene that expands the universe from earth's perspective then drops it into young Ellie's eyes was so powerful it made me cry -- mostly because I thought the image was a perfect reflection of Carl Sagan's vision, one he'd never be able to share again.

I had a little trouble with the notion that Ellie was essentially explaining a religious feeling, believing her own senses in the face of absolutely no other evidence. But I never doubted that she indeed did "travel" somewhere, and did talk to an alien in the form of her father. I think the 18-hours of static on the video was confirmation of this fact.

Why the aliens would do this? Easy. They only knew that we'd broadcasted an unsophisticated TV signal when they sent their own pre-canned response. They would know that it would take some time until we developed the science to intercept that signal, and have the technology to build the machine encoded in their signal. By building the machine, we let them know we had reached a certain level of technological expertise and that we hadn't destroyed ourselves... maybe we were ready for first contact. Additionally, having Ellie travel through the machine gives them the opportunity to study (one of) us more directly -- which they obviously did, since the beach she meets her father on matches the picture Ellie had drawn as a child and her "father" appears.

That no one believes her is the frusrating aspect... and seems added only to give her experience the "religious" aspect I referred to.

Anyway, thanks for bringing up this great movie and spending some time disecting it! Happy new year.

She found GOD.

ROGER WROTE:
" As a hypothesis I suggest that the beach and sky experienced by Ellie are likewise generated within her own mind."

As evidence, I will point out that the beach appears earlier in the film. She drew a crayon drawing of the beach, as a child, and it was pinned to her bedroom wall.

I loved 'Contact' when I saw it the first time in 1997. When I watched again recently on television, I found it ham-fisted and melodramatic. I suspect the book is more nuanced, but it's not on my reading list.

All (or most) of these questions are about to be answered and soon.
We think we know pretty much about how life on this planet--and the universe--works but the reality is that we know very little.
There is MUCH more to life in general and in the cosmos than solids, liquids, and gases. Much. much more.
Roger, it is NOT "New Age woo-woo." The last thing you want to be now is a cynic, all these people who claim to be skeptics and "debunkers."
How can you debunk something if you lack complete knowledge of the realm in which it exists?

I enjoyed the film very much but on a different point this was my first experience of David Morse who has since gone on to become one of my favourite actors.

One of Hollywoods best kept secrets tonnes of films and supporting roles all great performances yet very little audience recognition.

At least the powers that be keep employing him.

when i watched this movie i didn't think it was that effective. It seemed a little heavy handed in trying to make hollywood mystical point. Also the sci-fi drama wasn't all that great. would never consider this a great movie at all.

loved the clip of The Nuge though.

Made me think of Zeno's paradox of the arrow.

Zeno states that for motion to occur, an object must change the position which it occupies. He gives an example of an arrow in flight. He states that in any one instant of time, the arrow is neither moving to where it is, nor to where it is not. It cannot move to where it is not, because no time elapses for it to move there; it cannot move to where it is, because it is already there. In other words, at every instant of time there is no motion occurring. If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible.

Or that scene in Waking Life

Yes, it's empty with such fullness!!

Either I'm moving fast or time is. Never both simultaneously.

"Journey into the mind": a transfer flight you can't avoid.

I wish I could generate a worm-hole to 'contact' the Roger Ebert of
days gone by.

I just had a close encounter with "Sherlock Holmes, Game of Shadows."

It was noisy, visually onanistic and so convoluted in plot that it left me wondering what I was watching until the very end. It was not a Sherlock Holmes movie. It was at its best a poor parody of a Michael bay action flick. It certainly sucked, as you like to put it.

The aliens must have gotten you Roger.
P.S- Happy New Year!

This may sound strange... but I would rather have Rick Santorum as the Republican nominee than Mitt Romney.

Santorum comes across as a "lightweight" who only qualification is the endorsement of the evangelical wing of the Republican party.

Santorum promotes the Discovery Institute's current position of "Teach the Controversy." Basically, a lie, implying there's a controversy among scientists over Evolutionary Theory and the proponents of Evolutionary Theory are trying to keep it a secret from children in public schools..

In 2002, Santorum said in a Washington Times op-ed article that intelligent design "is a legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes."

In 2005, he said he meant that teachers should have the freedom to mention intelligent design as part of the evolution debate -- not be required to do so.

Santorum said he disagrees with the Dover school board's policy of requiring the teaching of intelligent design, rather than just teaching the controversy surrounding evolution.

If Santorum is the Republican nominee, it will force President Obama to learn the difference between "Teach the Controversy" and, well, the other positions held by Evangelicals against evolution.

It would make evolution an issue in the election, and Santorum doesn't have any kind of scientific background to support his statements.

I watched the last episode of "Ebert Presents".... well, the last one until it comes back. I wanted to say "Good job." Sometimes I think that, on a controversial subject, I'm not doing my job if I don't post my position, what I consider to be the Correct position. but I am glad that you are moderating the comments and you don't post statements that you think don't belong on the site. It gives me more freedom to say what I think should be said.

I doubt seriously that Santorum will get the nomination. He just isn't Presidential grade. But, I'd love to see Obama tell America why Intelligent Design is false.

"Mitt Romney's favorite novel?"

youtube.com/watch?v=tt2yMQ-HmQw

(Hint: Genre similar to CONTACT)

Ebert: Rather incautious, eh what?

http://bit.ly/wOPFuX

Roger, were you aware that the guitarist in the video for the Amboy Dukes is Ted Nugent?

When I saw Contact -- the first of many times since -- on the big screen, I was in awe. From the delicious opening sequence showcasing the size of the visible Universe to the engaging contrast between Faith and faith in someone you love, I was hooked.

Many of my friends won't even watch it, however, as it 'sounds corny and involves aliens.' Obviously, some people will always be small-minded and this movie is but a sample of reality.

Love this thread. Loved the movie and book. Interesting that no one made mention of the other physical evidence that would have been there. The metal fatigue from the broken chair, Elle's teeth with 18 hours of film on them. She never ate so she would have lost a pound or more in seconds! Dehydration? Sweat? Hair growth? You know that she was surely measured to within an inch of her life before she was sent.

Regarding the 18 hours:

For my part, I always took it as evidence that the events we saw legitimately happened. After all, we are treated to this non-Ellie scene where Kitz not only indicates his awareness of the 18-hour running length, but shows his lack of interest in refuting or excusing that fact. (In fact, James Woods' line reading in his video call to Angela Bassett almost sounds like he's going to follow it up with, "...and that is why you must DIE!" And then government-sponsored ninjas show up and kill Angela Bassett and....yeah.)

However, I don't think it would be hard to imagine what the in-universe cover story/explanation from Kitz and the authorities would be if that 18-hour info actually got out into public awareness. All they'd have to do is claim that Ellie's camera continued to run despite not capturing any viable video (in fact, they could even blame her hitting her head on the floor of the sphere for messing up the tech) for a good 18 hours before someone turned it off. It's a cheap trick, but it'd probably work. Kitz could utilize the requirement of proof that Ellie's camera not only took 18 hours of footage - static/white noise or not - but that it must be shown that those 18 hours of footage were taken at the moment Ellie claims they were. Which makes Kitz even harder to defeat in the public arena.

Loved Contact, and Jodie Foster's performance. Didn't love the stereotypical religious terrorists, but oh well.

Separate topic: Can't wait for your review of "The Hunger Games" movie coming out in March. I just read the novel trilogy straight through. I found it riveting and compelling, even at my age though it's billed as a "Young Adult" series. They probably focus on the romance and role-playing-game feel. I focused on the commentary on government and war that underlies the novels. I can totally see Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss and Woody Harrelson as Haymitch. Can't wait to see the movie. I think it's going to open big.

As another commenter pointed out, this ending is not the ending Carl Sagan wrote. The entire space travel sequence in the movie was a giant deus ex machina to set up the scenes that followed.

Sagan's message was a humbler one, about the loneliness we struggle with as human beings, and how we don't need to travel all the way to Vega to find out we aren't alone in this universe.

At first I saw the ending only as Ellie forced to question the value of her own perceptions, but later I thought it odd that people, those who value faith and personal testimony above logic, would want to discredit her for reporting an unsupportable personal experience.

The movie asks, "Is something out there?" Ellie, the scientist, says, "Yes, but I can't explain it." The clergyman seems to allude, "See! You were wrong to reject God." The Congressman says, "Bla bla bla bla!" How much has the venture changed anything about anybody?

I think Sagan accurately nailed the reactions of the various groups.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Sagan’s “Cosmos” book and TV series but could not stand the movie “Contact.” (My wife’s opinions are just the reverse.) I had hoped that the movie would be a wildly optimistic answer to the question “what will happen if SETI actually finds proof of intelligent life out there?” Instead, the lengthy list of technical errors and a conclusion that resolves nothing puts this movie at the bottom of my list. No, our TV signals cannot be detected at even our closest neighboring stars for the same reason that you cannot shout in Chicago and be heard in Los Angeles (without some help from technology). Perhaps it is an expectation management problem on my part. It would be silly to complain that a Veggie Tales movie is childish. That is exactly what they promise and what they deliver. “Star Wars,” “Star Trek” and similar films are just entertainment with perhaps an underlying message here and there. They don’t pretend to answer questions or stick to known scientific principles, and they succeed (for the most part) as entertainment. “2001” continues to be the best of the “first contact” type of film made, in my opinion. I had hoped that just as Clarke’s involvement with “2001” made it an exceptional film, Sagan’s involvement with “Contact” would bring it up to that level. It didn’t.

Oh! I'm reminded. A little sample from Darwin's own letters, printed posthumously in, I think, 1925, LIFE AND LETTERS. True Believers in any area don't enjoy "fine print," but here we have some:

"...we cannot prove that a single species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory."

The theory spread as a popular reaction against popular religious concepts that had become hoary, not from "proof." This hysteria continues to this day, as shown in the enormous length of Roger's blog comments predictably at loggerheads on the subject. It is as though there is some terrible price to pay for "disbelieving" hidden somewhere inside these heads. Perhaps Muslims will come getcha!

There are not "mountains of evidence" for it now, despite the bloviating that seems to always avoid mentioning a good one for sake of argument -- because, after all, only the "stupid" refuse to accept the shallow convenience of "accidents" creating the world they pretend to know. So the argument for Darwinism is "won" by the untested superiority of its True Believers. This is unreasoned "magical thinking," yet one more recently named unpredictable insantiy. Maybe it also causes Muslim Hate Speech? Or is that paid for -- implying another form of categorical insanity.

There are certainly mountains of paperwork and the politics of grant-and-budget-keeping. To omit this from the overall equation involved in research is to behave like any of those three monkeys covering eyes, ears and mouth. Or all three. To the True Believer, the previous statements will go either unperceived, or put them in an uproar of personal uncertainty, and likely, a show of false cool.

There's no reason to conclude that mini-microscopic viruses, which can and do indeed change rapidly, are doing so by random "natural selection," or "accident," as Darwin postulated. The conclusions made are simply the result of a faction of society that has, over generations, built up "faith" that this is the cause of behavior now seen under an electron microscope bombarding the little critters.

This may help regarding Sagan's intention. In the book, it wasn't just the tape that was found, but bits of sand, presumably from the beach.

What would have happened if the 18 hours showed the whole thing?

Ebert: That would make a movie.

I found this quite interesting: today (January 11, 2012), Google's main page "doodle" aludes to NICHOLAS STENO.

Paraphrashing Wikipedia (I know, I know; I was in a hurry):

Steno was a Danish Catholic bishop AND scientist who pioneered in both anatomy and geology. He is considered one of the founders of modern stratigraphy and one of the two founders of modern geology. He made discoveries in anatomy (heart and the parotid salivary gland) as well as paleontology (he was one of the first scientists to identify the existance of fossils). Pope John Paul II beatified Steno in 1988.

Maybe it's my need to find examples of amicable existance between fact and faith.

But this man was a Renaissance's Ellie Arroway, even though he coursed that character's path the other way around: he went from a life of pure religion to a scientific life.

Still, he knew how to balance them both.

Was he a rare case? Was it common for religious men to believe in science, or scientists to believe in religion?

Perhaps it's a good thing you hadn't read the book before you saw the movie, Roger. If Robert Zemeckis chose to adapt the final chapter, daring to suggest that there may exist a mathematical proof of intelligent design of the universe, do you think the movie would have made it to your Great Movies Collection?

Ebert: If it was good enough, sure.

I remember walking out of that film and thinking "I'd rather get my ass kicked than have to sit through that movie again."

The book is wonderful, and in my opinion has one incredibly important observation: scientists can reach a point where the wonder they feel at the mysteries of their profession is almost identical to religious awe--Sagan calls this feeling 'the numinous' in the book.

It's the conflict between, and eventually the co-existence of these two feelings, religious faith and the numinous that drives the story (there's no romance).

The book ends with a super computer calculating up to the zillionth (or so) digit of Pi, when a string of ones and zeroes when mapped out form a perfect circle.

That the movie takes some parts from the book and drops the truly amazing and profound parts of the novel is a travesty. I'm dissapointed that you consider it a Great Movie.

A great movie for the most part, but the ending fell flat. Why would an advanced alien race want to make us feel "comfortable", or show Ellie her father and an Earth-like beach? She's a scientist and an explorer, and she (and the audience) want to see what the aliens look like, what their world looks like, what technologies they have, etc. This could have been so much better.

Richard, I've waited a long time to find someone who sees what I see in this movie. It is indeed a film about faith, but it pushes viewers to enlarge their definition of faith. Despite the fact that people use the words faith and religion interchangeably, they are not the same. Sagan created the relationship between Ellie and Palmer to show that they are kindred spirits, although they disagree on the details. Ellie's reaction to seeing Vega in all its glory is an ecstasy on par with St. Teresa's, even without religious conviction. I immediately loved Contact because it so brilliantly explained my own beliefs or "faith": that science itself can feed that spiritual, seeking side of human nature, and the universe is a beautiful place even if there is no God.

Great choice to expand and analyze in the science fiction genre.
I, like Hays , am annoyed at the religious elements being so credited, but the movie never really presented anything of 'faith' or religion to be esteemed other than the pearly toothed actor as a romantic body. Such people exist; deal with it.
So too, the Machvellian power brokers: played well -- with the inevitable machinations as to who might be entitled to partake in the adventure.
What I liked was the fact; if intergalactic travel is to ever occur it would neccesitate such a device. Otherwise stars and other possible life are just too damned far apart. Cool concept for the travel machine too.
Jodie Foster was perfect for this role.

This story is one of the best all time classics for me. I even watched the newer version of this story the one where Brendan Fraser was the main star.

Making Contact, Information Overload, and Other Foibles

There's no doubt in my mind that the 1990's was the best decade ever for memorable movies. Independently made masterpieces—or at least as close to one as someone who isn't Akira Kurasawa is likely to come—like "Lonestar," and two other very unique films: "The Apostle," and "Sling Blade," that were written, directed, and acted in by two actors with a driving vision to place their ideas on screen for a large audience to see. "Lonestar" didn't find the audience that a great film deserves, but the other two did—all three films succeed on their own terms.

Other films like "Pulp Fiction," "LA Confidential," "Braveheart," "The English Patient," "Forest Gump," and a library of other rare and wonderful films came out. Indeed, Steven Spielberg revealed a side of himself that we didn't expect to see. Both "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" were complete blindsides from someone who was famous for making films like "ET." Spielberg looked at the dark side of human nature and didn't flinch.

So when that magnificent decade ended, I was amazed. I was also wondering if the flood of fine fair was going to keep flowing at the same rate. It didn't. Artistic endeavors, like other human activities, seem to wax and wane. I also had a favorite movie from that time, a film called "Contact."

I've noticed that the distinction between a favorite film and a great film is often mistaken by most of us. You might ask, what is that distinction? I believe I can answer that with two examples. Hands down, my favorite film of all time is "Out of Africa." I also think it happens to be a great film. The Brando movie "One Eyed Jacks" is also one of my favorites, and it's a very good movie, but I wouldn't make the contention that it's a great movie, mostly because it isn't a great movie. What constitutes a "Great Movie" is for another post, but I can focus on a single film and determine its eligibility for being considered "great." And that movie is "Contact" with Jodie Foster.

Roger Ebert has an interesting post on his site about the film. He may have jumped the gun on this one. It was posted on December 28, 2011 and so far has 203 responses to it. I believe it's safe to say that the consensus isn't in Ebert's favor. So, with regard to "Contact" Mr. Ebert and his commenters have done most of the leg work for me.

I submit that any movie requiring this degree of explanation can't be a great movie. A great movie can invoke a sense of awe, wonderment, and mystery that is often diminished and not enhanced by explanation—"2001, A Space Odyssey" comes to mind. Mr. Ebert's invocation of EE Cumming's verse for "2001"s follow up, "2010" sums it up well: "I would rather learn to dance from a single star than to teach a thousand birds how not to sing."

There is much debate about "the speed of light" and whether Jodie Foster's character can travel to Vega and back, even with the advantage of a wormhole, in the allotted amount of time. If this were a great movie—a movie that lead the viewer to think of ideas and mysteries of life, love, and loneliness in deeper and more elaborate ways, one wouldn't be talking about the limitations of the speed of light.

Ebert also got several of the facts about the movie wrong on his initial take. I'm not surprised by this, and in fact I'm absolutely amazed that he's able to recall as much as he does considering the mind-altering consumption of films he's watched in the course of his career—many times, the word "endured" seems to be the word I'd use. No, one can't fault him for getting a few details wrong; but the fact that the film requires so many remembrances is not in its favor.

The film has a lot of flaws in it. And one doesn't give a darn about them when a movie is a favorite film. One just ignores the fact that Mathew McConaughey is miscast, and that James Woods overacts in a couple of scenes, and one ignores the flatness of Jodie's nemesis in the film—a character so annoyingly one-dimensional that even the actor who plays him makes a dismissive remark about him in the DVD's commentary. One also overlooks the preposterous contrivance of making a backup for a half trillion dollar machine, which was only made because it was necessary for the story's continuation.

Yet, the most significant argument against the film's greatness is made by the filmmaker's themselves. It has to do with the issue of time in the film. And one can't dismiss the importance of it, for if the film had worked as the makers intended, they wouldn't have flinched. But they did. As someone who remembers the film's details fairly well—remember, it was my favorite movie of the 90s at one time, and I've seen it four times, with each successive viewing exposing the flaws in it at a more cringe-inducing degree.

The scene that shows the uncertainty of the filmmakers is the eighteen hours of static on the recordings of the trip. (I will admit that I remember it as twelve, and not eighteen, but who cares what length of time it was?) The fact is that the filmmakers stuck the minute and a half conversation in the film because they blinked. I always hated it that they did that. The film is supposed to end with a mystery and with each of us deciding for ourselves whether Doctor Arroway imagined the entire trip or whether it really happened. The sad fact is that the makers chickened out and placed a definitive answer in the film, when the braver artistic move would have been to leave the clarifying scene out. People who held the conviction that they had made a great movie would not have resorted to placing that scene in the film.

I find it ironic that I quoted you quoting EE Cummings in my previous post on this page. Of course the Cummings quote is from your review of "2010." I got that far before I decided not to read any farther because I didn't want the ending of "2001" to be ruined. As mentioned above, having a mysterious unexplained ending is preferable because I get too fill in my own blank, or leave it empty. (In the case of "2001" I prefer(ed) leaving it empty.)

Then I got thinking, because it just sort of stuck in the back of my mind: "How did he figure that out about aliens using Dave as someone to do experiments on?" I just never made that leap. The ending was completely unresolved.

Then it struck me: "OooooOOOooh NooOOoo! He gave the darn ending away because he saw "2010."

I wish you hadn't done that. :(