Contact (1997) * FULL LENGTH REACTION
Added 2024-06-19 15:00:11 +0000 UTCI'm ok to go!
The winner of the latest Patreon poll... and based on a novel by the one and only Carl Sagan!!
What a fantastic dive into a possible first contact, and a great showcase of human behaviour 🤣😭
It felt so incredibly real. How people would react, what people would do, what some government would do. I love how passionate Ellie and Kent and their team are! They aren't doing it for fame and glory, but because they are curious.
Seeing Ellie's childhood is brief, but so impactful. Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
The dialogue is concise throughout and the characters' actions tell us so much about them.
Overall, a great sci-fi movie that is more than just aliens, it's a display of humanity :D
For this style of reaction, you need your own copy to watch the movie. Also know there is an extension that allows you to do Picture-in-Picture in case you are interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picture-in-picture-extens/hkgfoiooedgoejojocmhlaklaeopbecg?hl=en
- Vero 🤩👽🎧
Thank you so much everyone for your support, I couldn't do this without you 🥰
Comments
Oh you know Jodie also played "Nell" a very unusual character who doesn't know civilization(?) She's a different version of Forrest Gump - actually totally different. All of the electromagnetic waves (or spectrum) include visible light and ultraviolet and infrared, etc. Radio is part of that and it's on one end, the long frequency waves end. The other side are very short waves, gamma radiation which are very powerful, more energetic. Microwaves are next to radio waves, and on the opposite side X-rays are before gamma rays. All electromagnetic waves (radiation) travel at the speed of light. Here's a good one for use in science fiction... If you could ride a spaceship at the speed of light... all of the electromagnetic radiation ahead of you will get compressed into shorter and shorter wavelengths until they become gamma radiation which will be lethal. You will be cooked if you look ahead of you. But what about if you look behind? You know a black hole is something that light cannot escape out of - the proper way of saying it is that "space is warped" by the gravity of the enormous mass of the black hole such that "paths in space" all lead into the black hole - so that light follows warped space curving into the black hole - there is no path that leads outside and so there is no path for light to escape. Okay so if you travel at the speed of light and look behind you, you'll be looking at a black hole. Because light from any objects behind you can't catch up to you because you're traveling at the speed of light... therefore everything behind you is basically a black hole. Oh and it's basically impossible to accelerate to the speed of light in our physics - so this would be done in science fiction through some future tech. Ahead of you all radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum becomes compressed to lethal doses. And there is also what they call Hawking radiation which comes out of a black hole - it's theoretical but you'd be stuck next to a black hole while you're traveling and you'd be bathed in Hawking radiation as well and so you'd be cooked from both directions. Very cool right? Might have to create a mechanism like a warp bubble to be protected from all this radiation. I have lots of science-bits like this, I could give you one a week and I'd never run out 😊
Mannygogou
2024-06-25 04:19:35 +0000 UTCOh it's definitely not her imagination haha. I love space and how mind-blowingly, incomprehensibly massive it is! Do you have any stories that you can/want to share? It's always nice to see what others think of in terms of storytelling/worldbuilding. I feel like Jodie Foster plays smart characters, but it would be interesting to see her play a completely different one too! I'm going to have to look into radio signals, that's something that I don't know much about. Thanks for everything you said, I really enjoyed reading it all!!!
Verowak
2024-06-25 01:14:37 +0000 UTCI have no idea what that is supposed to mean or be from 🤣
Verowak
2024-06-25 01:09:34 +0000 UTCto explain to people why I spend so much time following all these scientific breakthroughs and listening to all these podcasts, lectures, documentaries I had to say I'm a would-be science-fiction writer. I like to understand scientific concepts well enough to explain them at a high level and so that I can in turn fictionalize them... for fun stories you know. I'm not actually smart and a mediocre writer... but it's so much fun following technology and science 😊😄 Jodie Foster is super smart. She was in movies such as Searching For Bobby Fisher, Panic Room, Silence of the Lambs, Taxi Driver... right? An interlaced signal is the old TV broadcast system... where a frame of video is writing every other scanline (odd lines) and a 2nd frame is needed to write the other alternate half of the scanlines (even lines). So you need 2 to complete one frame. In computer processing, the gap of time when the TV tube finishes writing a scanline at the right of the screen and moves to the left to begin the next scan, that time is called the horizontal interrupt, it's not a lot of time. And the gap when the frame is completed at the lower right, the electron gun picks up to start again from the upper left and this is the vertical interrupt. Most of this is true 😊
Mannygogou
2024-06-23 05:25:22 +0000 UTCthis is basically a classic. Like you said, Forrest Gump in space 😊 I've watched so much astronomy content, listened to Science Friday every week (back then). One of the things you come to understand is how big... how mind bogglingly big the universe is. In that opening - that was great how you figured out the radio transmissions from Earth was "noise" which got quieter and quieter the farther out it goes. It is a sphere of radio signals traveling outward at the speed of light. Anyway, the opening beyond the "radio noise" where the camera flies farther and farther out into the endless cosmos, that is also a representation of how big the universe is out there - the normal person starts getting panicky at this sequence but then cinematically it ends up in Ellie's eye and people breathe a sigh of relief thinking "whew!, I'm glad it was just in her imagination!" No, no... that was not imagination, that is a representation of the enormous space and distances out there between galaxies and clusters of galaxies and etc... It's enough to get anyone panicky 🙂 if the truth were known it would blow minds. Wrestling with these enormous truths of cosmology!
Mannygogou
2024-06-23 04:42:19 +0000 UTC@Verowak. If this is your first Tom Skerritt, then, “I feel the need, the need for speed!”
James Hadden
2024-06-21 22:50:59 +0000 UTCThe build up is definitely more grounded, which makes it a breath of fresh air, after seeing a lot of other sci-fi handle it so differently 🤣 The Silence of the Lambs is on my list of movies to watch, though I hear Jodie Foster isn't in the next one(s?) for some reason
Verowak
2024-06-21 13:04:38 +0000 UTCUsage of real presidents doesn't bother me. I also have no idea when what president was in office, so it doesn't give me a timeframe for the movie. The old school computers date the movie way more to me lol I don't know what the reasons for using the actual president instead of casting an actor is. Sometimes it makes it seem more real to people that are watching it when it releases since the president in the movie is actually the current president.
Verowak
2024-06-21 13:03:00 +0000 UTCYou and me both! 😁
Verowak
2024-06-21 12:58:44 +0000 UTCIt must have been great to see it in theatres!! And thank you :D
Verowak
2024-06-21 12:58:32 +0000 UTCI've heard the name John Hurt a lot. I'll have to see more of him so I can know who he is when people mention him. This is the first I hear of Tom Skerritt, but he played that hatable character so well
Verowak
2024-06-21 12:58:17 +0000 UTCI watched this, and it is so interesting to see an expert's view on it!!! Thank you for that
Verowak
2024-06-21 12:53:38 +0000 UTCI went through his filmography since he looked familiar but I had no idea why. He's been in a lot of great movies!!! It turns out he was in Armageddon, so I guess that's where I saw him from. "Black Hawk Down" and "Heat" are both movies I want to see!
Verowak
2024-06-21 12:48:18 +0000 UTCI really like this movie. Because most of it is the build up to the first contact it feels more grounded to me than a lot of sci-fi, even if the climax is out there. My favourite Jodie Foster movie is simple - The Silence of the Lambs. I also thought she was great in The Brave One. I recently picked up Bugsy Malone in the hope I still enjoy it as much as I did as a kid.
James Hadden
2024-06-20 19:14:48 +0000 UTCNice to see Uncle Steve (RIP) putting his money to good use lol
James Hadden
2024-06-20 15:58:02 +0000 UTCDefinitely a favourite of mine. Love movies that engage me both emotionally and intellectually!
Laxjedi
2024-06-20 15:16:38 +0000 UTCI was the person who actually suggested this, and it ended up winning, so that was cool. Obviously, I like this movie. That said, there *are* some nitpicks I have about it. One of them being that I wish they didn't use the Bill Clinton footage throughout the movie. I feel like it was a distraction, and only served to date the story. (There was actually some controversy about using Clinton at the time of the movie's release. It made it seem like a sitting President was participating in or endorsing a movie he had no part of.) I know that they had just pulled similar tricks with Zemeckis's previous movie, Forrest Gump. But I feel like that was an entirely different situation. In those cases, the usage of the presidents was played up for comedy. Also, that movie was *supposed* to be dated; the presidents helped us peg the particular era that Forrest was living through in that moment of the story. That said, I'm glad you liked the movie. Also, it's interesting that the usage of Clinton didn't seem to distract or faze you.
WastedPo
2024-06-20 12:54:23 +0000 UTCCool movie. Saw it in the theater. Great reaction from you. Thank you.
Carl Evans
2024-06-20 05:54:12 +0000 UTCI enjoyed your reaction. I'm glad you went into it not knowing beforehand about the film. Actors Tom Skerritt (Drumlin) and John Hurt (Hadden) worked together years earlier in Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror fillm, "Alien". Tom Skerritt was the lead in an early David E. Kelley tv series, "Picket Fences", as the small town sheriff. He, his family, and the community dealt with issues that mirrored the greater social issues of the day. Skerritt won an Emmy award for Outstanding Lead Actor for his role in 1993.
ButtercupsTrueLove
2024-06-19 22:50:48 +0000 UTCThere are a lot of scientific inaccuracies with this film. An Astrophysicist, Dr. Becky Smethurst breaks them down, here is the link if anyone is interested. Great film with a brilliant reaction Verowak to one of my favourite films https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfRGIhrWWFI&t=253s
William
2024-06-19 17:23:03 +0000 UTCLooking forward to your watchalong after running errands today. I know that the character Kent is played by William Fichtner (hope I spelled his name correctly), a remarkable actor who seems to be cast in memorable supporting roles rather than leads. He played the team leader of the Army's Delta Force unit in Ridley Scott's true life war film "Black Hawk Down" and the villainous businessman in Michael Mann's crime thriller "Heat".
ButtercupsTrueLove
2024-06-19 15:38:12 +0000 UTC
