• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Contact (Jodie Foster / 1997)

Status
Not open for further replies.
jond76 said:
Atheists HATE it!


It was a good movie. The terrorist attack scene was creepy as hell. I've been wanting to watch it again.
Click to expand...

What? I'm an atheist and liked it. The book was written by an atheist.

Edit, apparently it was a joke that I didn't get.
 
Fired this up on Amazon Instant the other day and was immediately struck by how awfully Alan Silvestri's musical score clashes with the tone of the movie. Terribly maudlin and overbearing at times.
 
thought it was mostly boring and cheesy (the score especially)

the travel sequence was really cool though.. starting with her walk to the machine and the sound

was MM supposed to be jesus in this movie? why does he show up everywhere? secret government meetings and shit

jake busey's character was pretty comical too
 
brianjones said:
was MM supposed to be jesus in this movie? why does he show up everywhere? secret government meetings and shit

jake busey's character was pretty comical too
Click to expand...

lmao bruh. don't do this. i like this movie.

but yeah you're right. jake busey especially is some goofy ass shit.
 
MM? Mathew McHughnawhatever?

This thread made me re watch the movie and I didn't remember how annoying his character was, even the accent is a pain for the ears.
 
Just rewatched this again and I just want to say I love this movie so much.

That "For Carl" at the end always makes me choke up.
 
This is a good movie make no mistake but when I first went to see it I was expecting a movie that would take me on a journey through the universe. The trailers all showed her going into space so I expected the payoff to be amazing.

But instead I get crap, an alien version of her dad. I never got that space journey epic I was expecting.

17 years later I finally get that movie. No bait and switch, no bullshit, INTERSTELLAR is the movie I wanted to see all those years back. I cannot wait.
 
I found that movie quite boring. The premise was good, but it was faaar to long. The extraterrestrial experience was far to cheesy as well.
 
Yeah. I really enjoyed this movie and have seen it many times. Jodie is (as always) very good in this.

It's a nice slow burn movie.
 
This movie always interest me because the screen writer, James Hart, was friends with someone in the college department I did lab work for. His last name was Sparks, which is where Jodie Foster got her nickname in that movie from, Sparky.

Good movie tho, remember seeing it in theaters, then It amazed me 13 years after the fact randomly encountering it as I did in the story.
 
Delta Assault said:
Were there really that many changes? The only ones I can recall are that the transporter held 5 people in the book, and the ending with pi.
Click to expand...

its been a LONG time since I read it, but yeah there were a LOT of huge character development changes. Mostly related to Jodie Foster's character and her family, her father and what made her who she was. I believe the ending was different in several ways, they glossed over some of the things that were pivotal in the book about religious groups and fanatics (they were painted in a much harsher light in the book, the movie seemed to cater to an "american" audience in this regard.)

But come on, the book was written by Sagan! It is worth reading for that alone! (I love all his books btw and I cried like a blubbering little baby at the end of billions and billions :( )
 
It was one of the first DVD's i got when i got my firs DVD player, i loved the opening scene where the camera keeps zooming out from earth to the universe with the different songs & audio events from the ages playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWwhQB3TKXA

The one thing i have never forgotten is the Second Machine scene & those words "first rule of government spending, why build one when you can have two at twice the price"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et4sMJP9FmM

Class film.

I would love for this to really happen in my lifetime :(
 
MiamiWesker said:
This is a good movie make no mistake but when I first went to see it I was expecting a movie that would take me on a journey through the universe. The trailers all showed her going into space so I expected the payoff to be amazing.

But instead I get crap, an alien version of her dad. I never got that space journey epic I was expecting.

17 years later I finally get that movie. No bait and switch, no bullshit, INTERSTELLAR is the movie I wanted to see all those years back. I cannot wait.
Click to expand...

We'll see if that movie is anywhere near as good as Contact.
 
I liked it because it was well made but mostly it was surprising because it's fairly rare that anything like literary science fiction makes it to the movies. There was this and Cloud Atlas but I can't think of a ton in between.
 
My favorite movie.

I just love the part where she's flying through space and see's some sort of highway in orbit above a planet with cities below.

Breathtaking, and really gets you thinking.
 
Decent movie and book but a bit too intelligent design-y for my liking. All that stuff about hidden messages in pi left by a creator, an "artists signature". No thanks. Until I read that I never would have imagined Sagan as any form of creationist in a million years.

This book did introduce and fascinate me endlessly with introducing me to astroengineeering when the alien was telling Ellie about how they are working to stop the expansion of the universe by increasing matter density in local areas and how they are "building" the large scale radio source in Cygnus A. That was my first introduction to my favourite trope in hard science fiction and from there I've gone on to love Stephen Baxter and the crazy stellar scale artificacts he has his alien races build.
 
I loved the space trip, the wormhole, the way they tried to play with space/time when a shadow or her appears to her side saying things from the near future.

that aliens took the form of her dad, that blows. .
 
Classic movie. I saw it when i was younger in theaters. I was like 14 or something. I feel like it is more fondly liked now than it was when it debuted. Kind of strange. They got a lot of things right in this movie.
 
Allways hated the end of this movie how they covered up the proof which was the hours worth of static recorded which should have been impossible if she really didnt go anywhere.
 
TheVampire said:
Allways hated the end of this movie how they covered up the proof which was the hours worth of static recorded which should have been impossible if she really didnt go anywhere.
Click to expand...

Movie was basically about faith. It was frustrating but in the end wasnt the point of what they were doing. Not necessarily a religious movie but some level of spirituality is there. As an agnostic currently i love it more than when i was still in the cult as a wee lad.
 
it was a good movie at the time.

But I tried rewatching it recently and I just can't. It makes slightly more sense with the novel, because of the 'hippy or doomed' sentiment towards the millenium, but I can't stomach the movie anymore.
To be fair, it's been twenty years, so that was going to happen anyway.

Then again, the whole "math of the universe" hits my vomit-button anyway.
 
Just because it's not a happy ending doesn't mean the end sucks, the point the movie makes is perfectly valid.

It's like saying the ending of Empire Strikes Back is bad because it ends up with all the characters at their lowest point. But instead of it being for a cliffhanger to hype up the next installment, it's to motivate us to make it better in real life.
 
I really enjoy this movie. The terrorist scene is legitimately creepy, and the visuals at the end are really stunning

Due for a rewatch, I think
 
innervision961 said:
I hate to be that guy, but the book is infinitely better than the movie, even if the movie is passable.
Click to expand...

I don't understand judging a film based on its faithfulness to its source material. It feels like you're judging the medium instead of the film.

I love Contact, but I haven't revisited it in over a decade. Time to fix that.
 
MiamiWesker said:
This is a good movie make no mistake but when I first went to see it I was expecting a movie that would take me on a journey through the universe. The trailers all showed her going into space so I expected the payoff to be amazing.

But instead I get crap, an alien version of her dad. I never got that space journey epic I was expecting.

17 years later I finally get that movie. No bait and switch, no bullshit, INTERSTELLAR is the movie I wanted to see all those years back. I cannot wait.
Click to expand...

I was still a lil punk kid when this came out. So I expected the payoff to be an exciting scary encounter with a malevolent alien being. I hated this movie so much when I saw this with my parents.

But this movie grew on me as I got older.
 
I was too young to appreciate it the first time I saw it. I thought it was great the second time a few years back, but not a masterpiece by any means.
 
I H8 Memes said:
It was disappointing to not get to see any of the Aliens in the movie. Especially with it being hard sci-fi it would have been interesting to see what they came up with. You do see a suggestion of an outline as the alien is taking the form of her father.

The ending of the movie wasn't saying humans aren't ready though. I mentioned earlier that they had left some sort of guide for humans implanted into Ellie's memories, both in the past and appearing to her in the present. It's obvious that this means that humans have to initiate the next step on their own and will probably have to work together to achieve it. If we want the next level of interaction we have to work for it and it wont be easy.
Click to expand...

I don't know if anyone would recall, but there was a scene in an episode of South Park where someone mentioned Contact, and Mr. Garrison said something like, "Waited through that whole movie to see the alien and it was her goddamned father."
 
After reading the book, to be honest I felt the book had a messy ending. The movie is more elegant with Ellie being the only passenger in the Machine, making it far more plausible that her fantastical story would be roundly dismissed as a stress induced delusion. Plus it put Ellie more firmly in the hot seat with regards to empathizing with and understanding the value to be found in the subjective human experience as well as the scientific method.

It's interesting how some come away with the idea that the story is somehow advocating religion or even creationism when Sagan was such a strong opponent of things like creationism. Between book and film scripts, the impression I came away with was that of a rationalist being fair to religion and trying to understand how and why human beings think and feel that way. The movie's finale was always very powerful to me; as Ellie discovers that a profound human experience is not limited to being part of a religion or believing in the supernatural. And even after this epiphany the script reiterates that "I don't know" is the best answer when faced with the unknown not yet understood.
 
Great film,

handles the whole contact scenario in a very almost too realistic manner, wasn't a fan of James Woods' cliche dissenting army general guy shtick.
 
When I was 7, I was an extra on this movie along with my family. We were out of school for a week although they had an on-set school, which consisted of large green tents with tables and pencils inside where a "teacher" would baby sit all the minors for the day.

Only thing I remember about it is we filmed it at Edwards Air Force Base, our scene was to cheer on some guy in a human cannon on top of a truck or something? There were food trucks for breakfast and lunch, mostly serving breakfast/non-breakfast burritos. My brother claims we saw Matthew McConaughey but I don't remember it (probably didn't know who he was at the time). I do remember seeing Jodi Foster in a pickup truck with her head resting in her hand with her eyes closed like she was avoiding eye-contact or was sleepy.
My step-dad got to drive a military truck with other actors inside because he actually drove the same one during his Air Force days.

I never actually watched the movie. It came out two years or so after we were filming it, and upon rental, we reviewed our "scene" and all we could recognize of us was my older brother's hand at the edge of the frame in a sea of people. I should probably actually watch the movie.
 
I love this movie. When I first saw it, my reaction was "they changed this, they changed that" - which is usually the case when I've read the book. But on later viewings, it grew on me.

Also, I read that they narrowly avoided changing the ending to have green spacemen land on Earth or some such bullshit. Suddenly the other changes seemed really minor.
 
I haven't watched this in a long time but I just remember the ending pissing me off to no end!

Maybe I should watch it once again and stop it before the ending.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Trailer for THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD starring Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, and Bill Skarsgård
18
417
Chuck Berry replied
First episode of the fan-animated season 2 of Berserk 1997 released
24
8K
Jsisto replied
Why is it usually TALK SHOW HOSTS who won’t let you make eye contact??
42
3K
Aesius replied
  • Locked
How To Contact Mods?
19
1K
DGrayson replied
Christian Bale becomes real life Bruce Wayne as he builds dedicated foster facility for kids
25
3K
jason10mm replied
Top Bottom