Contact book sagan3/27/2023 Seeing her last hope fading, Arroway delivers an impassioned speech before Hadden's selection committee, about how the establishment ought to have blind faith in wild. Hadden (John Hurt), a cranky billionaire reminiscent of Howard Hughes or perhaps Bill Gates should he grow even richer and age badly. The last stop on her fund seeking tour is the high-tech conglomerate of S.R. For once it is the man who pines, awaiting the phone call the nonchalant woman has no intention of placing.īecause her project has been defunded, Arroway sets out looking for private support. How that squares with his still-applicable Catholic sexual morality is never explained. He is a Catholic seminary dropout who divides his time between writing and some sort of anti-technology crusade. Near the observatory where she works, she meets a colorful younger man, Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) with whom she passes some time. A long flashback sequence details the childhood experiences that have determined the grown woman's ambitions. She hopes to find patterns that could not occur naturally and so might possibly indicate intelligent life. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is a radio astronomer who specializes in monitoring signals from deep space. Still, what my friends and acquaintances as well as the professionals missed while viewing "Contact" amazed me. I have oftentimes observed the way people see and hear what they expect to see and hear, completely missing appalling and absurd surprises hidden before them in plain sight. I found its overall message to be the antithesis of secular humanism. When I saw the film myself, I was stunned. All this pointed to a deeper story that mainstream journalists would never write. President Clinton had his lawyer write Zemeckis an angry letter, protesting the use of Clinton's image and words out of context in a fictional situation. The CNN journalists who cameoed in the film were criticized by their peers for playing themselves reporting fictitious news stories. There were grandiloquently phrased reviews in some major media, panning the film but never quite making clear what is wrong with it. The coverage sounded enough sour notes to tip me off that this would not be quite the positive, humanist film I might hope for. Carl Sagan Sandra Robb Contact: A Novel Kindle Edition by Carl Sagan (Author) Format: Kindle Edition 3,345 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle 13. Tarter and Cullers, the real-life radio astronomers on whom Arroway and her blind colleague in the film are loosely based, all had their fifteen minutes of fame. Cohen.įor a few days last July, the media were full of Robert Zemeckis' film, "Contact," adapted from the late Carl Sagan's 1985 novel of the same name. This review is reprinted from The Greater Philadelphia Story, the newsletter of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, September/October 1997.
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