YMMV / Contact

YMMV tropes and audience reactions for the 1997 film Contact:

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Even in-universe, nobody's sure what Hadden was really after, especially considering how close to death he was. Money? A charitable contribution to mankind's future? Manipulation for its own sake? Scientific discovery? All of the above?
  • Drumlin is very politically savvy and much of what he does lampoons Ellie. However he never does anything bad and unlike Ellie, who is very condescending to those (meaning just about everyone else) who don't understand the science as well as she does, he is very good at explaining things so regular people can understand. It's as if Sagan separately identified the two aspects of himself; the personable lecturer and the passionate scientist. Without the connection to humanity he would be as arrogant as Ellie, without the science he would be as cynical about the universe as Drumlin.
  • Kitz is the National Security Advisor. He would be blatantly derelict in his duties if he wasn't skeptical and cautious about everything going on. It is a theme of the movie of course, but Ellie puts a lot of faith in the aliens.
• Anvilicious: When the international committee is interviewing Drumlin and Ellie in order to decide which one goes through the machine, the question of religion comes up. Ellie honestly says she is an atheist, while Drumlin portrays himself as deeply religious. Afterwards Ellie confronts Drumlin in private as she knows him enough to know he's not religious. Drumlin flat out says he told the committee members what they wanted to hear. Aaand then Joseph the fundie sneaks into the Machine — with Drumlin too much of a coward to test it himself, and too much of a glory hound to be paying attention to his lackeys — and blows him up. He got into bed with religion to win at all costs, and religion killed him via suicide bomber — so either the dangers of fundamentalism itself or the dangers of trying to use such elements for personal gain. Subtle Zemeckis is not.
• Broken Aesop: The movie ends with Ellie being interrogated by Congress after the device seemingly fails with nothing other than her faith to assure her that what she experienced in the alleged 18 hours she travelled through space and time was not a hallucination. (And it later turns out she was right). While this would normally be an Aesop on how sometimes you can't always rely on empirical evidence to find truth, the fact is Ellie had nothing BUT faith that the aliens had nothing but benevolent intentions and defended her assertation with the same zeal as a religious zealot. There's also the fact that the previous two hours was the audience being beaten over the head that people who base their worldview on faith are either morons, hypocrites, or violent extremists.
• Designated Hero: Palmer can come off every bit as unhelpful and obstructive of Ellie as Kitz or Drumlin, for both unscientific and selfishly personal reasons, but gets away with it because he's the Love Interest.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Ellie starts doing her research from the Arecibo Observatory, the home of what was the largest reflector radio telescope in the world (at least until 2016, when it was surpassed the facility in Guizhou, China). Sadly, the telescope is no more. It sustained structural damage from Hurricane Maria in 2017 and earthquakes in 2019 and 2020. Later, it ended up collapsing on December 1st, 2020, shortly after the announcement that it would be dismantled.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When the Vegan first walks towards Ellie, his blurry form bears a strong resemblance to the DRR DRR DRR creature.
  • If the film is really taking place around the time it was made, Hadden's trip to Mir oddly predicted Dennis Tito's visit to the ISS 3 years later.
  • Matthew McConaughey is in this film, and seventeen years later, it would be his turn to take a ride through a wormhole. Honest Trailers even lampshaded it, dubbing the film "Christopher Nolan's Contact".
  • During the opening trip through the solar system, the chorus from the disco standard "Boogie Oogie Oogie" is played at the exact same time we see the planet Mars. This is somewhat funnier after The Martian, with the running gag that the only music left with Mark Watney on Mars is disco.
  • The word "vegan" means a whole different thing 23 years later, so modern audiences are apt to be confused by this film's use of it and wonder why the characters are mispronouncing it (vea-gan vs. vee-gin). What, the aliens don't eat meat? Well, good for them!
• Memetic Mutation: First Rule of Government Spending; Why build one when you can build two at twice the price?^Explanation Hadden's quote may show up whenever someone complains about excess government spending
  • "They should have sent a poet" tends to crop up whenever someone is otherwise in Stunned Silence by something they find awe-inspiring.
• Narm: When Drumlin says Ellie won't be taken seriously as a scientist with her SETI work, she shouts back "So what?! It's my life!", a line that makes her sound more like a petulant teenager than a grown-up scientist^note Admittedly, there is a bit of It Makes Sense in Context here; Drumlin is portrayed as basically eliminating any project having to do with Ellie searching for intelligent life, as if he is attempting to force her to work in the field(s) he wants her to.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Hitler speech video. The noise from the message is in sync with the chanting "Seig Heil! Seig Heil! Seig Heil..."
• One-Scene Wonder: Unsurprisingly, John Hurt sells the Hell out of his two scenes as S.R. Hadden.
  • Jake Busey is absolutely chilling in his small role as Joseph, the religious fanatic who destroys the first transport in a suicide bombing.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Most people recognize the film due to its high-profile Troubled Production as well as the negative publicity surrounding then-president Bill Clinton making an unauthorized cameo as well as those of real-life CNN personalities.
• Retroactive Recognition: Jena Malone as young Ellie in the flashbacks to her childhood.
• Strawman Has a Point: Kitz is a total jerkass, but when you think of it, his fears aren't that stupid as they sound in context. At one point he even asks Ellie directly about why she thinks the aliens must be benign.
  • Near the end of the book, Ellie starts to wonder if she has been selling him short. Given that personal experience vs. objective evidence is a major theme of the book, this portrayal may be deliberate.
    • In the movie, it comes full circle: Kitz discovers definitive evidence that the aliens are real, but suppresses it to maintain the status quo. But he also gives Ellie a blank check for future SETI research. He's a politician - he's playing all the angles.
  • During a debate on whether the aliens sending the signal might be hostile, Ellie opines that sending this signal to harm the people of Earth would be "like killing a bunch of microbes on an anthill in Africa." Drumlin calmly counters, rightly, that the argument swings both ways: "And how guilty would you feel about killing a bunch of microbes on an anthill in Africa?"
• Tear Jerker: All of Ellie's backstory, especially when her father dies suddenly.
  • During the backstory, while Ellie talks with her dad about making contact with faraway places, she asks if they can contact her deceased mother. Her dad solemnly says that even the most powerful radio in the world can't reach that far. After her dad's funeral, the flashback ends with her desperately trying to contact him in vain.
    Ellie: Dad, this is Ellie, come back?
• Technology Marches On: Sagan lampshades this in the "Author's Note" section.
  My fondest hope for this book is that it will be made obsolete by the pace of real scientific discovery.

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YMMV tropes and audience reactions for the 2006 video game Contact:

• Good Bad Bugs: A double-edged one — your Stat Grinding is supposed to have diminishing returns as you outlevel the enemies, but the Anti-Slash stat erroneously scales this to the Slash stat instead of to itself. So if you knew this in advance you could max out Anti-Slash against the crabs on the first island, by making sure not to hold a blade until then. If you didn't know this, you might find this one defensive trait inescapably locked at a pitifully low level and never know why.

• Scrappy Mechanic: Terry recharges one EP if he kills two enemies between skill uses (three if he started with 0). There is no other way to recharge EP. This makes EP very hard to come by and all skills feel Too Awesome to Use at any time other than when you're maxed out (at a paltry 5 points) and don't want to waste the recharge.

• Unintentional Period Piece: The Professor's vocabulary and occasional meme reference are strikingly mid-2000s. "Weaksauce, as they say."