Contact 🎥 1997 Movie Info

Plot Summary

Dr. Ellie Arroway works for the SETI program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. She was inspired to pursue a career in science, starting with amateur radio, by her father, who died in her youth. Her work involves listening to radio emissions from space in the hopes of finding signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The program loses funding after David Drumlin, the President’s science advisor, deems it futile. However, Arroway receives financial support from S. R. Hadden, the secretive billionaire industrialist who runs Hadden Industries, which enables her to keep working at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Four years later, when Drumlin is about to terminate the SETI program at the VLA, Arroway discovers a signal containing a sequence of prime numbers originating from the star Vega. Drumlin and the National Security Council, headed by Michael Kitz, attempt to seize control of the facility. Arroway’s team discovers a video hidden within the signal: Adolf Hitler’s opening address at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. The Hitler transmission was the first to penetrate the Earth’s ionosphere and reach Vega. The project is put under security and its progress is monitored around the world. Arroway discovers the signal contains over 63,000 pages of encoded data, and Hadden provides her with the means to decode it.

The decoded data reveals schematics for a machine that may be a form of transportation for a single person. Multiple nations provide funding for the construction of the machine, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. An international panel will select a candidate to travel in the machine. Arroway is a leading candidate until the Christian philosopher Palmer Joss, a member of the panel with whom she briefly had a romantic relationship in Puerto Rico, draws attention to her atheism. The panel selects Drumlin.

Meet the Cast