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{{quote|''"Some kind of celestial event. No... no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! [[They Should Have Sent a Poet|They should have sent a poet.]] So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea."''|'''Dr. Arroway'''}}
'''''Contact''''' is a movie [[The Film of the Book|based on]] astronomer [[Carl Sagan]]'s [[Contact (Literature)|novel of the same name]], although in an odd case, Sagan wrote it first for the screen, then turned it into a book after it ended up in [[Development Hell]]. Unlike most Hollywood science fiction adaptations, this attempted to stay true to the original and get the science right. Sagan died before the film was finished, so we don't know what he would have thought of it.
Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" [[Meaningful Name|Arroway]] ([[Jodie Foster]]) is a driven yet gifted scientist on the [[Absent Aliens|failing]] SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, who confounds her critics when a powerful signal is received from Vega, 26 light years away. The signal is encoded with technical instructions for building a [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]] device which can send a single ambassador to the stars. The film explores issues of science vs. faith, and [[If Jesus, Then Aliens|whether the two are mutually exclusive]].
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Not to be confused with the unrelated game ''[[Contact (video game)|Contact]]'' or the trope [[First Contact]].
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{{tropelist}}
▲* [[Alien Sky]]: The aliens create a beach based on the drawing Ellie drew as a child.
* [[Aliens Speaking English]]: Averted. The so-called 'Vegans' make contact with a signal based on mathematics. When the National Security Advisor asks why these [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]] don't just communicate in English, Arroway responds that 70% of Earth's population speak other languages. "Mathematics is the only true univeral language." Also the schematics for the FTL machine don't match up {{spoiler|until it's realised they're three-dimensional.}}
* [[Alternate Character Interpretation]]: Even in-universe, nobody's sure what Hadden was really after, especially {{spoiler|considering how close to death he was}}. Money? A charitable contribution to mankind's future? [[Manipulative Bastard|Manipulation for its own sake]]? Scientific discovery? All of the above?
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'''Constantine:''' What interests me is that {{spoiler|it recorded approximately eighteen hours of it}}.
'''Kitz:''' [''leans forward so he is looking directly in the camera''] That is interesting, isn't it? }}
* [[The Chessmaster]]: Hadden takes a ''very'' thorough interest in his long-term investments.
* [[Close on Title]]: The title card and the rest of the opening credits immediately precede the closing ones.
* [[Cyanide Pill]]: Jodie Foster's character is given a suicide pill to use if anything goes wrong, such as being marooned or an incomprehensible [[Fate Worse Than Death]]. According to the film, every NASA astronaut and test pilot is given one of these, for emergencies where dying quickly would be a mercy. In his book ''[[Apollo 13|Lost Moon]]'', Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell mentioned that this had been a rumor for some time, and that it was not
* [[Death Glare]]: Joseph at Elle.
* [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]]: Averted with Howard Hughes-expy S.R. Hadden, though even he implies he's not a saint.
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* [[Hollywood CB]]: The radio telescope Ellie builds.
* [[Hot Scientist]]: Dr. Eleanor Arroway.
* [[Humans Are Special]]: "You are an interesting species, that are capable of such [[Humans Are Good|wonderful dreams]] and such [[Humans Are
* [[Invisible President]]: News footage of Bill Clinton was expertly spliced into the film, much to the annoyance of the White House. Averted in the novelization, in which the President is a woman, and implied to not be the first.
* [[Ironic Echo]]: Elle brings up Occam's Razor (All things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one) to Palmer as an explanation of her skepticism. In the senate hearing at the end, Occam's Razor is brought up to Elle regarding the most likely explanation regarding her claims.
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** [[Not So Different|In some ways]] Ellie Arroway is this herself, except her cause is [[For Science!]].
* [[Mythology Gag]]: Sort of, Ellie speculates that the message could be the Tome One of an Encyclopedia Galactica, she also mentions the term ''Technological Adolescence'' both which are seen in Carl Sagan's series, ''[[Cosmos]]''.
* [[A Nazi by Any Other Name]]: There's a certain amount of alarm when the signal turns out to be a retransmitted television broadcast of [[Adolf Hitler]] giving a speech. Kitz even suggests it comes from [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens]] who find his views appealing. Cooler heads point out that aliens wouldn't understand the context of the
* [[New Tech Is Not Cheap]]: A terrorist attack destroys the first device. There are plans, but building the device was so expensive for the entire world that the prospect of building a second one (especially since it would invite yet another attack) is summarily dismissed. It is then that a second, backup device is revealed to have been built in secret. It is explained with the [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] line:
{{quote|"First rule of government spending: why build one, when you can build two, at twice the price? Only, this one can be kept secret. }}
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* [[Playing Against Type]]: David Morse as a character who isn't a hardass or a villain, but a loving father?
* [[Precursors]]: Whichever alien race built the [[Portal Network]]. {{spoiler|It wasn't the Vegans.}}
* [[
* [[Retired Monster]]: Possibly. Hadden has made enemies of a ''lot'' of people, industries, companies, and governments. One of the [[Magnificent Bastard|possible]] reasons why he is helping out with the Machine is to give something back to a world he has taken a lot from.
* [[Rule of Cool]]: The opening sequence shows a pull-back from Earth where we hear 10-year-old music before we've even left the solar system, completely missing the real propagation times for the radio signals, but it doesn't matter because it gets the message across so powerfully.
* [[Screw the Rules, I Have Money]]: Hadden thinks that rules and laws don't exactly apply to him... turns out he's right, but that's only because he owns half the damn planet.
* [[Stealth Pun]]: Buried in the [[Arc Words]]: "If it was only us, that would be an awful waste of space."
* [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien]]: This is the central conflict of the film. The main character is an atheist and believes in rational explanations for everything, but at the end her journey to the center of the galaxy is revealed to be in every respect a religious experience, where the alien beings are God.
* [[Surveillance Station Slacker]]: Basically Jodie Foster plays a protagonist version of this. See also her
* [[They Should Have Sent a Poet]] (former [[Trope Namer]]): As well as the awe-inspiring sequence that contains the page
* [[We Come in Peace, Shoot to Kill]]: It's suggested by Kitz that the machine might be a Trojan Horse doomsday device, meant to eliminate any potential rival civilization.
* [[Western Terrorist]]: Joseph.
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'''Ellie Arroway:''' How long was I gone?
'''Mission Control:''' [[Wham! Line|You didn't go anywhere.]] }}
* [[When Things Spin, Science Happens]]: The Machine is a giant gyroscope that generates a [[Our Wormholes Are Different|wormhole]] by spinning its rings at tremendous speed. The last ring is brought to speed via ''rocket propulsion''.
* [[Year Inside, Hour Outside]]: Dr. Arroway's trip through the [[Portal Network]], conversation with an alien, and return home seemingly took about 18 hours. But as it took less than a second as time is reckoned here on Earth, quite a few people ended up strongly doubting that she actually traveled anywhere at all, since no one on Earth saw Arroway's pod disappear and her recording equipment displayed only static. This suggests that what Arroway experienced was [[All Just a Dream]], {{spoiler|but unknown to her and the general public it turns out that the camera recorded a full eighteen hours of static.}}
* [[You Imagined It]]: Or Ellie's led to believe.
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