Learn to Accept Articles of Faith -- Visit Vega

Rating: 8/10 (9 August 2017)

Science and faith are diametrically opposed, right? Empiricism wouldn't be the system of checks and balances that it is without peer reviewers dismissing /belief/, to separate stark fact from shades of fact at very least.
Contact introduces Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) as she unfolds a potentially groundbreaking discovery -- there could be other intelligent life in the universe. Through a series of contact ranging from Morse Code to advanced instructions for how to build a spacecraft designed to reach the unthinkably distant system Vega, Arroway, a calculating scientist, misses her chance at exploration the first time around when she reveals her agnosticism to a panel deciding who will man the one-man craft destined for Vega.
When the first iteration of the spacecraft malfunctions, wiping out a woman-slighting, opportunistic loser, a private investor gives Ellie her shot at the trip. In Vega, Ellie encounters a simulation of her father, who explains the gradual process of contact for galaxies across the universe.
When she returns, her whole trip is thrown into question, as it appeared that she had not even left the launch deck. Arroway is tasked with giving a moving speech to bolster faith behind something that she has no proof of and cannot explain.
Contact rocks. As Carl Sagan reminded and still reminds sizable populations of stoners and armchair astronomers, faith and awe are two separate things.