Contact and Faith
In my opinion, Contact is the greatest science fiction movie ever made.
It is an screen adaption of Carl Sagan's book Contact, produced by Warner Bros. in 1997. It is starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway. It is one of the very few science fiction movies where the science is rock-solid.
That's not what matters, though.
Let's back away for a moment and see what the usual science fiction film does. It gives us an Earth menaced by evil and gruesome-looking aliens, space battles, time travel, great heroes who single-handedly defeat an army of bad guys in funny clothes. Don't get me wrong. I love Star Wars and Back to the Future. I've seen many episodes of Star Trek (I seem to enjoy complaining about inconsistencies and impossibilities), and I even remember watching older stuff, like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers, when I was a child. But what we're dealing here, basically, is action movies set in the future (or the past, in the case of time travel). That even goes - to a lesser degree - for classics such as The Forbidden Planet.
Contact is brilliant because it does what few science fiction movies do. It stays true to the spirit of science fiction. It is, in the truest sense, speculative fiction.
A dozen people may see as many morals to a story, or, in this case, a movie. For me, Contact is about faith.
It speculates about the nature of beliefs. It asks you, personally, what do you believe? In many ways, Contact for me was about the search for God.
I'm not a religious person. For a long time, I saw organized religion entangled with the Church, with hypocrisy and intolerant dogma and crusades and fanatics and murder, all in the name of God (whatever you want to call him). I know, of course, that I'm hardly fair to many millions of people both living and dead here. It took a while to make me see that it's not all just a long nightmare, that there can be positive sides to organized religion.
But in another way, in a broader and probably truer understanding of the term, maybe I am a religious person after all.
Because I do wonder about the world. Where it came from. Where we came from, and where we go. It is not by accident that I study history. There is a picture of the Earth, taken from the moon by Apollo astronauts. It looks as if the Earth is just rising above the horizon. Seeing our world from such a perspective, our differences and struggles seem so small, so petty1. Our whole existence seems so insignificant compared to the vastness of space. I can't but feel a deep longing at such times, a yearning for company, unity and meaning.
I'm asking myself: Is this it? Are we alone? Is there nothing else?
I'm really not talking about aliens.
Ellie Arroway might be. For her, the comfort of knowing that there is company out there, among the stars, is soothing. She is so sure in the core of her being that what she experienced was real that she won't give up her belief in it for anything. Against better knowledge as a scientist (a sceptic!), against the logic of Ockham's razor2, against all odds.
This is faith.
She believes just like Palmer Joss believes. Just like a religious person believes in the existence of God without the need for proof. That's what the movie works out like none other.
For me personally, Contact goes still further. It relativates science, yes. Science is man-made, a way to look at the world, certainly a successful one when it comes to building useful models, but still only one way, one which has very limited ability to answer the questions that burn inside us. And that's all right! Science was never meant to explain everything. Science is the art of explaining how? - how does the Universe work? - but it is no good at answering why? - why is the Universe there? To what purpose? Why are we here?
Yet there is also a very positive statement Contact makes: You don't need to go out there, among the stars, to find the answers to your questions. You can't. You won't find answers there. In analogy, Ellie is sent back with a knowledge that there is more, but with no answers to her real questions.
When she finally gains certain knowledge of something - that we are not alone - it is not by the methods of science. It is by pure faith.
Little Ellie might have asked into the void, Dad? Are you there? But the point is that no matter what questions you ask, the path to the answer passes through you. And so Palmer Joss may ask, God? Are you there? Still others might ask, Am I a good person? Am I just? Am I alone? Am I loved? Do I love?
As I said: Different people see different things in stories. I chose to see a lot in Contact. I don't know if it's all there - others whom I have talked to seem to have a very different picture of the movie - but I'll say that there are not many movies who get me to think such thoughts.
This, then, would be one of my criteria for greatness in a movie.
1 As it happens, Carl Sagan himself seemed to feel something similar to this; he expressed it much better though in Reflections on a Mote of Dust in his book Pale Blue Dot.
2 This is fine irony in the movie. William of Ockham rejected all attempts to scientifically prove the existence of God and instead insisted on separating science and religion, claiming that the belief in God must ultimately rest on faith.