Contact: A Movie Review

 By Ravindra Loomba

Contact is based on the book by Carl Sagan. From a ham radio enthusiast the young heroine  turns into a professional astronomer after she grows up. She is part of SETI, you see.She lives among rows of large dish antennas and room full of scopes. She and her friends are looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. Her doting father dies of a heart attack while she was a young girl.

One lucky day she receives unusual signals from outer space. These are accompanied by detailed design for a machine which will create a doorway to the unknown alien intelligence. A rich man named Hayden helps her understand the documents. When the plan to build that machine becomes public, there are protests from religious groups. One religious fanatic is on a suicide mission. He infiltrates SETI  and blows up the machine as it is nearing completion! Fortunately, the government has an identical copy of that machine elsewhere. 

The machine takes our heroine through a series of wormholes after which she descends on a beach with a posture that seems like she is in bed. On the beach she has unusual experience of seeing a small galaxy just above her head which is surrounded by a transparent medium like a pool of placid water! A ripple goes towards the center of the galaxy when she gently touches that medium.

Then a flickering shadow approaches her from a distance. As it gets near she realizes that it is her dad. She is overwhelmed to see him. She asks him if this is where people go after they die and he answers that some do. She has many more questions but the father says 'small steps' and the visit ends. She is instantaneously transported backto her machine module that has remained where it was built…

At the special hearing held to brief her seniors, she has difficult time convincing people that she had that experience because all that the observers saw was her module descending into the sea a few minutes after it was started. Doubts are raised about rich Hayden's involvement and whether whole thing was fake. But the young lady is adamant that she did have that experience and it is not a drug induced hallucination. 

They also notice 16 hours of static on the recording device..

I wish Carl Sagan would send us a signal from the other dimension to confirm his story..

Note: The information received from alien intelligence also has news from the time of Hitler. I have forgotten the details...