Contact, 1997

Contact is a 1997 American science fiction drama film directed by Robert Zemeckis, based on the 1985 novel by Carl Sagan. Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan wrote the story outline for the film. It stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway, a SETI scientist who finds evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make first contact. The film also stars Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, Tom Skerritt, William Fichtner, John Hurt, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, Jake Busey, and David Morse. The film features the Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Mir space station, and the Space Coast surrounding Cape Canaveral.

Sagan and Druyan began working on Contact in 1979. They wrote a film treatment more than 100 pages long and set up Contact at Warner Bros. with Peter Guber and Lynda Obst as producers. When development stalled, Sagan published Contact as a novel in 1985, and the film reentered development in 1989. Roland Joffé and George Miller had planned to direct, but Joffé dropped out in 1993, and Warner Bros. fired Miller in 1995. With Zemeckis as director, filming lasted from September 1996 to February 1997. Sony Pictures Imageworks handled most of the visual effects sequences.

Contact was released on July 11, 1997. It grossed over $171 million worldwide and won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation along with several wins at the Saturn Awards.

Plot

Dr. Ellie Arroway works for the SETI program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Guided into science and communication—starting with amateur radio—by her now-deceased father, she listens to radio emissions from space, hoping to detect evidence of intelligent alien life. David Drumlin, the president's science advisor, pulls the funding from SETI, believing the endeavor is futile. Arroway gains financial backing from Hadden Industries, run by secretive billionaire industrialist S. R. Hadden, which allows her to continue the project at the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.

Four years later, with Drumlin about to end the SETI program at the VLA, Arroway discovers a signal repeating a sequence of prime numbers, apparently sent from the star system Vega about 26 light-years away. This announcement causes Drumlin and the National Security Council led by Michael Kitz to attempt to descend on the facility. Arroway's team discovers a video hidden in the signal – Adolf Hitler's opening address at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. Arroway and her team postulate that this would have been the first signal strong enough to leave Earth's ionosphere, reach Vega, and be transmitted back.

The project is put under tight security, and its progress followed worldwide. Arroway finds that the signal also contains more than 63,000 pages of indecipherable data. The reclusive S. R. Hadden secretly meets with Arroway to provide the means to decode the pages. The pages reveal schematics for a complex machine that is determined to be some kind of transport for a single occupant.

Multiple nations fund the construction of the machine at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. An international panel is assembled to choose a candidate to travel in the machine. Although Arroway is a frontrunner to go, her hopes are scuppered by Christian philosopher Palmer Joss, a panel member whom Arroway met and briefly became romantically involved with in Puerto Rico. When he brings attention to her atheism, the panel selects Drumlin, as more representative of humanity. When the machine is first tested, a religious terrorist destroys the machine in a suicide bombing, killing Drumlin and several others.

A cancer-stricken Hadden, now in residence on the Mir space station, reveals to Arroway that the US government had contracted with his company to secretly build a second machine in Japan, and that Arroway will be the one to go. Outfitted with several recording devices, Arroway enters the machine's pod, which is then dropped into three rapidly spinning gimbaled rings, causing the pod to apparently travel through a series of wormholes. Arroway sees a radio array-like structure at Vega and signs of an advanced civilization on another planet. She then finds herself on a beach, similar to a childhood picture she drew of Pensacola, Florida. A figure approaches that becomes her deceased father. Arroway recognizes him as an alien taking her father's form and attempts to ask questions. The alien tells her that the familiar landscape and form were used to make their first contact easier for her and that this journey was just humanity's first step to joining other spacefaring species.

Arroway falls unconscious as she begins traveling back through a wormhole. She awakens to find herself on the floor of the pod, the mission control team repeatedly hailing her. She learns that, from outside the machine, it appears that the pod merely dropped through the machine's rings and landed in a safety net. Arroway insists that she was gone for approximately 18 hours, but her recording devices show only noise. A Congressional Committee is formed and speculates that the signal and machine were a hoax designed by the now-deceased Hadden. Arroway asks the committee to accept the truth of her testimony on faith. In a private, online conversation, Kitz and White House official Rachel Constantine reflect on confidential information that, although Arroway's recording device only recorded static, it recorded 18 hours of it. Arroway and Joss reunite, and Arroway receives ongoing financial support at the VLA.