Ellie listening to radio waves.
On assignment, I watched the movie Contact (1997), directed Robert Zameckis. It is centered around the search for and “contact” with extraterrestrial life. It could be considered an ‘alien’ movie if it was to be categorized in a specific genre. The protagonist is a women named Ellie, who has made it her life’s mission to discover signals and contact extraterrestrial life. After the director gives us a splash of all the most important moments of Ellie’s childhood: her love of radios, her father’s death etc., he flashes forward and we find Ellie as a struggling astronomer working for the underfunded program SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Life).SETI shuts down and Ellie, and her fellow SETI scientists, must seek private funding to continue their research. She finds a donor in Hadden Industries, and gets a lease to work on The Very Large Array. The stereotypical portrait of a struggling artist, is constantly emphasized and reemphasized. Nobody understands Ellie, or her passion especially not even a confident, handsome, religious writer named Palmer (Matthew McConaughey). But in true Hollywood form, opposites attract and Palmer and Ellie become close.
The director, Robert Zameckis, shows us the important experiences from her childhood: her love of radios, her wonder of the universeand her blaming herself for both of her parents deaths. Following the stereotypical Hollywood depiction of a troubled genius, they make it blatantly clear how the main character’s internal conflicts arise.
The transportation machine designed by the extraterrestrial life and built by the world.
Ellie discovers a coded instruction manual for a transportation machine from the star Vega. The challenge seems hopeless, but of course an old wise guru, Mr. Hadden, discovers the answer: still standard Hollywood stuff. Eventually the world comes together to build the machine but a radical religious terrorist sabotages the machine. But, holding true to the a standard Hollywood story arc, there exists a second machine. All is well, Ellie gets to go visit vega, except for her odyssey is not finished yet. After Ellie visits Vega, she wakes up in the safety net at the bottom of the machine, to find that nobody believes she left Earth because there is no physical evidence. Bringing into question faith into conflict with science.
In general, the plot and characters are standard Hollywood. There is the troubled genius, the lover, the wise old guru, the two major plot twists, speaking with a dead loved one and the little factoid at the end to justify the protagonist. Nothing exceptionally interesting originates from the plot or the characters.
What interests me is the way the director presents the conflict between faith and science. The conflict is prevalent throughout the plot and characters, from Ellie’s and Palmer’s disagreement about religion, to the religious radicals belief that we are violating God’s will contacting extraterrestrial life. I do not agree that there should be any conflict between religious institutions and science because they are two completely different fields. Certainly, science is not a religion nor is it an alternative to religion.
Although throughout history science has disproved certain ideas religious institutions touted, like the geocentric model of the Universe, science does not exist solely to refute religious ideas and faith. These historical examples are a matter of circumstance, in which religious institutions unknowingly adopted wrongful scientific ideas. But when correct theories were discovered they simply refused to let believe them. They refused to take part in the testing and falsifying of hypotheses, they refused to obey the scientific method.
Classic synthesis of faith and nature.
At first, the director presents religion and science as opposites, but subtly he changes that. Reinforcing the idea that religion and science are completely different ideas, he disposes of the religion-science conflict and embraces faith as their commonality. Faith is required in all aspects of life, even in science, yet it takes an extreme situation to show this. Ellie must convince the world she visited is real, without any scientific proof, and ironically she strictly adheres to the scientific method. Unwaveringly, she refuses to compromise her beliefs and begs for faith from the world. Due to the lack of scientific evidence, the world must have faith to believe her story. But at the very end, a presidential aide discovers that her videocamera recorded eighteen hours of footage, the exact amount of time she claims she was gone for. This suggests that the director changed his mind: deciding faith has no place in science.
Unnecessarily the media catalyzes a conflict between religion and science. There should be no dispute, even the Papacy believes that their should be any conflict as is evidenced in their acceptance of Evolution and the Big Bang theories. Instead they take a perfectly acceptable position with regards to God, they believe God set the Universe into being action and let the laws of physics create what exists today. The director, Robert Zameckis, compounds the problem in this movie and does so in a indecisive but entertaining way.
