30 for 30: 1997 — "Contact"
"See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."
What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 1997. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996
I believe in a few things unequivocally.
I believe in God.
I believe in science.
I believe the two above statements are not mutually exclusive.
As such, I love “Contact.”
Robert Zemeckis’ film based on Carl Sagan’s novel about a scientist who intercepts the first alien transmission from outer space to earth has everything you could ask for in a film about outer space, science and religion. It’s got Jodie Foster. It’s got Matthew McConaughey. It’s got a lot of heady, existential conversations about how if we’re the only ones in the whole galaxy, “it seems like an awful waste of space.”
That’s been my line of thinking with a good friend of mine lately whenever the government report about UFOs came out earlier this summer. I don’t necessarily think there are little green men running around out there in some other galaxy, but if you believe that there is a God, and God is all-powerful, and God can make whatever God wants to make, then who am I to assume that earth is the limit of God’s powers?
Yes, we are all made in God’s image, but the romantic in me wants to believe that there’s something out there — and if there is, to me, that’s proof that we don't know God as well as we could. But I’m OK with that because that means the universe is even more vast than I could possibly imagine.
Many of the characters in “Contact” don’t hold that view, however. The events that happen in this movie after it’s established that America has made contact with an extraterrestrial being play out pretty much exactly as one would expect. It causes a lot of confusion and a ramp-up in American patriotism when it’s discovered the first broadcast is a relay of Hitler’s opening ceremony for the 1936 Olympics. Religious service attendance skyrockets. Conservative pundits decry the discovery as anti-God. People camp out in the desert selling “UFO insurance.” A suicide bomber destroys the first spaceship scientists would use to make contact.
All of that sounds a lot like America now, where the gap and divide between science and faith seems like it’s wider than ever, but a rewatch of “Contact” proves this sentiment was there all along. The movie (and Sagan’s book) is a testament to the push-and-pull of science and faith, creating a legacy for space films that stretches to “Interstellar” (also starring McConaughey, interestingly enough). “Arrival” (which I’ll cover later in this series) and “Ad Astra.”
It reaches its apex at the end, when we as a viewer aren’t quite sure if Jodie Foster’s Ellie makes contact with an alien or not because the alien takes the form of her dead father. Ellie’s whole life and her career has been devoted to searching for her father if there is an afterlife or something out there. In the end, she has to take it on faith that what she sees in the spaceship is real.
And if it’s not, the alien has a heartwarming message for Ellie as well: "See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."
If it is just us in the world, it does seem like an awful waste of space. But if it truly is just us, then we need to take care of each other while we can.
Up next: I talk about my love of 1998’s “Prince of Egypt.”
Letter of Recommendation
That government report I mentioned earlier about UFOs can be found here.
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