Contact took eighteen years to reach cinemas, and Carl Sagan never saw it
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan began Contact in 1979 as a film treatment, hoping to show what meeting aliens might really be like. The studio project stalled, so Sagan turned it into a novel in 1985. Two directors came and went before Robert Zemeckis finished the film in 1997, months after Sagan's death.
Jodie Foster plays Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer hunting for alien signals. After a presidential science adviser, David Drumlin, cuts her funding, a reclusive billionaire, S. R. Hadden, backs her work at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. There she picks up a stream of prime numbers from the star Vega. Buried inside is a startling video: Hitler opening the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the first broadcast strong enough to escape Earth's ionosphere, bounced back by listeners who heard it. More than 63,000 pages of data turn out to be blueprints for a machine that carries one passenger.
The story then pits science against faith. Palmer Joss, a Christian philosopher played by Matthew McConaughey, questions Arroway's atheism on the selection panel. When she finally rides the machine, she seems to cross wormholes and meets an alien wearing her late father's face on a beach like her childhood drawing of Pensacola. Back on Earth her instruments show only static, and she must ask a committee to accept her account on faith. The twist is that the static lasted 18 hours.
Sagan borrowed wormhole ideas from the physicist Kip Thorne. The heroine's first name honours Eleanor Roosevelt, and Arroway nods both to Voltaire's real surname, Arouet, and to an arrow flying through the cosmos. Druyan denied she was modelled on SETI researcher Jill Tarter, though Tarter advised on how women scientists were treated in earlier decades, and Foster met her to prepare.
Filming ran from September 1996 to February 1997, with real locations including the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Released on July 11, 1997, it grossed 171 million dollars and won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.
Source: Contact (1997 American film)
