Tonight's MovieMovie: Contact Starring Jodie Foster & Matthew McConaughey
Posted 11.17.12 by BrentJS
"See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other."
There are very few movies that can claim to have been conceived by a scientist, let alone a Public Welfare Medal recipient — the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences — but Contact is one of them. Originally pitched as a film treatment by astrophysicist, cosmologist and author Carl Sagan in the early '80s, Contact became a novel when the movie became mired in development hell. Years later, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the movie and hired Robert Zemeckis to direct it.
Contact is based on the work of the real-life Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, which uses scientific methods to scan the cosmos for electromagnetic radiation that could indicate extraterrestrial transmissions. Two-time Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster (The Accused, Silence of the Lambs) stars as Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway (Jodie Foster), a scientist who works for SETI at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. On the verge of being shut down, SETI receives a transmission from the star Vega that includes technical schematics for a machine or craft of some sort. The nations of the world fund the building of the machine, which they hope will allow us to contact whoever sent the signal. However, not everyone is happy with the prospect of humanity making "contact" with aliens. Matthew McConaughey, William Fichter, Angela Bassett, Tom Skerritt and James Woods also star.
Make Contact TonightMovies nightly on Reelz, check listings
Contact | Jodie Foster | Matthew McConaughey | Robert Zemeckis | Movie Trailer | Review