I have a soft spot for this movie. I think Jodie Foster is amazing in it. But almost everything in it is stupid.
Carl Sagan was best known, when I was a kid, of being a guy who was on TV all the time making astronomy cool. It was his idea to make a golden disk for the Pioneer space probes so that in a million years, if someone or something comes across it, there will be a (literal) record of who we were and where we came from.
We were optimistic about who else might be out there. Liu Cixin and his Dark Forest theory has changed my thinking on that subject. Old hotness: there is a galactic community out there waiting for us to find and join them. New hotness: older civilizations are interested in killing young civilizations before they can become a problem and attack as soon as they are detected.
Jodie Foster is a radio astronomer who detects a strong signal coming from Vega, a young star 25 light years from Earth. The signal initially appears to be a TV broadcast of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympics, but other signals embedded within that signal give instructions for building a mysterious machine that is intended to, they assume, bring a human through the light years to where they are.
Foster eventually goes on that machine, meets her dead father in Pensacola, returns, and nobody believes her. She is forced to admit that she is asking the world to take her story on faith, which she has rejected throughout the movie, as she is a scientist.
So that’s the movie. Here’s why I am angry.
But first, it’s funny to see Tom Skerritt in an antagonist role denying the existence of aliens. Because… he played the starship captain in the movie Alien… I chuckled.
Early on, Foster argues that Occam’s Razor suggests that a scientific explanation is preferred to a religious explanation for what is happening. That’s the principle that the simplest explanation is more likely to be the correct one – or it’s explained that way in the movie. I dunno. An invisible deity responsible for all creation and micromanaging everything seems like the simplest explanation. Stars? God did it. I bumped my knee? God did it. Someone died? God did it. Can’t get much simpler.
And in fact, when she meets Space Dad, he says that his alien race found the interstellar transportation there when they got there, and it might well have been God that did it (they imply). But she rejects that.
So here’s a bunch of things that made me angry.
James Woods suggests a satellite was the source of the signals. No. Radio telescopes on opposite sides of the Earth pegged Vega as the source. A satellite couldn’t be the source unless it happened to be at Vega, or at least a few light years in that direction. In one of the first scenes of the movie, they specifically check to rule out satellites.
Woods also suggests that assuming alien civilizations are friendly is a big ask. Foster dismisses that out of hand. But why? It’s legit.
When Foster’s space machine is warming up, there are pronounced light, gravity, and spatial distortions. Yet Woods says that nothing happened. Something totally happened.
Before Foster goes on her trip, she is reporting in real time the distortions she is seeing. These could easily be verified by running the machine again.
Why didn’t they run the machine again?
Some of the subcontractors building the machine were doing it in exchange for the rights to use the alien technology. Which, as we saw, does work. What happened there?
The overarching theme to the movie (explicitly stated at one point) is that science and religion are two approaches to explain the same things, and both are valid approaches that should work hand in hand. So to keep this balance, they add evil scientists (Skerritt) and evil preachers (Jake Busey, Rob Lowe) so that nobody feels singled out. Couldn’t they just have actually worked together? I recently watched My Cousin Vinnie for the first time, and it was fun seeing a movie without any real antagonists. When Vinnie proves his case, the prosecutor immediately accepts the fact and drops the charges so that Karate Kid can get the heck out of Alabama. Herman Munster was the judge. It was a cool movie.
The selection committee asks Foster what, if she were selected and met an alien, she would ask them. She gives an answer, but when she finally meets an alien in the persona of Space Dad, she does not ask the question. It was a good question!
I’m no scientist, not even a movie critic, but this movie just seems lazy. I really expected more from an actual scientist like Sagan. I have read the book, and it had some even more out-there stuff in there, like a message written in the digits of pi.
Dude. Pi is random digits. Every message is written in the digits of pi.
Anyway. Foster sells the movie, but remove her, and it just leaves all the problems.