Truly this movie by far was the best movie of the year.

Rating: 9/10 (22 September 2016)

Well, this movie to me is a timeless classic. Although I am not an atheist like Sagan was, I truly love how intensely he brought the realities of what moves and motivates the inward emotions from both perspectives in this film.
Faith is essentially what we are required to have as one who believes in a God or higher power. Most religions describe faith as a hope in that which is not seen which is true. Carl Sagan's Contact does such an amazing job of showing us what it is to have faith.
Eleanor Arroway's character is a staunch atheist keeping her entire belief system upon empirical evidence. Her early life experiences brought her to understand that only that which we can actually see is real and that everything else is circumstantial.
Eleanor becomes an Astrophysicist and pursues the S.E.T.I. (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project which is losing a lot of steam at the point you are introduced to her career. On one of the project sites, she meets a failed preacher Palmer Joss who she finds very attractive the hit it off and they spend the night together.
As they clearly don't see eye to eye with life's purposes they move along. At some point Eleanor and her S.E.T.I. team finds a signal from deep space which when deciphered provides instructions to construct what appears to be a transportation device.
After funding is OK'ed to construct this massive and very expensive transportation device Elly is eventually the person who gets to go on this adventure to this mysterious other world or whatever it does, as no one knows. As Elly is sent through this transportation device her experience is that she travels several light years in only a few hours. She visits different solar systems and even goes down to the surface of one of the planets and speaks to these other worldly beings. Shortly after this she becomes unconscious and awakes the next day in a hospital on Earth.
She is completely confused as she comes to realizing that everyone is explaining to her that the modular device which she was in through her entire experience simply fell directly through to the bottom of the transportation machine in a matter of a few seconds.
Elly can't believe it she knows that the module capsule device she was in was thrust away faster than the speed of light and that she did indeed visit other worlds and solar systems. However, because everyone else only saw that the device fell directly through the machine they only believed that the device simply malfunctioned.
Although the story is fictional it evaluates the ideas of faith a bit closer. Perhaps we grasp the understanding just a little stronger of what it is to have faith for those of us who can not or do not understand the concept.
I for one do have faith in a higher power, many people I know do not understand it but that same higher power has many times revealed great things to me.