Contact (1997)
All things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the the right one.
THE SUMMARY: A spinster scientist listens to the sky until it talks back to her, and she learns harsh lessons about God, faith, and purpose as she uses alien technology to find her AI dad on a beach in space Florida. I hate the main character so much, but I’m supposed to, so I guess that’s good scripting and performance. Big themes and deep thoughts earn high ratings, but I’ve still had plenty of Jodie Foster.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER JG HENRY: With all the talk in the news about visiting aliens, I thought a movie that takes the position that aliens are benevolent and just want to be friends is a good contrast to just about every other movie that has aliens wanting to kill us all. This is a unique, underrated movie that has a good cast and is entertaining.
JAMIE AND JEANNE’S SHOW AI ART FOR THE WEEK:
Blonde’s eye got a little wonky, and I look like the Nickelback frontman.
THE BEST:
Ellie’s journey to faith: Even though it’s dressed up as an alien encounter, Contact is more fundamentally a movie about science versus God. Early on, I thought I was in for almost three hours of lab coat-dunking and religion-bashing. Instead, the movie closed nicely with Ellie realizing not everything we know to be true is easily demonstrated with tangible evidence. By the end, she confesses to the congressional investigators that all she has to support her intergalactic joyride experience is, well… faith. In fact, she believes it happened, despite the video evidence that it didn’t.
Even if it may not be faith in God in the traditional sense, Contact is the story of a woman’s journey through closely-related lessons. She sneeringly dismisses faith, only to be sneeringly dismissed herself, despite her own experience. She comes to believe strongly in something she can’t provide evidence to support. And she learns that science and religion are not actually competing concepts - they’re complimentary.
The ideas I initially thought this movie was criticizing, it actually upholds and defends. Those ideas are refreshing for their own sake in today’s degenerate times, but it’s even better to see them defended in a way that exposes the opposing case step-by-step. It’s thoughtfully written, and keeps the viewer guessing.
Did you love your father? Prove it: To the prior point that there are some things we know to be true even if we can’t prove them, Contact’s most compelling moment in demonstration is Ellie’s exchange with Palmer about belief in God. She says she only believes in that can be proven. Palmer asks her if she loved her father, and she affirms. He asks her to prove it, and she’s speechless, searching her mind for an answer.
There are all sorts of fundamental truths like this we know and understand, even if we can’t explain the evidence on which we make that judgment. You love your family. Murder is wrong. Life has value.
How do you ‘prove’ these things, other than some moral framework to which you adhere? And since you do adhere, why? Did you just arbitrarily choose these things one day without even thinking about them, or was there something more fundamental that established these truths before you did? If you believe these things but can’t conclusively explain why, that’s the point - we take these things on faith.
Science is an amoral concept: The reason that science and evidence have little to say about the prior point is because these are moral concepts, not scientific ones. Science helps us understand and explain the physical world around us, but it doesn’t make value judgments, as in what is ‘good,’ or what is ‘bad.’ Science just informs what is, not what should be. Palmer is clear on this concept throughout.
Does technology make us happier? Not inherently: Palmer’s skepticism that technology makes us happier has aged finely in the near 30 years since this movie’s release. By polling, American happiness is declining, despite our rapid technological advancement in recent decades. And notably, American happiness suffered significantly during the greatly Scientific™ era of the last three pandemic years. Simultaneously, American belief in God has declined as well.
Sure, the internet and video games and social media and all the other forms of modern convenience and entertainment are cool. I like them too. But I can personally confirm that my Call of Duty kill/death ratio has never satisfied, fulfilled, and disciplined me like my wife and son have.
It’s not necessary to be ‘anti-technology.’ Technology eases and enhances our lives in many amazing ways. It’s just necessary to recognize that technology is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or evil. Sort those concepts out first, and then play video games later.
The Hitler cameo: It was hilarious to wonder what the incoming alien message would be, only to have the slow reveal of a swastika and then the Fuhrer himself. Well played, Uncle A - German tech is indeed a thing to marvel. These days if we actually were contacted by aliens replaying a Hitler message, I’m convinced we’d spend more time smearing the aliens as evil Nazis than we would actually figuring out how the communication happened. It’d be the first case of an intergalactic hate crime.
Ellie sees the other side of faith
Did you love your father? Prove it.
Are we happier… because of science?
THE WORST:
Ellie is insufferable, in perspective and temperament: I genuinely hated her character. She’s emotionally unstable. She woman-splains The Science™. She hates guns. She’s a globohomo. She’s an atheist. She’s a nihilist. She trusts aliens she’s never met by default, because feelings. She self-righteously interrupts others who disagree.
She’s just awful in every way, and I didn’t even get the satisfaction of watching her die a horrible space death, silently screaming into the very godless void she insists is the truth of the universe.
But as the movie progressed, I realized that’s actually what I’m supposed to think. Maybe not as harshly as I just described, but the script clearly intends to show that Ellie is a flawed character who gains a new perspective on those flaws. Fair enough. For that reason, this point could just as validly apply as praise. It’s like Joffrey in Game of Thrones - hating him is actually demonstration of good writing and a good performance.
But I just hated this character so much it often made the movie less enjoyable. Hopefully she shuts the hell up and lets Palmer make good use of the last egg or two she has collecting cobwebs in her womb attic.
Palmer didn’t even do it for God, lame: As much as I hated Ellie’s character, I loved Palmer’s, particularly that he was willing to hold the woman he loves accountable to the God he loves more. When he exposed Ellie as an atheist before the selection committee, it was a great moment of discipline, demonstrating that even love itself ought to be secondary to moral conviction.
Until Palmer ruined it by telling Ellie he didn’t really out her in service to God. He did it to keep her from going, so he’d have another shot at those cobweb eggs. Boo!
Terrible intro: Small point, but c’mon - a 2.5+ hour movie doesn’t need a 3+ minute intro showing that space is really, really big. We get it. Lots of planets, stars, systems, galaxies, whatever - get to the story.
He did it for this lame chick, not for God.
We get it. Space is big.
THE RATING: 4/5 Wickies. Early on, I leaned toward a lower rating, but taking the movie’s trajectory overall, and realizing that I’m actually supposed to hate Ellie, or at least see her flaws, it’s a better movie than I thought it would be. I think I’d enjoy it more on a second viewing, knowing what I first thought was leftist ‘science’ propaganda was actually a perspective the movie challenges.
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NEXT WEEK: Silverado (1985)
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