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NOTES |
This film is
about a real place and real people (see below), an
institution which is dedicated to listening to space. One day
they receive signals from a distant star.
The film concentrates on the radio astronomer who leads the
team of scientists working for S.E.T.I.... (search for
extraterrestrial intelligence). This is not Independence Day
but a film about realised characters asking significant
questions both scientific and theological.
One of the scientific team is blind (Kent Clark in the film) and
is based on one of the workers at S.E.T.I., the physicist, Kent
Cullers. In fact he was going to play himself until the part was
expanded.
Damon Rose writes:
"The interesting thing about it is that we don't know the
character is blind until right near the end - and even then its just
with a quick flash of a white cane, no big deal is made of it at all
(apart from a later clichT super sense reference when our blind
character can hear something that the others don't hear).
So, yeah, the framing, the scenes, the contexts don't allow us
to realise that he's blind - we only find out 2 hours into this 2.20
mins film. "
I've just seen this film and the first ten minutes lived up to my
expectations but then the tone changed. I had expected a
serious, well-acted portrayal of a scientific community on the
edge of discovery. Instead the dedicated and obsessed young girl
become the woman scientist who battles against the
administration. Then there is a one-night stand with an ex-
priest only there for plot purposes later on. Kent Clark, the
blind character, we're aware of straight away in the
handshake between him and Jodie Foster's character. He
then becomes the blind person with exceptional hearing yet is
still pushed to the edge of the events.
This is partly because Foster's character is the focus
throughout and hardly anyone else gets a look-in. Tom
Skerritt plays the administrator who steals her thunder.
James Woods is the security chief who pops in and out. And
John Hurt is the mysterious financier. None of these characters is
developed.
In no time at all Foster's discovery becomes a media
jamboree in the way that so many films broaden their horizon
showing clips from CNN and others and neglect the essential
drama. It gets worse. After a lightening quick decipher of the
'aliens' message done in the usual Hollywood style by a flash
of inspiration and not hard work the film broadens out into the
building of a 'space craft'.
By this time I'd lost sight of the people involved. From this
point, especially the court of inquiry and 'twist' ending, the
inspiration and imagination has disappeared. The tone at the
beginning that this was science fact has changed totally to
science fiction. The problem is that we, the audience, know
there has been no 'contact' with aliens. But the film tries to
convince that this is a 'maybe'. Yet by the end Foster's
character comes over as little more than one of those 'nutters'
who claim to have been abducted by aliens. Science has
been replaced by belief, and the atheist Foster has been
converted.
Zemeckis, the director, was also responsible for "Back to the
Future" and "Forrest Gump". The former good entertainment
without the presumption that time travel is probable or
possible. And it is a pity that a work of fiction (Sagan's) has
been set in a real scientific institute. Everyone else I have
read on the film disagrees totally with my views. But then I
didn't like Forrest Gump either.
n.b.
Hadden, the mysterious financier dies from cancer.
But for more on the real fascinating S.E.T.I. and the real
people who work in this field go to
After the novel by Carl Sagan.
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