Wouldn't it be a waste of space if there were only us in the universe!
Have you ever looked up at the stars? Looking at the stars in the sky on the roof of the building at night, imagine whether there are lives that are the same as us or different from us, and outline their appearance and the style of the planet in my mind. Although there have been many movies so far that have explored this unknown universe for us, there are phenomenal IPs like Star Wars, and niche movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. And here I want to amuse this science fiction movie from 1997.
Digression (no spoilers)
There may be many people who haven't seen or even heard of "Contact", but another movie of the same type that made waves in 2014 is "Interstellar" directed by Christopher Nolan. From "Interstellar", you can actually see some shadows of "Interstellar Contact". For example, Matthew McConaughey is still the male protagonist. Just kidding, in fact, the similarities lie in some settings, and the storylines are still different.
Contact is directed by Robert Zemeckis and released in 1997. Director Zemeckis may not be known to some people. He is the director of the "Back to the Future" series, "Desert Island" and the famous "Forrest Gump". The two leading actors in the cast lineup, Jodie Foster, are the heroines of "Silence of the Lambs". They escaped from Hannibal's pursuit 6 years ago and began to study the mysteries of the universe. The hero Matthew McConaughey It was the astronaut Cooper who ran into high-dimensional space who played "Interstellar", but in this film he played a cleric who believed in God, which made me always think of it when I watched it. The two have won the laurels of the Oscar and the best actor respectively, and they are indeed in place from the point of view of the lineup.
Humans are looking for themselves while exploring intelligent life (spoiler alert)
The opening scene of the movie starts from the surface of the earth and gradually extends far away to leave the Milky Way, and the accompanying radio waves are also gradually old, from Armstrong's famous quote in 1969 to a broadcast in 1939 to silence, which echoes the back of the movie. In the plot, the radio waves of human society are only more than a hundred years old. Without considering attenuation, the earliest radio waves propagated as far as only more than 100 light-years away, while the electromagnetic waves emitted in the closer era were also far away from us. Even closer, compared to the 100,000 light-year diameter of the Milky Way, there is no comparison at all.
After a 3-minute opening, the film officially begins. The heroine of the film, Ellie, liked to observe the stars since she was a child, and became an astronomer with the support of her father, who died when she was in high school (a scene shot through a mirror when her father was ill became a classic, Used as a model for study by many photography courses). For her dream, Ellie came to work at an observatory in Puerto Rico and met his mentor Clark and clergyman Joss, but the president of the foundation Drum thought Ellie's research (SETI project) was a waste of time , has no commercial value, and stopped her project funding.
Ellie came to Mexico to work on the SETI project with the Very Large Telescope Array. Four years later, there is still no progress. The government decided to reclaim the lease of the Very Large Telescope Array. When Ellie was disappointed alone, she heard a faint regular pulse signal from the earphone, which made Ellie very excited. This is also the movie. In the first small climax, more than 20 telescopes were immediately called for observation and analysis, and it was concluded that the signal came from Vega, which is 26 light-years away. Through analysis, it was found that the signal was a sequence of prime numbers between 2 and 101. Ellie immediately announced the news. . This immediately attracted the attention of the government. Security advisers representing the U.S. government accused Ellie of endangering national security, while Ellie and the others believed that they should cooperate with research institutions in other countries. Under everyone's attention, the signal was parsed out. It was the first television broadcast of the 1936 Olympic Games hosted by Hitler, which caused an uproar in the society. At this time, Drum ran out and robbed Ellie. Credit for explaining why to the public on TV. At the same time, Clark found that the received signal was 50 frames per second, while the transmitted TV signal was only 25 frames per second, and through a series of algorithms and processing, he found more than 60,000 pages of encrypted text, and finally decrypted and found that it was a construction A blueprint for a communication device or vehicle. After that, the U.S. government decided to build this machine, and the committee voted to select one of the selected candidates to use the machine, and the male protagonist Joss was a member of the committee. Joss thought this matter was very dangerous, even if it succeeded. Fifty years have passed since Ellie came back to Earth four years later; on the other hand, Jos couldn't force himself to vote for a candidate who couldn't represent people's beliefs because Ellie didn't believe in God. In the end, Ellie was defeated, and Drum became the pioneer of this 300 billion plan. Unfortunately, before the launch, a religious fanatic who believed in God came strapped with explosives and rushed into the site, leaving the launch pad in ruins. , Drum was also spared.
"Luckily" is that the US government actually used the 300 billion to build two machines, and Ellie finally successfully boarded another machine built in the Japanese waters. The machine started and the process of shuttle in the wormhole was very beautiful. Ellie couldn't explain everything she saw. She tried to record all this through voice and video surveillance. She briefly saw extraterrestrial during the shuttle. Civilization and indescribable alien technology. Eventually, she arrives on an island and briefly communicates with an alien being who takes the shape of her father. After the conversation, the screen changed, and the launch capsule on the Earth side fell directly into the sea when it was activated. It only took a few tens of seconds, as if Ellie had never been anywhere. Surprisingly, all the surveillance images were not recorded. to anything. Ellie believes in everything she has experienced, and believes that the machine has opened a wormhole channel, causing the time in the machine to be inconsistent with the time outside the machine, but she does not have enough evidence to prove herself, in court, the US government finally put the alien signal The incident was blamed on the recently deceased American super-rich, who thought it was a fake signal that he wanted to write himself into history. After the court, U.S. officials recorded 18 hours of video surveillance in a top-secret report. So far, it is left to the audience's imagination.
There is a lot of discussion about religion and science in the film, and it also shows a lot of conflict. For example, Ellie, who only believes in science, has this passage: "Almighty God created the universe without providing evidence of his existence? Or there is no God at all, but we created God so that we don't feel small and lonely." Theology and science, just like Joss and Ellie, two people with different beliefs can still love each other. I think there should be no complete opposition between the two, and they can coexist and share commonality. The meaning of human beings, the meaning of the universe, but the way of research is different. And what the film conveys to me is that religion and science are complementary. When Ellie can't explain scientifically, she can only give an ideal answer, believing that everything is true, saying how small but precious human beings are, and they must live in awe , there are beings greater than us, and we are not alone.
over, thanks!
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