Subject: Review: Contact (1997)

From: [email-masked] (Ram Samudrala)
Date: 15 Jul 1997 03:43:48 GMT

CONTACT
A film review by Ram Samudrala
*spoiler warning*

When I was a kid, I was the only one on the block who watched Carl
Sagan's Cosmos diligently.  While it was boring even given my interest
in cosmology, there were moments which really enthralled me and
captured my attention.  I expected /Contact/ to be similar: a few
flashes of brilliance, but mostly boring. I was pleasantly surprised;
my attention was held for the entire 2.5 hours.

/Contact/ comes close to being a perfect movie.  It has action,
effects, a great story, realistic science-fiction, and some great
acting.  While there a few holes in the science aspect (which I'll
discuss later), the story is convincing.  The main plot is the
interception of an alien communication by Eleanor Arroway (Jodie
Foster), the decoding of the communication to reveal a transport, and
the actual contact between humans and aliens.  Mingled in with all
this is a power-play from many ends, those wanting to make the first
contact, those wanting to use the technology for their own ends, and
those fearful of the technology.  /Contact/ is filmed in a highly
non-conventional manner, with a slow introduction and a fast-paced
ending which makes one want to give up bungee jumping and start
listening for signals from outer space.

Every aspect of the movie is brought out excellently, from Arroway's
initial interception of the alien signal to her travel through a
wormhole and encountering aliens, which is done in the best manner
possible.  There are some breathtaking visuals.

The acting by most of the characters is great. I'm sure Foster will be
remembered during next year's Academy Awards.  While I don't like
Matthew McConaughey's acting, he is passable here as Palmer Joss
(though there are times when he appears to be sleep-talking). The
performances by Tom Skerritt as David Drumlin, Arroway's mentor with
his own ambitions; John Hurt as S. R. Hadden, an eccentric
billionaire; James Woods as Michael Kitz, the skeptical National
Security Advisor; and Jena Malone as young Arroway are particularly
excellent.

One great aspect is the combining of what we perceive to be part of
the real world (clips of Clinton, Leno, Bernard Shaw, etc.)
interspersed with the fiction of the movie.  Robert Zemeckis, one of
the directors whose work I've consistently found to be
thought-provoking, knows that to weave a good and believable story,
one must mingle facts with speculation.

The biggest flaw I found in /Contact/ is with the amount of time
elapsed during Arroway's encounter with the aliens, which ends up
being a fairly crucial part of the movie towards the end.  According
to Arroway, she spent eighteen hours away from Earth.  As far as the
people on Earth are concerned, she never went anywhere. This sets up a
situation where her experience has to be taken on faith and this is
good for the story, but consider this: relativistic theory says the
faster your speed, the lesser the amount of time taken for an event as
measured by your clock. This isn't platitude, but rather illustrates
the notion of relative time.  If you travel in a straight path from
point A to point B on Earth by an aeroplane and it takes 5 hours, then
if you travelled at the speed of light between the same points, and
you took a longer, more circuitous route, the time taken, as judged by
your watch, would be zero.  In fact, this is brought out earlier in
the movie: Joss points out that Arroway will be travelling at near
light-speeds, and when she returns the people she knew on Earth would
no longer be around.  This is because travelling at near the speed of
light, she would age only a fraction of the time she would have aged
had she been travelling at the speed of Earth.

Yet, in the movie, the reverse is what happens, i.e., her "watch"
measures eighteen hours, whereas the "watch" on Earth measures a
fraction of a second for the loss of contact with her transport.  This
implies that the speed she was travelling at while she was away was a
lot slower than the speed of Earth.  This is highly incongruous, to
say the least. While this inconsistency can be explained in a
hand-waving manner (with emphasis on the waving part), no attempt is
made to account for it (which I think is at least necessary given
Joss' initial statement).  I've not read the book this movie is based
on, but I'd be very surprised if Sagan used the same situation to
enable people on Earth to discount Arroway's experience. In all but a
few other respects (the percentage of people on Earth believing in a
god, for example), the writers appear to have taken great pains to
ensure a certain scientific validity to their plot.

Arroway's actions at the end, when she is asked to explain her
journey, are, in a sense, insulting to the scientific profession.
While a scientist may believe life exists on other planets, a good
scientist will do their best to falsify hypothesis they come up with
(in a Popperian spirit), even in a case where all their senses scream
that the hypothesis is true.  None of us as scientists would (rather,
should) publish or expose our opinion to the world in a formal manner
without suggesting ways to prove our hypothesis false (especially in a
grant application).  In this case, I think Arroway had plenty of
opportunities to falsify her hypothesis.  The reason Arroway gives at
the end for her actions is a cop-out, given her reputation.

Finally, we come to a topic that is addressed in a seemingly
dichotomous manner in the movie: religion vs. science.  Science is a
matter of faith to many people, and could even be considered one's
religion, as the movie tries to bring out. But unlike most
orthodox/institutional religions, science not only encourages, but
also /requires/, that you constantly question your faith and find ways
to disprove what you believe.  I've found that if you stop looking
when you've found what you wanted to find, it results in pathological
science. That fundamental difference between science and religion
alone makes it more likely to find "truths", if they exist, using the
scientific method than any other.

This all relates to the question about the existence of a god or God.
The problem with that question is that it takes on the form of a bad
hypothesis, in that it does not easily lend itself to falsification
(to prove it false, one would have to scour the entire universe). The
real question is whether God's existence is relevant to our lives, and
further, whether /a/ given god's existence is relevant (after all, the
notion of a Christian God, or a similar omnipotent omniscient deity,
has its own problems in terms of reconcilation with the beliefs of the
people on this planet, and also leads to fundamental
inconsistencies).  Initial answers to these questions can be found in
the phenomenal work done by physicists in the 20th century.

All this discussion goes to show /Contact/ is a great movie, in that
it is provoking and stimulating intellectually, while providing a nice
visual spectacle.  While the amount of depth in the story itself is
negligible, there's a lot a viewer can get from it. Don't miss this
one.

email@urls  ||  http://www.ram.org  ||  http://www.twisted-helices.com/th
               Movie ram-blings: http://www.ram.org/ramblings/movies.html