Spiritual science fiction

Rating: 8/10 (18 July 2011)

Great opening sequence!
Too bad a lot of viewers don't have a clue what's going on.
See, radio waves travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second or 5,878,625,373,183 miles in a year (or 9,460,730,472,580 km,) i.e., 1 light year.
So if you could instantly travel 50 light years from Earth you could, theoretically, pick up radio waves that were transmitted 50 years before. And electromagnetic radio waves also are used to transmit television, which we hear but don't see as the image moves farther from Earth.
That's why we hear President Franklin Delano Roosevelt give his famous Pearl Harbor speech and why we hear Hitler. This is the image of humanity the Earth is sending out into space, and it's not a pretty picture that any alien civilizations might and could hear. But conversely, we should be able to pick up radio waves from other planets, too, with a strong enough antenna. That's what the movie is about.
That's the basic science. But many viewers probably are clueless when it comes to the technological time line of the 20th century; this includes young Americans, but is especially true of viewers outside the West. Electronic television was first demonstrated in 1927 by Philo Farnsworth, but was delayed in America by patent lawsuits by RCA. So Germany in 1936 and England in 1937 were the first to begin regular broadcasting. The U.S. had only experimental stations until 1939, but WWII then froze TV station construction until 1948. Some Asian countries didn't get television until the 1960s or 70s.
What you hear in the opening is primarily American broadcasting (hey, this is an American movie), until the shocker: Hitler. Germany used primarily American and British technology to try to claim Nazi superiority by being the first to broadcast television live, sort of. Their television cameras were not sensitive enough, so they filmed events, ran the film through a very fast developer in a truck and then scanned the film for broadcast of Olympic events. You can see some of this film of Nazi TV footage on Youtube!
Meanwhile, mein Fuhrer starts showing up on astronomers' television sets on Vega 27 years later, and they send a message back to Earth, which is received after another 27 years. Get it? And 40 years later, those Vegans start developing an irresistible craving for Big Macs.
Great opening. Now the film changes gears, and we see the birth of a young radio astronomer as a ham radio operator, metaphorically. But after that we get a lot of philosophizing. Some people seem to consider philosophizing "propaganda," but we are seeing a variety of viewpoints espoused. This is in the grand old tradition of science fiction going back to Robert Heinlein, where the story is not about technology so much as speculation about the spiritual potential of human beings.
Oddly, the religious mouthpieces in the movie don't seem to get this; spirituality for them is a theological hierarchy with God at the top. But science, and here the contact with an alien species, is about potential for human progress, which is ultimately spiritual progress and understanding. The movie could have made this clearer, but Ellie gets tongue tied in her testimony. The truth is, no one can really imagine what contact would mean.
Instead, we witness this through Ellie in her travels through the worm hole and her vision of swirling galaxies, when she is at a loss for words to describe what she is seeing. We get a small taste of the enormity of the universe. And when she returns to Earth we see how puny human squabbling is in comparison, and how far our species must yet travel to reach our potential as human beings. That is the key vision "Contact" seeks to convey.
Why, if there are so many solar systems and galaxies, have we not yet made contact? For one, more advanced civilizations may have long abandoned radio wave communication for some other medium unknown to us. More likely, they are waiting to see if we self-destruct. They don't need a Gort and Klaatu to threaten Earth if we don't behave; they probably realize planets have a self-destruct mechanism to test global cooperation we know as global warming. (Or maybe they are waiting for us to self-destruct so they can colonize the beautiful Earth.)
The aliens aren't talking because it is up to us to solve our own problems without outside help, which would be a form of galactic cheating. If we're still around in 100 or 1,000 years, then we'll talk. When that time comes, what will it be like?
On the other hand, there are those who say we are already talking.