Comments from a personal discussion with the late Carl.

Rating: Null/10 (10 July 2001)

Having met Carl Sagan in 1974, when he and his friend Frank Drake were in Australia, I have the benefits of an actual discussion with him on this subject that is of relevance to this movie and may be of interest.
Carl Sagan's philosophy was a simple and very powerful one. Here is my understanding of it.

If we discover intelligent life "somewhere", it will be the most important discovery we will ever make.

Not because of any "scientific" knowledge that we can exchange; but because we will then no longer be the only intelligent life form.

Thus, we will be able to review everything that we think we know about ourselves, because finally we will have another viewpoint, another reference point. (Aside: I realized this analogy many years later. If you learn to speak a second language, this will give you a different point of view on your primary language. This will give you a faint glimmer of what this concept is all about).

It is these insights into everything that we think we know about ourselves that will be the greatest value of this realization.

As a secondary point, the search for other intelligence, even if a complete "failure", will move us great steps in this direction. Thus, the search itself will be of great potential value.

As very close secondary issues, made clear in the book "Cosmos" (which is a worthwhile "primer" before reading "Contact"), Carl had very negative opinions on how the religions and the military had abused their positions in what he called the "stewardship" of our planet. He thought that their points of view were far too narrow in the context of the power and responsibility that they claimed in the leadership of the direction of thinking on this planet.
"Contact" (the book), then, is essentially Carl's personal "typical best case" scenario of an example of how all of this might happen. To see this, when you read the book, pay as much attention to things that happen in the "background" as you do to the main story.
Finally, we come to the movie, which of necessity covers only a small fraction of the material contained in the book. My understanding is that he was involved in the making of the movie as best he could; and was reasonably pleased with the efforts that he saw.