Reflection Paper - Contact - Movie Review Example

Download file to see previous pages The paper "Movie Reflection Paper - Contact" provides a review of the film "Contact". The movie is about a young scientist who is obsessed with finding some kind of extra terrestrial being. She, Judie Foster, eventually become aware of signals that seems to be coming from the some non human living entities residing far in space on a planet called Vega. This discovery shocks the world and everyone is panicked to a certain extent. The message sent by the space being is decoded with the help of a rich billionaire, but eccentric, inventor. The message is about building a machine that can take a single person to the planet. After a long process one person is selected to take seat in the machine but after a blast the main character gets an opportunity to take the most important journey ever taken by a human being. The journey is quite eventful for the scientist but NASA could not verify anything she says to have experienced. Finally the whole world realizes that this was a hoax by the eccentric inventor who helped decipher the message of the space beings. But top government officials of USA found, in the end, that there was little proof for the experience of the scientist who travelled in the machine. In Contact we find many themes that are explained in our text book. When the world becomes aware of the existence of an extra terrestrial entity, a mass religious hysteria breaks out and many people come out with their own interpretation. Scientists attempt to explain the phenomenon by objective facts. while others think that this journey should not be taken as it will be a step against God. The reason behind the suicide bomb attack in the movie was also to stop the ‘ungodly’ actions of human beings. Other educated theologians believed that discovery of an intelligent species would straighten the idea of God. The Second Chapter of our text books talks about the non religious explanations of religion or religious beliefs. In the film too we can identify some of the explanations that are given in the text book. There seems to be an intellectual motivation for the theologian to believe in God because he thought that the discovery of a new intelligent being further ensures that a God exists. He was actually trying to explain and indentify the cause of the new being and in turn satisfying his intellectual thirst of inquisition. Many people do the same when encountering with complex phenomena that cannot have a rational justification. In the case of the movie Contact there was no rational explanation of how the intelligent specie came into existence and how did it acquire intelligence superior to human beings. When there seems no explanation then people associate it with supernatural beings, and this is what the theologian in the movie is doing. He is rationalizing the cause of existence of the nonhuman living species. There is another religious side in the movie. A religious extremist group’s leader argues that building of the machine is not moral because we are not sure whether the aliens believe in God or not. This may sound nonsensical to educated people but it is an extremely important dimension of the film. In the text book author explain that primitive people believed in rituals that had important social functions like sustaining peaceful family life, and preventing fights (37). Now the same idea is ...Download file to see next pagesRead More