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The movie focuses pretty heavily on a Christian or at least monotheistic God, and the book has some different depictions of gods and how humanity relates to the

The movie focuses pretty heavily on a Christian or at least monotheistic God, and the book has some different depictions of gods and how humanity relates to them. Hadden is the most obvious: a maybe immortal man, living in the sky, who saves the plot with a deus ex machina. I remember Hadden having built a theme park/commune in a jungle somewhere which had polytheistic and maybe sacrificial elements. The protagonist discovers that existence is neatly ordered, down to the digits of pi. It's not proselytizing, but it looks at how humans react to higher powers, whether they're called aliens or faith or gods. It's a skeptic's inspection of the humanness of belief and faith.

Mithaldu 11y ago
I didn't read the book, only watched the movie. And i am saying quite seriously: Until i read the post above i did not see anything religious in the movie. Whatsoever. I do realize that this is highly likely to be due to being not an american and coming instead from a culture where religion is looked upon as at most a hobby, something a vanishingly small percentage of people spend time on and even less take seriously. Thus: Interpreter matters. Whether Contact manages to touch on religion at all is highly dependant on the subjectivitiy of whoever watches the movie.
- slg 11y ago
  The religious aspect of the movie wasn't some deeply masked symbolism. It was right on the surface. The two main characters of the film were a scientists and a reverend who had multiple debates about faith and the existence of god. Then the climax of the movie is when their roles are reversed and the scientist is the one asking for people's faith to believe her without any physical evidence.
  - avar 11y ago
    There's the evidence of her having recorded many hours of static after the pod fell for a few seconds.
    - rquantz 11y ago
      Yes, the movie on the surface seemed to end on a note of ambiguity, but it in fact resolved in favor of science.

Mithaldu 11y ago

I didn't read the book, only watched the movie. And i am saying quite seriously: Until i read the post above i did not see anything religious in the movie. Whatsoever. I do realize that this is highly likely to be due to being not an american and coming instead from a culture where religion is looked upon as at most a hobby, something a vanishingly small percentage of people spend time on and even less take seriously. Thus: Interpreter matters. Whether Contact manages to touch on religion at all is highly dependant on the subjectivitiy of whoever watches the movie.

slg 11y ago
The religious aspect of the movie wasn't some deeply masked symbolism. It was right on the surface. The two main characters of the film were a scientists and a reverend who had multiple debates about faith and the existence of god. Then the climax of the movie is when their roles are reversed and the scientist is the one asking for people's faith to believe her without any physical evidence.
- avar 11y ago
  There's the evidence of her having recorded many hours of static after the pod fell for a few seconds.
  - rquantz 11y ago
    Yes, the movie on the surface seemed to end on a note of ambiguity, but it in fact resolved in favor of science.