Poster for the movie "Time-Lapse Contact"
Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring judy Foster and Matthew McConaughey, the science fiction film Contact In Time was released in 1997 and is based on the famous novel "Contact" by American astronomer Carl Sagan. Before "Timeless Contact", Robert Zemeckis had already made the inspirational classic "Forrest Gump", and Judy Foster twice won the Oscar for "Raging Pear Blossom" and "The Silence of the Lambs", it can be said that on the basis of production, cass and script, this movie has occupied a lot of innate advantages.
Ellie in the movie "Timeless Contact"
The film mainly tells the story of Ellie, a girl who has been obsessed with radio since childhood, and grew up to become an astronomer, obsessed with finding space signals that can prove the existence of civilizations in outer space. By chance, she received a signal from the Vega galaxy, a discovery that caused a sensation around the world, and then a steady stream of extraterrestrial messages came, and after cracking the message, humans created a space-time machine. As a representative of humanity, Ellie boarded the machine, and during the subsequent time-travel, she met her dead father.
"Contact", by Carl Sagan, translated by Yu Bei, Guomai Culture | Shanghai Science and Technology Literature Publishing House, February 2022.
The original novel is widely involved, involving rich knowledge of physics, astronomy, religion and history, and in the film, these knowledge theories that support the novel are simplified to varying degrees, along with the background of the protagonist Ellie. In the movie, the audience only knows that Ellie lost her father when she was a teenager and grew up alone. In the opening minutes of the film, Ellie as a teenager practices using radio in the company of her father.
The novel has a more detailed description of Ellie's life. Ellie has been close to her father since childhood, loves nature, and is full of curiosity about everything. Two years after his father's death, his mother remarried with his stepfather. In Ellie's view, what her mother did was undoubtedly a betrayal of her dead father and herself. In the process of constantly trying to get rid of her new family, Ellie developed an independent personality, and relying on this independence, she realized her childhood dream and occupied an important place in the male-dominated astronomy industry.
It is difficult to say that the existence and death of her father was not the key to opening the door to Ellie's growth, and her father's gentle character in life affected Ellie, and his death was both traumatic and powerful for Ellie. This is why, the most important part of the film and novel is that the alien civilization reads all the information from Ellie, who is in a timeless space, and chooses to talk to Ellie in the form of her father. Because no matter how far civilizations develop, or how different languages are needed to communicate, how much technology is used to approach each other across time and space, in this way, only the unforgettable love buried in the depths of memory is the common language, and Carl Sagan's alien civilization knows this well and chooses to use the embodiment of love to get close to Ellie.
When Ellie returns from a time-travel, the indifferent part of her body begins to disintegrate, and she tries to save her relationship with her mother, only to learn that her mother has died. In a letter left to her by her mother, Ellie learns a secret that has been hidden for years: her current stepfather is her biological father, and her dead father knows her origins, conceals it, and raises her until her death. Even though Carl Sagan reveals Ellie's life in this way at the end of the novel, she has also completed a person's retrospective of her own spirit, achieving a sense of "ring closure", "She has been trying to contact the most distant and strange alien races, but she has almost no contact with people in life." She is committed to debunking other people's creation myths, but she does not know that the core of her life is also a lie; she has spent her whole life studying the universe, but ignoring the clearest message in it: the vastness of the universe can only be endured by love for small creatures like us."
Stills from the movie Interstellar
Stills from the movie "Star Quest"
If a film is measured by so-called awards and honors, "Time-Space Contact", which has almost no success that year, may only be subservient, but the theme of using the universe to carry human love in the film has been continued in many future science fiction films, including both fictional parts and unconfirmed historical details. For example, in the movie "The First Man on the Moon", based on the life of American astronaut Neil Armstrong, in order to commemorate his dead daughter, Armstrong threw his daughter's bracelet on the far side of the moon when he landed on the moon. Christopher Nolan, a director who is respected by fans, used a sci-fi shell in the movie "Interstellar" to tell the love of a father and daughter that transcend time and space and the universe. In recent years, in James Gray's 2019 star quest, Brad Pitt plays an emotionally handicapped space engineer who lost his father as a child and is tasked with finding his father, who disappeared twenty years ago. It was during this interstellar journey that he began to fill the spiritual void created by the lack of fatherly love, a journey that was both an adventure and a process of self-healing.
Karl Sagan, author of Contact
Back to the original author, Carl Sagan, who is both an astronomer, writer, physicist, and cosmologist, and Contact was published in 1984, a symbolic year in the history of literature in which George Orwell's novel 1984 predicted that the world would be divided between three superpowers and placed under totalitarian rule. Carl Sagan in this novel completed during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union has created a more ideal world, the message of space civilization gives different races and cultures of human beings the opportunity to shake hands and make peace, the countries led by the United States and the Soviet Union have shifted from confrontation to cooperation, and in addition to Ellie, there are four representatives from different countries who participate in this time-travel. Lenovo Carl Sagan deliberately crossed the cordon of a nuclear test site in 1986 to protest U.S. nuclear research, and Contact seems to support his vision of a more peaceful and united humanity and even a cosmic world. Even when he imagined an unknown space civilization, he did not portray it as a colonizer who wanted to conquer the earth, but rather as the protector of the universe, the enlightenment of the future civilization of mankind—as evidenced by their ability to communicate with humans in the language of love alone.
Carl Sagan died in 1996, and when Contact In 1997 was released, he paid tribute to him with "Dedicated to Carl" at the end of the film. After more than two decades, when wars are frequent and the epidemic has not subsided, the plight of mankind is still glued, and perhaps Carl Sagan's vision will be realized one day, but I am afraid that it will not be today, nor tomorrow.