A chick-flick cartoon version of the book, and dated

Rating: Null/10 (8 August 2011)

I just don't buy it.
Razor-faced Jodie Foster as a fashionably geeky young woman who is such an overachieving genius (yet who at age ten asked her dad, "can we talk to dead mom on a ham radio?"--LAFF) that she manages to discover alien signals sent "in the language of science" the night her tenure at the Very Large Array (Arroway?) is over!
Hollywood bunkum.
Palmer (spiritual pilgrim) Joss (household deity) goes from New Age sexual drifter to bestselling author and presidential spiritual consultant. 'Spiritual'--not even religious. (That's Rob Lowe's job!) The U.S. prez actually has one of those, like Picard did with Troi, AND keeps close a god-fearing zealot for good measure?
Baloney!
Vega. Vegans. Vegan. Sagan. VEGetarian saGAN? But Vega has more to do with vultures than grazers. Interesting that the Vegans depend on the remnants of an even greater race of beings (and swoop out of the sky, so to speak).
I digress.
Then another zealot (this one with long white hair so we don't confuse him with Rob Lowe) prattles on about how science is ruining everything (like insulin and air conditioning and the microphone he uses), then somehow gets a techie job at NASA so he can blow up the Machine.
Ellie (LE. Life elsewhere. EL. Extraterrestrial Life! I get it!) then finds out another Machine was secretly built on remote (?) Hokkaido Island by Esarhaddon (look it up) and suddenly we go from late-90s USA to a future with VSTOL passenger jets and bland grey attire for all.
Oh yes, the 1996 Russians on 'Mir' wouldn't have called Ellie "comrade." Come onnnnnnn.
The Machine is fired up and does something so that Mission Control can't talk to 'EL'lie but they can tell her pod's internal environment is normal. Hmmmm! (The pod specs call for NO SEATS OR RESTRAINTS--a big visual plot point--and yet EL is to be dropped, kersplash, several hundred feet into a net. Without a seatbelt. Uh huh.) About the only things that might ring true are the Japanese seeking lucrative tech rights and the US shouldering much of the development. (The Machine sorta gets built JUST LIKE THAT, hey? With 63,000+ pages of text to decode. Mmmhmm.) And we KNOW Ellie takes 18 hours to meet an alien, out there and back again, but screen time is what, 12 minutes? We didn't get to see much (that we didn't see every episode of Deep Space Nine).
Sagan and the filmmakers completely pandered to the American movie-going focus groups with this one. Young stars, old men. (The book has a FEMALE president, by the way.) Spiritualism/religion vs. science, the centuries old struggle (that's really only played out in bad TV talks shows, and movies like this 'un). Let's hope some Esarhaddon (look it up) decides to remake this as a mini-series that's faithful to Sagan's highly enjoyable and broader-minded book.
What the heck IS spiritualism, anyway?