Unpretentious and effective

Rating: 7/10 (3 July 2006)

For sci-fi, this is brainy (what would one expect from the late Carl Sagan?), clever, humorous, coherent, and family-friendly. The pretext is that we have gotten signals from life out in space -- life that has gotten the worst possible introduction from humanity, an early television signal from the Third Reich (nazi Germany, of course). Humanity gets plans for a machine that can supposedly get people elsewhere in the universe... a sort of Heaven.
To be sure, I am not convinced that the machine so much gets people to the Other Side and doesn't create the illusion by analyzing the thoughts of its 'passengers' -- but the ambiguity looks intentional.
The satire of anti-rational religious figures, UFO cultists, political extremists, and the like is exactly as one would expect from Sagan, someone who long told us that space travel to the stars would be so difficult that it might not be worth the effort. Science and technology, in contrast, offer awe and beauty just as Sagan said that they would.