Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Great movie and a better book.

I was a bit pissed when I first watched it, because they made this huge deal of of the religion vs. science thing - which wasn't in the book so much. I've since mellowed, but still like the book better.


In the book they had this cool thing where the Jodie Foster character at the end of the story, turned the pattern detection computers toward looking for patterns in repeating decimal numbers. She found numbers that geometrically represented this huge circle, a few thousand places in to pi. She took this as proof that the universe was artificially created. (kind of like finding a serial number stamp). Really fascinating stuff.

Yeah, the movie kinda blew - casting Matthew McConaughey and Bill Clinton (from his own press conferences) were pretty huge mistakes. Robert "Back to the Future" Zemeckis was not the guy to do this material - it was pretty dumb for a movie about smart people.

Penn Jillette wrote a great rant about that movie, and how they trashed Carl's scientific idealism and replaced it with something that was the antithesis of everything he stood for. http://www.pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/excite/contact.html

The Carl Sagan angle got killed off in the movie executives offices when concerns were raised about selling a pro-science movie to a Midwest Christian audience.

Yeah, the good thing about this movie is that it got me to want to read the book. And yes, the book is far better, as is the case with most (all?) book vs. movie angles.
Besides, I just wanted to post to look at all the purty stars!

The movie doesn't quite do the book justice, but it does a pretty good job of conveying all the important themes and ideas. It's very artistic and has amazing sound design. Hard to believe it's been more than ten years since it came out. Guess I'm getting old.

*cinema *books

Adding video to channels (Books, Cinema) - requested by berticus.

*dead

This published video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by berticus.

berticus has fixed this video's dead embed code - no star awarded because berticus was awarded too recently.

It only takes half a day for radio waves to reach the outer solar system, so what we have here is some bad science. You'd have to travel much farther to go 'back in time' through radio history.

For all it's flaws, I still love this movie so very much.

oh, und *promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 10:21pm PST - promote requested by NicoleBee.

The Eagle Nebula is the wrong way round. In the video we're looking at it from behind when we've zoomed though it, so it should appear reversed, but it appears the same way round as it does when we view it from Earth.

*notdead

Invocations (notdead) cannot be called by vaporlock because vaporlock is not privileged - sorry.

And the Sun is much further out from the galactic centre than that, and the planets are much further apart. Artistic license be damned; this stuff would have been easy to get right.

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The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 3:12 - length declared by blutruth.