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Contact (film): Difference between revisions
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* [[Arc Words]]: "If it was only us, that would be an awful waste of space."
* [[Armies Are Evil]]: National Security Advisor Michael Kitz comes closest to filling this role.
** [[Word of God|The director stated he had fun with this character]]. In ''[[ET the Extraterrestrial (Film)|ET the Extraterrestrial]]'' he'd be a [[Card
* [[Asshole Victim]]: {{spoiler|Dr. Drumlin.}} In the novel, he {{spoiler|died saving Ellie, causing greatly mixed feelings in her.}} He was still a jerk, but she remembers that [[I Wished You Were Dead|she wished he was dead]].
* [[Based
** Until we've {{spoiler|calculated sufficiently down into pi}}, we won't know.
* [[Benevolent Precursors]]: The Vegans. They've been doing this for a ''long'' time. {{spoiler|It's actually played straight ''twice'', because even the Vegans don't know who built the transportation network they're using.}}
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* [[Jumped At the Call]]: Humanity eagerly jumps to the challenge of building the Machine, despite the cost mounting in the Trillions. Its even admitted during the first test, they ''still'' don't know what it'll actually do.
* [[Knight Templar]]: The [[Blond Guys Are Evil|blond-haired]] fundamentalist {{spoiler|who blows up the first FTL device with a [[Suicide Attack]].}}
** [[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 transmission -- the speech is Hitler opening the 1936 Olympics, which would have been the first strong [[Aliens Steal Cable|TV signal sent into space]]. Sending it back is simply their way of showing the message was received. But that doesn't stop the Neo-Nazis from believing "Hitler lives".
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* [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]]: The Vegans, arguably. {{spoiler|"It's been done this way for millions of years." Although it's heavily implied, all throughout the film, that they know what they're doing and are benevolent.}}
* [[Only Known By Their Nickname]]: The Vegans. They aren't from Vega at all, as is pointed out that the system is far too young to have created life. Its just that one of the hubs for their [[Portal Network]] is located there, which is how they became aware of humanity's presence.
* [[One
* [[Place Beyond Time]]: The Machine loosely fits this trope.
* [[Playing Against Type]]: David Morse as a character who isn't a hardass or a villain, but a loving father?
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* [[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.
* [[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 2 scientist colleagues at SETI
* [[They Should Have Sent a Poet]] (former [[Trope Namer]]): As well as the awe-inspiring sequence that contains the page quote -- a staggering symphony of visual effects and music built around Jodie Foster's note-perfect performance -- the movie opens with a amazing[[Epic Tracking Shot|pullback]] that, starting from Earth orbit, proceeds to give you the faintest hint of just how INCREDIBLY HUGE the universe is, complete with a kind of audio time-travel, backwards through the history of broadcasting as the signal travels away from Earth at the speed of light.
* [[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.
* [[What Year Is This?]]:
{{quote| '''Ellie Arroway:''' What day is this?<br />
'''Mission Control:''' I'm sorry, did you say "what day"?<br />
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'''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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