10 Starry Facts About “Contact”

Marc Mancini and Mental_Floss present 10 Starry Facts About Contact.  Here are three of my favorites for a movie that I really like and feel is totally under-rated… [Beware of Spoilers!]

1. ITS OPENING SHOT SET AN INDUSTRY RECORD.

Contact begins with a close-up of our home planet. At first, a babel of ’90s radio broadcasts nearly deafens the audience. But as the camera pulls back and Earth grows smaller and smaller, iconic audio clips that were recorded 20, 30, and even 100 years ago greet our ears—only to fade seconds later. By the time our galaxy recedes into an endless cosmic backdrop, there’s nothing left but silence.

This is one of the most ambitious sequences in cinema history. The completely digital intro lasted for 4170 uninterrupted frames, making it the longest computer-generated shot that had ever appeared in a live-action film at the time. Great pains were taken to capture the look of deep space. On the special edition DVD commentary, visual effects supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum recalls getting started by gathering “absolutely incredible” Hubble snapshots of “distant galaxies and stars and other interstellar phenomenon … We laid out what we liked and said, ‘Okay, how can we pass through some of this? How can we combine it together into something [that’s] visually stunning?’”

Brilliant as it is, however, the moment ignores physical law. Just ask Neil deGrasse Tyson. If one could really overtake the radio signals, he argues, “you would hear them in reverse.” Still, the good doctor acknowledges that—for artistry’s sake—everything needed to sound intelligible. “[They] couldn’t have gotten it right and still had the scene work,” Tyson concedes, “so they had to do it the way they did.”

8. MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY REFUSED TO DELIVER A CERTAIN LINE. 
Late in the final script, McConaughey’s character—a self-described “man of the cloth without the cloth” named Palmer Joss—says “My God was too small.” Though Druyan really liked this line, McConaughey called it sacrilegious and wouldn’t say it. Later on, the two talked at length about faith and became good friends (despite differences of opinion).

9. NASA FLATLY DENIES ONE OF THE FILM’S INSINUATIONS. 
In the movie’s third act, a stunned Arroway receives a cyanide pill before entering the pod. According to Zemeckis, Sagan swore that this just-in-case practice was observed “on every single [NASA] mission.” However, Apollo 13 veteran James Lovell has dismissed the idea, writing “many people have asked me ‘Did you have suicide pills on board?’ We didn’t, and I never heard of such a thing in the 11 years I spent as an astronaut and a NASA executive.”