Both the movie and the original book are, IMO, great. The science in the book is possibly more consistent and is a 'better' story. I rewatch the movie about once every couple of years on average.
Oh my god dude, learn to figure shit out yourself instead of spamming your question in everyone's replies.
The second paragraph of the linked article tells you the year, main actress, and director of the movie, compare that to the movie described in your Wikipedia link to get the answer.
Yes, that’s the movie, and I think it’s worth watching. To compare it to a more modern movie, I think Arrival was inspired a fair bit by Contact. If Arrival is up your alley, you’ll probably like Contact too.
> To compare it to a more modern movie, I think Arrival was inspired a fair bit by Contact.
Do you think Chiang's story was based on Contact (movie or book), or only that the movie was? Neither of those seems likely to me—more just a case of two authors independently writing about similar themes than of direct inspiration—but I haven't seen Contact for some time, and never read the book.
I’ve only seen the movies, but my understanding is that they reasonably closely reflect the books, at least in terms of major themes and plot points. Based on timelines, my guess is that Chiang’s novella was inspired by Sagan’s novel. The stories are far from identical, but there are lots of similar themes - aliens sharing knowledge with us, the challenges of deciphering their language, world governments and extremists acting somewhat as antagonists, the interleaving of the protagonist’s personal life/family with all this.
I could easily be wrong too, but I certainly got Contact vibes when watching Arrival.
> I’ve only seen the movies, but my understanding is that they reasonably closely reflect the books, at least in terms of major themes and plot points.
Arrival is a good movie, but it's radically different from Story of your life, which is an intensely interior novel. It also substitutes a familiar time-travel plot for the, to me, radically novel linguistic approach to (not really but, for want of a better word) time travel that the novel creates.
> The stories are far from identical, but there are lots of similar themes - aliens sharing knowledge with us, the challenges of deciphering their language, world governments and extremists acting somewhat as antagonists, the interleaving of the protagonist’s personal life/family with all this.
I agree that these points are in common (although I'd argue that the role of world governments, while still important, is more peripheral in Story of your life), but they seem like quite common sci-fi tropes to me. Perhaps Contact is the ur-text for the trope after all ….
Yeah, I think those themes are all individually common in sci-fi, it’s more the combo of all of them together that made me feel there was significant inspiration. But as I said, I’ve only seen the movies, and am going on 2nd hand accounts that they’re based fairly closely on the books. I could very well have a different opinion after reading the books (have added both to my list!).
For some reason, my mind went to the Charlie Sheen movie 'The Arrival', which as a 15 year old, I actually liked - but for 10 seconds, your comment confused me :-)
I always thought they recorded this scene by having the camera pointed to a mirror the whole time (at a slight angle of course, so it's not in the frame). Turns out the effect was much more complicated to film than that.
This is the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life period. This moment in the beginning draws you into the movie and then you have the intense effect of immersion throughout the film, and in the end the unreal scene where Ellie touches the universe bubble. It warps up leaving you with a perfect quality of awe and wander. The whole movie is a perfect trifecta of trifecta’s.
The book is even better. As great a science educator as Carl Sagan was, I think he was a better science fiction author. I only wish he wrote more of it.
Ellie makes a mind bending mathematical discovery at the end of the novel that puts the whole story in an even vaster context. The movie skipped it. It's almost as egregious as Peter Jackson skipping the scouring of the shire.
Yeah - it's cliche to say the book is better, but in this case it's not just better - the movie is an inversion of the book’s core idea.
In the book they send an elected representative group in the ship. She's gathering evidence at the end to confirm her story and persuade others that it's not a mass delusion (of which the mathematical discovery is a part).
In the movie Jodie Foster cries and says they have to take it on faith - basically the exact opposite of the book's message.
> In the movie Jodie Foster cries and says they have to take it on faith.
Except they don't have to... there are hours of static from her camera, something that should not be possible if she spent only a fraction of a second out of contact.
This tiny scene ruins the movie, IMHO. I have a personal edit which simply cuts out the scene where they discover that the camera ran for hours, and it vastly improves it.
Oh wow, I have always considered this scene a blight on an otherwise perfect movie. I have often speculated over the years that it wasn't in the original script and was a pickup after test screenings or inserted because a producer was scared audiences couldn't handle the ambiguity.
One way of reading the film is as an epistemological exploration of modern society and how one character evolves their belief systems in the face of both ordinary and extraordinary events. I love the movie far more than the book because it doesn't neatly resolve the "truth" of what Ellie experiences, and it leaves the audience, minus this scene, in the same place as the protagonist.
Yes, of "static". Which just reuses the signal from space plot-hook from the start of the film. Presumably that static, either in raw data or a display encoded form, could also contain a similar bit of vital data that will eventually be useful.
I think the movie ending is better. Sagan wanted some ambiguity but then copped out with the math thing. If Ellie had instead spent decades pursuing another "crazy" idea (like SETI was) and found the answer much later, then it would have been more satisfying (proving life, proving creator mystery - which is somewhat a contradiction for Sagan).
At around the same time, a group of religious NASA contractor folks I knew and had had faith conversations with where getting satellite imagery of Mt. Ararat. Those of us unbelievers somehow lacked "faith" but true believers like them were hunting for the Ark...
I think Sagan's ending is highly -- perhaps uncharacteristically -- religious. It practically proves the existence of an intelligent creator ... a watermark stamped on reality. It suggests that it was the creator that reached out to Earth, and Ellie, and cared about her feelings. The ending is Ellie the devout modern priestess of a cold clockwork universe coming face to face with an animate aware personal universe. It's the mathematical version of Palmer Joss's message.
This is Sagan attempting to reconcile Ellie and Palmer, a dream of a scientific theology.
I get what you’re saying, but I’d argue it’s not “religious” in the normal way we use the word.
In Sagan’s book a scientist uncovers evidence that the universe was built and she’s working to leverage the scientific method to understand it. In that universe that appears to be what’s going on, but it’s the evidence that leads them in that direction.
I don’t buy that the “creator” cared about her feelings. In the book, the aliens she meets are just a more advanced inhabitant of the universe, they don’t know its origin either.
Religion usually does away with evidence to rely on faith based reasoning (which is basically what the movie does). The reason I don’t like the movie is it distorts the book’s point to be the opposite of what it was.
Agree. It always bothered me that they dropped that bit from the movie (which I still loved). Reading that page in the book literally made my hair stand on end.
I can’t think about this movie without revisiting that existential dread and hopelessness that I felt halfway through. As someone that was in government contracting at the time, it was quickly followed by a strong contender for my favorite line from any movie ever.
I liked that part quite a bit, it made _sense_ to have a backup for such an important thing, and it felt refreshing compared to a lot of "we only have one chance" plots.
The commentary talks about the decision making process for the opening sequence specifically about how risky it was to just have absolute silence for such an extended length in a feature. It was an absolue brilliant choice and really helps deliver the effect of how far way the camera moves.
I read the short story several years after seeing the movie and I was completely blown away by how good it was even though I already knew how it would play out. Far and away the best short story I've ever read and it isn't even close.
Why is a film focused website still using gifs for displaying sequences? Video on the web is a solved problem and it's better then gif in every possible way, especially for full color full motion live action.
i'm glad it uses a gif. it's straight to the point, it plays in a loop, you can't control the playback, cant pause it, cant seek forward, cant tell how long it lasts.
if it used a video, its likely the developer of the site would be encouraged to add: a beginning countdown timer before the clip played (video will start in 3, 2, 1, .. you arent sure if the clip has audio or not so you hit Pause and never see the clip), a distracting progress bar showing how long the clip lasts, messing up the anticipation for not knowing when the clip ends, killing all suspense.. and finally, about 1 second before the video is over, a little popup that shows Whats Playing Next, and a countdown timer starts playing for the next clip. This is best case scenario.. worst would be a 2 minute ad before the video starts.
video on the web isn't a 'solved problem'. What if I want to play a video that uses indexed color? No video codec I know of supports that. Can I trust that the video I just encoded in h264 with ffmpeg will play on the web, or, or do I need to test first to see if it will play? Will it work on all browsers? Is my codec listed on https://cconcolato.github.io/media-mime-support/ ? and on and on. the simplicity of a gif makes perfect sense here.
This site worked great with javascript disabled. It was a refreshing experience in 2020 when many completely static images on sites all over the web refuse to display at all or show up only as a blurry mess.
For what it’s worth, there is an embedded video at the top of the page that I assume is the full clip, but when I clicked it, it just showed a loading spinner. When I scrolled down I was pleasantly surprised to find gifs (that worked) accompanying the text.
It's not just a compelling shot. It uses the door frames that enter the viewframe to completely trick your brain: suddenly its not a door frame but the frame to the mirror. So, it's entrance doesn't immediately break the illusion.
Also the mirror has to be more than just bluescreen - there's distortion in it too as it moves.
The extended edition of Terminator 2 also has an impossible mirror shot -- and it achieves it with an almost hilarious solution.
Terminator 2 also used another set of twins. When the T-1000 mimics the security guard, they're both seen on screen simultaneously in a couple of scenes. Not CGI but identical twin actors.
Transistors have gotten more efficient, but that doesn't mean CPUs' TDPs have decreased. At least for desktop CPUs they've mostly stayed the same or even gone up: the Pentium 4 "PresHot" from 2005 had a system power consumption of 233W whereas the i9-10900k from 2020 has a package power consumption of 254W.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that they had to do the shot this way so the camera wouldn't appear in the mirror. That is a great example of film making at its best: so immersive, you don't even notice they had to do something special to pull it off.
It took me several minutes too, but to get to a different conclusion: I didn't notice the lack of reflection you mention, what I noticed is that the real Arnie must be the one "inside" the mirror, while the one giving us its back is a fake. This way they could open the port-cover in the head in a single shot!
This is one of my all time favorite movies. I’ve seen it probably 30 times and it is always just as good. A lovely lovely story. As others mentioned, Arrival is similar and that is also a top movie for me.
I'm apparently not a very attentive movie watcher. I've seen Contact several times, and nothing struck me as odd about this mirror scene until this article pointed out the obvious. Or maybe I become to engrossed in the story to notice these types of artifacts? Anyone have another favorite instance of subtle(?) movie making magic that a casual observer might have overlooked? And I wonder if the filmmakers would consider that good or bad that I missed this ingenious tidbit.
There is a boatload of stuff that you can't really appreciate until you've tried to make a movie yourself. When you've actually gone through the process of setting up a shot and looking at the horrible result you get a much deeper appreciation for what it takes to make something that looks even half-way non-amateurish, let lone smooth and polished. The thing that always drops my jaw is the settings of period pieces, particularly ones that have a lot of vehicles and old buildings in them. I know it's mostly CGI nowadays, but the quality is just ridiculous nowadays. I can't tell what is CGI any more, and I know what to look for.
I can appreciate what you said - I accidently learned that just keeping the camera still and not moving it around much drastically improves the home videos I shoot.
No, I think you're the ideal audience member. To become so engrossed in the movie that you notice no artifact is the goal of most moviemakers. (I've studied filmmaking for 30 years.)
The same director, Robert Zemeckis, made Cast Away. There's a scene where Tom Hanks has removed the tape from a videocassette and tied strips of it to a tree, as streamers, to tell him when the wind changes direction. The strips of tape are blowing in the wind, and slowly they start blowing over to the other side, to show that the wind has finally changed direction. (He needs to know this as part of his plan to sail away.) Anyway, the tape was all computer animation! I guess they couldn't get it to act how they wanted with real tape and some fans. So they painstakingly animated it, and I would have never known, had I not heard it on the behind-the-scenes commentary.
Halfway through the video you can see how it was done. Notice the "focus puller" running next to the camera, also mentioned in the original article.
The focus puller is a person holding a rotary knob which wireless adjusts the focus length of the camera. While the cameraman moves the camera around, the focus puller adjusts the focus so that the subject is always kept in focus. It impresses me how well they can do this.
Awesome thanks that’s really helpful! Reading the article I had to google what a “focus puller” was, like did they have their hand on the lens turning the focus wheel the whole shot down the hallway? That video explains it much better.
Though I’m not sure why in Contact the focus puller had to be painted out of the entire shot, maybe they couldn’t get behind the camera in the hallway?
81 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadWill start watching the movie right away if you say it’s good enough?
Edit - is this the movie? -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film)
The second paragraph of the linked article tells you the year, main actress, and director of the movie, compare that to the movie described in your Wikipedia link to get the answer.
Do you think Chiang's story was based on Contact (movie or book), or only that the movie was? Neither of those seems likely to me—more just a case of two authors independently writing about similar themes than of direct inspiration—but I haven't seen Contact for some time, and never read the book.
I could easily be wrong too, but I certainly got Contact vibes when watching Arrival.
Arrival is a good movie, but it's radically different from Story of your life, which is an intensely interior novel. It also substitutes a familiar time-travel plot for the, to me, radically novel linguistic approach to (not really but, for want of a better word) time travel that the novel creates.
> The stories are far from identical, but there are lots of similar themes - aliens sharing knowledge with us, the challenges of deciphering their language, world governments and extremists acting somewhat as antagonists, the interleaving of the protagonist’s personal life/family with all this.
I agree that these points are in common (although I'd argue that the role of world governments, while still important, is more peripheral in Story of your life), but they seem like quite common sci-fi tropes to me. Perhaps Contact is the ur-text for the trope after all ….
SoYL and Hell is the Absence of God both really broke me. Even after reading SoYL I genuinely wasn't prepared for how HitAoG made me feel.
Edit: FWIW, I think this is a good thing, just in case it doesn't come across that way.
It's really interesting how scenes are actually filmed.
This is the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life period. This moment in the beginning draws you into the movie and then you have the intense effect of immersion throughout the film, and in the end the unreal scene where Ellie touches the universe bubble. It warps up leaving you with a perfect quality of awe and wander. The whole movie is a perfect trifecta of trifecta’s.
Ellie makes a mind bending mathematical discovery at the end of the novel that puts the whole story in an even vaster context. The movie skipped it. It's almost as egregious as Peter Jackson skipping the scouring of the shire.
In the book they send an elected representative group in the ship. She's gathering evidence at the end to confirm her story and persuade others that it's not a mass delusion (of which the mathematical discovery is a part).
In the movie Jodie Foster cries and says they have to take it on faith - basically the exact opposite of the book's message.
Except they don't have to... there are hours of static from her camera, something that should not be possible if she spent only a fraction of a second out of contact.
One way of reading the film is as an epistemological exploration of modern society and how one character evolves their belief systems in the face of both ordinary and extraordinary events. I love the movie far more than the book because it doesn't neatly resolve the "truth" of what Ellie experiences, and it leaves the audience, minus this scene, in the same place as the protagonist.
At around the same time, a group of religious NASA contractor folks I knew and had had faith conversations with where getting satellite imagery of Mt. Ararat. Those of us unbelievers somehow lacked "faith" but true believers like them were hunting for the Ark...
This is Sagan attempting to reconcile Ellie and Palmer, a dream of a scientific theology.
In Sagan’s book a scientist uncovers evidence that the universe was built and she’s working to leverage the scientific method to understand it. In that universe that appears to be what’s going on, but it’s the evidence that leads them in that direction.
I don’t buy that the “creator” cared about her feelings. In the book, the aliens she meets are just a more advanced inhabitant of the universe, they don’t know its origin either.
Religion usually does away with evidence to rely on faith based reasoning (which is basically what the movie does). The reason I don’t like the movie is it distorts the book’s point to be the opposite of what it was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array
if it used a video, its likely the developer of the site would be encouraged to add: a beginning countdown timer before the clip played (video will start in 3, 2, 1, .. you arent sure if the clip has audio or not so you hit Pause and never see the clip), a distracting progress bar showing how long the clip lasts, messing up the anticipation for not knowing when the clip ends, killing all suspense.. and finally, about 1 second before the video is over, a little popup that shows Whats Playing Next, and a countdown timer starts playing for the next clip. This is best case scenario.. worst would be a 2 minute ad before the video starts.
video on the web isn't a 'solved problem'. What if I want to play a video that uses indexed color? No video codec I know of supports that. Can I trust that the video I just encoded in h264 with ffmpeg will play on the web, or, or do I need to test first to see if it will play? Will it work on all browsers? Is my codec listed on https://cconcolato.github.io/media-mime-support/ ? and on and on. the simplicity of a gif makes perfect sense here.
All of this can be achieved with video.
just wanting to join in.
[0] https://youtu.be/pTl42COCNaM?t=255
Also the mirror has to be more than just bluescreen - there's distortion in it too as it moves.
The extended edition of Terminator 2 also has an impossible mirror shot -- and it achieves it with an almost hilarious solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYTOK89w8h0
It's literally a window with Linda Hamilton's twin sister on the other side performing rehearsed/synchronized movements.
edit: just found out she passed away a few months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr-RRixkRhI
https://movieweb.com/leslie-hamilton-freas-gearren-dead-term...
https://www.analog.com/en/analog-dialogue/articles/consideri...
...or reversible computation...
https://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/80_Toffoli.pdf
https://calculemus.org/logsoc03/materialy/ConservativeLogic....
(The movie I made about 15 years ago that was my substitute for film school: http://graceofgodmovie.com/)
The same director, Robert Zemeckis, made Cast Away. There's a scene where Tom Hanks has removed the tape from a videocassette and tied strips of it to a tree, as streamers, to tell him when the wind changes direction. The strips of tape are blowing in the wind, and slowly they start blowing over to the other side, to show that the wind has finally changed direction. (He needs to know this as part of his plan to sail away.) Anyway, the tape was all computer animation! I guess they couldn't get it to act how they wanted with real tape and some fans. So they painstakingly animated it, and I would have never known, had I not heard it on the behind-the-scenes commentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dA60D-j290
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3TBvJUtuHs
Halfway through the video you can see how it was done. Notice the "focus puller" running next to the camera, also mentioned in the original article.
The focus puller is a person holding a rotary knob which wireless adjusts the focus length of the camera. While the cameraman moves the camera around, the focus puller adjusts the focus so that the subject is always kept in focus. It impresses me how well they can do this.
Though I’m not sure why in Contact the focus puller had to be painted out of the entire shot, maybe they couldn’t get behind the camera in the hallway?