Build a movie plot around this: Where is the SETI Program located? Countryside
The film opens with a shot of Earth from space and an audio track of various samples of recognizable mass communications from world history. The shot suddenly begins to travel outwards from Earth at impossible speed, passing Mars, the Asteroid Belt of the Solar System, passing Jupiter, travelling through Saturn's rings and leaving our Solar System. Travel continues even faster, seemingly faster than light, passing the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula and out of the Milky Way galaxy. The trip passes through another galaxy, finally showing us a field of thousands of galaxies. After a few moments we pass through the iris of a young girl, Ellie Arroway, who is reciting a HAM radio greeting "C-Q" ("seek you") in her bedroom.Ellie has a gift for science and is encouraged by her kindly father to communicate with people in distant cities on her HAM. Ellie makes contact with someone in Pensacola, Florida, her longest communication yet at over a thousand miles from her home near Madison, Wisconsin. That night Ellie asks if she could ever have a transmitter powerful enough to talk to her deceased mother (who died in childbirth). Her father says he doesn't know but suggests that Ellie is tenacious enough that she probably could accomplish such a task one day.Ellie's father dies one night while they stargaze. Ellie seems to blame herself for not getting her father his heart medication in time. Ellie grows up to become a brilliant astrophysicist, earns her doctorate and begins her research with SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) at Arecibo in Puerto Rico.At Arecibo, Ellie meets influential spiritual ponderer Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), and has an intense, brief, but detached (on her part) affair with him. One day while looking in a Cracker Jack box, he finds a toy compass and gives it to her, 'so she wont lose her way.' Palmer wants to get closer to Ellie in terms of a relationship, but Ellie is more preoccupied with her search for extra-terrestrial life. Shortly after, Ellie is angered...