Contact

Contact DVD cover

Movie (1997) "PG"

Starring:
Jodie Foster (Eleanor Arroway)
Matthew McConaughey (Palmer Joss)
James Woods (Michael Kitz)
Tom Skerritt (David Drumlin)
William Fichtner (Kent)
John Hurt (S.R. Hadden)

Contact is a science fiction drama based on the book by Carl Sagan. Starring in the film, Eleanor Arroway first became interested in making long distance contacts using an HF Ham Radio when she was young. Her curiosity continued to grow as she got older and she later became a scientist.

Dr. Arroway traveled to Puerto Rico to work on a project called the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program using the Arecibo Observatory. After years of listening, she finds a strong signal repeating a sequence of prime numbers from the star Vega on 4.4623 GHz. Kent, one of the main scientists, finds a better frequency to receive the signal on and re-tunes to 8.9247 GHz. There were a few helicopters that flew in military and government personnel once the scientists verified that they had found something significant.

With the help of several nations, the U.S. began constructing a transportation machine using detailed instructions that were discovered in the signals coming from Vega. This caused a lot of controversy which ended with the destruction of the machine and killed many people. However, S.R. Hadden, a billionaire industrialist who lives on his own airliner, was secretly building an identical replacement in Japan. Dr. Arroway was selected to go in the second pod. During a heavy rain storm, she was flown to a carrier boat where the plane landed vertically on it's landing platform. The boat then transported her to the transportation pod.

The ending of the movie was good but I will let you be the judge to decide what really happened.