Latest / This Film is Lit / Contact

Transcript

Contact · This Film is Lit

• 0:04
  Speaker A: This Film Is lit, the podcast where we finally settle the score on one simple Is the book really better than the movie? I'm Brian and I have a film degree, so I watch the movie but don't read the book.
• 0:15
  Speaker B: And I'm Katie, I have an English degree, so I do things the right way and read the book before we watch the movie.
• 0:22
  Speaker A: So prepare to be wowed by our expertise and charm as we dissect all of your favorite film adaptations and decide if the silver screen the or the written word did it better. So turn it up, settle in, and get ready for spoilers because this film is Lit. She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message. For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. It's contact. And this film is Lit. Hello and welcome back to this film is like the Pockets where we talk about movies that are based on books. Boy, we got so much to get to. It's a Switch episode. And if you've been a fan of the show, you know that when I read a book and do notes, it's gonna be a doozy. So got a lot of notes to get to.
• 1:18
  Speaker B: We're in summer series territory of pages of notes.
• 1:22
  Speaker A: This is longer than some of our summer series. Yeah, I'm gonna try to not have it be a four hour episode, but we'll see. We have every single segment. We're gonna jump right in. If you have not read or watched Contact, here's a summary in Let me sum up. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
• 1:40
  Speaker B: This summary of the film is sourced from Wikipedia. Astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway arrives at the SETI program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The film's prologue reveals that she was encouraged to pursue science by her father, who died in her youth. In the film's present, Arroway studies radio emissions from space to detect signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. While in Puerto Rico, Arroway meets Christian philosopher Palmer Joss. They have a brief romantic encounter, but Arroway does not contact him again. David Drumlin, the President's science advisor, cuts SETI funding, deeming it futile. Arroway is furious and instead pursues and receives financial support from SR Hatton, a reclusive billionaire industrialist. Arroway relocates her team to the Very Large Array VLA radio dish observatory in New Mexico. Four years later, Arroway is about to lose access to the VLA satellite dishes. Before being evicted, she discovers a signal containing a sequence of prime numbers originating from the star Vega Drumlin and the National Security Council, headed by Michael Kitts, arrive and attempt to federalize the facility. Meanwhile, Arroway's team detect a video embedded within the signal. Adolf Hitler's opening address at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. The Hitler transmission was the first to penetrate Earth's ionosphere and reach Vega. The project is put under federal security and its progress is monitored globally. It is discovered that the Signal contains over 63,000 pages of encoded data though it is undecipherable without a primer. Haddon breaches the government's computer systems and discovers the primer providing Arroway the means to decode the data. It reveals schematics for what could be a transportation device for a single person. Multiple nations provide funding for the construction. At the Kennedy Space center in Cape Canaveral an international panel is assembled to select a candidate to travel in the Machine. An American is preferred and Airway is a leading candidate until Palmer Joss, a panel member, focuses on her atheism during the interviews. The panel selects Drumlin. During the first tests, a fanatical religious terrorist destroys the Machine with a suicide bomb killing Drumlin and several others. Haddon, terminally ill with cancer, is now residing on the Mir space station. He informs Arroway that the US Government and Haddon Industries have secretly built a second machine in Hakito, Japan. Arroway, the only remaining American candidate, will use it in Japan. Joss and Aroway are reunited. Joss explains he voted against Araway because he feared she would not survive the experiment. Equipped with multiple recording devices, Aroway enters a pod which is dropped through the massive machine's counter rotating rings. She seemingly travels through wormholes and observes a radio array like structure at Vega. Signs of civilization on an alien planet and a celestial event. Aroe finds herself on a beach similar to her childhood drawing of Pensacola, Florida. An alien, assuming her deceased father's appearance approaches. He explains that the aliens detected humans radio emissions and judged it worthy of a first step into the cosmos. Aroway is soon sent back through the wormhole. Aroway regains consciousness inside the pod. The mission control team reports that the pod fell through the machine into a safety net and that the experiment achieved nothing. Arroway insists she was gone for hours but her devices recorded only static. A congressional committee headed by Kitz speculates the signal and the machine were a hoax perpetuated by Haddon, now deceased. Arroway admits she cannot scientifically prove her experience and requests the committee accept her testimony on faith. Joss tells the press that he believes Aroway's claim and they leave the hearing together. Kits and the White House official, Rachel Constantine, discuss the confidential information and observe that Arroway's device recorded 18 hours of static. Arroway receives ongoing financial support for the SETI program at the vla.
• 6:10
  Speaker A: There you go. I actually have two short Guess who's. So let's do it. Who are you? No one of consequence. I must know. Get used to disappointment. There was more descriptions, but a lot of characters that aren't in the movie, so. And some of the. I don't think there's any characters. I think these are the only two characters that are directly in the movie from the book. Okay, that's not true. But I don't think there's a description of Haddon because Hadden's in the book. But now I'm thinking about it, maybe there is and I just missed it. Anyways, here we go. First one. A pretty dark haired young woman of middling height with a lopsided smile. Her eyes, large and set far apart served to soften the angular bone structure of her face. Her long dark hair was loosely gathered by a tortoise barrette at the nape of her neck. Casually dressed in a knit T shirt and khaki skirt.
• 7:02
  Speaker B: Okay, so there's really only one like main female character.
• 7:09
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 7:10
  Speaker B: So I'm gonna guess that this is Dr. Elie Arroway.
• 7:13
  Speaker A: It is. So really the main difference there being that Jodie Foster has blonde hair and she has dark hair.
• 7:19
  Speaker B: Yeah. Otherwise sure, pretty. Pretty good, yeah.
• 7:23
  Speaker A: This next one I kind of pieced together from several locations and added some words and changed some things. So it's not exactly as it appears in the book, but it's close enough for the purposes.
• 7:32
  Speaker B: I do that all the time. Was I supposed to be confessing that I do that?
• 7:35
  Speaker A: No, you don't have to. I just. I just. I like to be transparent. In contrast, he looked rumpled, distracted and more weather beaten with slightly unkempt good looks. And the discoloration beneath his eyes that made you think he never slept for worrying about the rest of us.
• 7:51
  Speaker B: Okay, there's not a ton to go on there. No slightly unkempt good looks.
• 7:57
  Speaker A: I will say this. The in contrast is to a guy in a suit, if that helps at all. But like the part before this is a description of a guy wearing like a very nice suit. And then it says in contrast he looked rumpled, distracted and more weather beaten.
• 8:11
  Speaker B: The slightly unkempt good looks makes me think of when we first meet Matthew McConaughey's character and he's like. He looks like a beach bum kind of guy. Because, again, we don't really get to know a lot of other male characters all that much. And it's not. It's not Drumlin. I feel pretty confident about that. And I know it's not Haddon, because you just said there wasn't a description of him. And also, I don't think billionaires worry about the rest of us. So definitely not Haddon. So I am going to guess that this is Joss. Palmer.
• 8:49
  Speaker A: Palmer Joss.
• 8:50
  Speaker B: Palmer Joss. He has two first names and also two last names.
• 8:55
  Speaker A: Palmer Joss. Yes, this is Palmer Joss. And it's funny because I think that's very direct. Like, even the discoloration beneath his eyes. I mean, you think he never slept for worrying about the rest of us? I don't know if he necessarily has discoloration beneath his eyes, but I think. I think Matthew McConaughey in the movie has that look of weariness to him at times that I can. I don't know. I think it translates pretty directly. But, yes, that is Palmer Joss. And in contrast, he's comparing them to. And we'll talk about it later. Rankin. I think Billy Rankin is his name in the book, which is Rob Lowe's character in the movie, who is.
• 9:28
  Speaker B: He was kind of barely in the movie.
• 9:30
  Speaker A: He's barely in the movie. He's not really in the book a ton, but he's in it more than the movie. But he is the very, like, evangelical Christian.
• 9:40
  Speaker B: Gotcha. Like, so kind of a foil to.
• 9:44
  Speaker A: And I'll talk a lot more about that here in a little bit in the next segment. So Katie has a bunch of questions. We're gonna find out. Was that in the book? Gaston, May I have my book, please? How can you read this? There's no pictures.
• 9:58
  Speaker B: Well, some people use their imagination. So this movie opens with young Ellie. She's like a kid, and she is playing with a CB radio, trying to contact people. And we see that her dad is, like, encouraging this as a learning tool. And I was curious if the book opened the same way almost.
• 10:22
  Speaker A: So it does start in Ellie's childhood. We get snippets. The first few, like, sections in the first chapter are little snippets of her life. We get snippets of her birth, her learning to speak at 2, learning to read at, like, 3, and then at some age under 10, I don't know exactly how old. There is a scene of her repairing an old radio, but it's like A regular, like home radio, you know, for listening to music and stuff. And she becomes obsessed with how it works and how technology and stuff works. There is no specific scene of her using a CB radio to try to talk to other people, which I thought worked really well. I said, I have that embedded in the movie. I actually liked her trying to contact people on the radio in the beginning. And then the little thing with the pins, I thought it was good visual storytelling. It sets up later and it expands on what's in the book. She is a radio nerd. It's just they specifically make it a listening and talking to people as opposed to just fixing an old radio.
• 11:15
  Speaker B: Yeah, that does seem like a good way to set up her later obsession.
• 11:21
  Speaker A: And again, the book does that. It's like she's obsessed with this radio. It's slightly different. Cause it's. That is the radio telescope. That's what she does. But yeah.
• 11:29
  Speaker B: Does her dad call her Sparks? Because I thought that was really cute.
• 11:33
  Speaker A: Yeah, you have a little
• 11:36
  Speaker B: big eyes emoji.
• 11:37
  Speaker A: Yeah, I was like, what is that one? I don't know what that one's called, but yeah. So he does have a nickname for her in the book, but it is not Sparks. He calls her Precious. Short for Precious. That's what he calls her.
• 11:48
  Speaker B: I like the movie nickname.
• 11:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think Sparks works good for. Because she's, like, into, like, radio stuff and technology. I also had this embedded in the movie.
• 11:57
  Speaker B: Not.
• 11:58
  Speaker A: Not the nickname necessarily, but I just added this note here that I really liked seeing more of her relationship with her dad. We get, like, a very brief sniff, snippet of it in the book. It's actually not much of the book is, like, her relationship with her dad. We'll get more into that later. But there is a little bit. But the movie just kind of expands on it because it becomes such a central relationship and kind of core element of the film. So I liked that.
• 12:22
  Speaker B: So in this first opening scene, her dad says a line that gets repeated a couple times throughout the movie. So I was curious if it was from the book. And that line is, if it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
• 12:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's when Ellie asks him, like, is there anybody else out there in the universe? So, boy, did this spawn a rabbit hole that I went on last night doing these notes. First, it's not actually in the book. I started searching because I was like, it's not in the book. But I wanted to know where it came from because it's in the movie. When I did A quick search, the top AI result that Google returns says it's in the book, says Carl Sagan in the novel Contact or something like that. A bunch of other places on the Internet directly attribute it to Carl Sagan. Like if you will just see tons of images of that quote with just Carl Sagan at the bottom as the attribution. I could find no direct evidence that he was the one who wrote that line. So I found a Reddit comment from 11 years ago on a post where somebody had put that image up. A similar quote, but the one from the end of the movie where she's talking to the kids. It's like a slightly different version of it, but basically the same. And they had attributed it to Ellie Arroway in Contact. And the top comment on that post was just so you know, the original quote, and I'm not sure if the middle part is in there, came from Carl Sagan. They threw that in there as an homage to him because if I'm right, he was recently deceased at the time of the movie making. Also, Contact was Carl Sagan's only fictional work. Not trying to be an asshole, just trying to provide something more. This person's wrong. This is the top voted comment on that Reddit post from 11 years ago. As far as I can tell. This person's wrong. So I went digging some more because this is one of those things where everywhere I looked, everything Goodreads says it is from the novel Contact. It is not in the novel Contact. I, I have a PDF of it. I was searching. I, I was thinking about it while reading it because I knew of that line, it's not in the book. I found other comments on other Reddit posts of people saying it's not actually in the book, it's just in the movie. But everybody directly attributes that quote to Carl Sagan. He is one of the screenwriters on this movie, but he is not the sole screenwriter on this movie. So I started doing some more digging, trying to figure out where it came from. So I finally and I found like an Instagram video that had that as like the title. But then when I watched the Instagram video, it was another clip from Cosmos of Carl Sagan saying other stuff about Aliens. Never says that line. Everybody directly cites it either to Carl Sagan or to Carl Sagan or attributes to to the novel. And then also some people attribute it to the movie. But so much of where it gets attributed to is just Carl Sagan, blankly. As far as I can tell, he never actually said those words. I could not find A clip. I could not find a clip of it. I could not find it written anywhere. Now I will say I then found a clip from 1972 on YouTube where Carl Sagan is giving a speech to, like, some physics class or something, I don't know. And he quotes a guy named Thomas Carlisle, who was like a philosopher or something from the 1700s, who said, quote, a sad spectacle if they be inhabited. What a scope for misery and folly this is in relation to, like, all of the planets in the universe. A sad spectacle if they be inhabited. What a scope for misery and folly if they be not inhabited. What a waste of space. End quote. Okay, the closest the book gets to this is Ellie is thinking to herself, could Dave talking about Dave Drumlin possibly be right? No extraterrestrial civilizations anywhere. All those billions of worlds going to waste. Lifeless, barren, intelligent beings growing up only in this obscure corner of an incomprehensibly vast universe. No matter how valiantly she tried, Ellie couldn't make herself take such a possibility seriously. So all those billions of worlds going to waste is the closest thing in the book that I could find. But the fact that Sagan, and now there may be somebody. I actually also am reaching out to audience if you have found. Can find Sagan saying this line somewhere in a video or. Or a direct reference of him writing it. The fact that he quoted that line that one time makes me think that he almost assuredly was the person who wrote that in the script. Because he did write the early drafts of the script. People came in later and rewrote it and stuff. But my guess is with that line there, he probably wrote that line. But I could not find any direct confirmation that Carl Sagan is actually the person who wrote that line. So I just thought that was one of those things that was really fascinating to me. And again, I didn't. I didn't look for days. I looked for 30 minutes, right? But I did quite a bit of Googling and digging through threads and stuff that I could not. I went through YouTube videos and I could not find him saying that line. I could not find any direct Evans that he wrote it. I think it's likely he did, but it's specifically written for the movie. So there you go. If anybody knows anymore or just, like, if there's an interview somewhere where he talks about writing that line or something. I. Again, I believe it's most likely that he wrote that into the script or maybe on the special features for Contact at some point they're talking about them.
• 17:58
  Speaker B: I mean, it seems Likely, yes. That he probably wrote that line.
• 18:02
  Speaker A: It sounds like him. I'll say that like everything I've ever
• 18:04
  Speaker B: heard of sarcasm, particularly because we know that he knew the Thomas Carlyle quote.
• 18:09
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 18:10
  Speaker B: But it is an interesting example of the way that we can kind of like on the Internet, that we can kind of mass hallucinate something.
• 18:19
  Speaker A: Well, and then. And again, it's one of those things where it's like, it's probably very likely. And maybe at some point there was some. Somebody had some confirmation that again, maybe there's some special feature or something somewhere. Somebody had some confirmation that Carl Sagan wrote that line.
• 18:32
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 18:33
  Speaker A: But it's so funny to me that it always only just gets attributed to Carl Sagan, so often without the. The context of. It's from the movie Contact.
• 18:42
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 18:42
  Speaker A: And then other times it even directly gets credited to the novel, which it is not in the novel. It's just fascinating. That stuff is so interesting. And then. Yeah. People on the, on the, the most popular comment on a Reddit post about it was somebody just wrong saying that he said it, that it directly came from him and they threw it in there as an homage to him.
• 19:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, I.
• 19:04
  Speaker A: Maybe, maybe. And still that's the thing. Maybe, I don't know. Like, I don't know, maybe that comment's not wrong. Maybe that is true. Maybe he said it somewhere that I couldn't find. And then a different screenwriter, as an homage, threw that in there. Or a screenwriter saw the clip of him reading the Carlisle thing.
• 19:21
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 19:21
  Speaker A: And added. And I. I don't know. But if that's the case, then it's not him saying it and it's him saying something similar. And then I don't know anybody. If you can figure this out and find it, I would love to know, but that's my rabbit hole on that. Very probably the most famous line in the movie.
• 19:37
  Speaker B: Okay, so we know from guess who that Joss Palmer is in the book, but is he. Or was he going to be a priest but couldn't do the celibacy? Because that's what he says when they meet. Initially.
• 19:53
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 19:54
  Speaker B: And then follow up on that. I just kind of wanted to know if there was any more about him and, like, what his deal was. Because he goes, from when they first meet, he's like a shirtless hippie who appears to be living like kind of a driftery lifestyle. And then when we meet him again, he's an advisor to the President of the United States. And I wanted to know how that happened.
• 20:28
  Speaker A: So Palmer, Joss in The book is a preacher, but there is no joke about him not doing celibacy. And there's not even. He did not even go to. What did he say in the movie? He said I went to divinity school or whatever. Yeah, he. There's no reference to that. So he has a very fascinating backstory in the book. Palmer Joss in the book was a carnival act in the past. He had the entire globe, like an old timey globe and tattooed on his torso. And he would go with like a traveling circus when he was like young to as like part of it. And he would like show off like he's like the human globe or whatever.
• 21:07
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 21:07
  Speaker A: He would literally. There's a line about how he would like flex his like pecs to make like the, the, the. The like you know those old maps where they have like the drawing of like the, the face like blowing the wind. He would like flex to make it look like it was like moving and like the ocean was moving. And so there's a line sight about that. He was a carnival act. And this is what it said. This isn't like him telling the story. This is the book relaying it like from a third person, like omniscient narrator. So I assume this is accurate. It mentions that he was a voracious reader. He initially started reading like shitty self help books. He doesn't directly mention them, but he alludes to like how to make how to win friends and whatever that you know what I'm talking about. How to win friends and not intimidate people, influence people influence people, intimidate and some other ones like that. He makes some adjacent references, some of those kind of help self help books, but he decides that those are vapid and empty and dumb. And so he moves on to like classic literature and science and philosophy and gets really well read on all of that stuff while he's part of this traveling carnival act. Every town he stops in he goes to the library and has them recommend him books. Then at one point during this he is struck by lightning during an act and has a near death experience which the movie actually mentions. I have this and nailed it because he's. After he has sex with Ellie, they're laying in bed and he mentions having a near death experience. It's what they're chit chatting about after they have sex. Then when he comes to Billy Rankin is the guy who is there. Billy Rankin is this version's movie of Billy Graham. I don't know if you know who Billy Graham is.
• 22:36
  Speaker B: I know who Billy Graham is.
• 22:37
  Speaker A: Yeah, Billy Joe Rankin, is he that very prominent evangelical, super hardline fundamentalist Christian.
• 22:45
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 22:45
  Speaker A: Who is an advisor to presidents and all that sort of stuff. Which is why in the movie he's played by Rob Lowe. We see him like at the meeting and stuff with the President. He is found by Billy Joe Rankin as he laying there. He wakes up from getting struck by lightning and he comes to and says, am I gonna live or die? And Billy Joe Rankin says to him, my boy, you're gonna do both. Which I thought is a great line. Also the movie nailed that Ellie, when he, Palmer tells her about his near death experience and she tries to like explain it, like give him like real explanations for what happened, which we see in the movie in that scene. So after he comes to, he then studies under Rankine, who is a preacher, an evangelical preacher, and becomes like his protege. But he's like a worldly educated one because he's read all this philosophy and all this sort of different things, but he was also taught by like a raving conservative evangelical. I love that after he comes back, there's another great line in the book when he comes to and as he's been training him, Rankin says to him, you've been reborn, you should change your name. Except Palmer Joss is such a fine name for a preacher, you'd be a fool not to keep it. Which it really is, which I think it's a great. One day, eventually he sees Billy Rankin Jr. Who is the main one, the Rob Lowe character, because I think it's senior that he is training anyways, doesn't matter using holy water to fake heal people and stuff and is like, this is bullshit, I'm not gonna do this. He starts publicly denouncing faith healing and all that kind of stuff. And the Rankin's disown him because of this. They're like, fuck off, get out of here. So then he goes on his own spiritual journey and he writes a book. And ultimately we end up with a very similar character in the movie who is a more worldly, enlightened, slightly progressive theologian. Still very much a Christian, but he's pretty chill about it. And that is in direct contrast to Rankin. And I think he's called Rank in the movie who is like the fundamentalist loon. So that is the backstory of Palmer Joss. And then he becomes influential by just. He writes a bunch of books and yeah, he becomes kind of the voice of a more progressive Christianity in the country. And so he and Rankin are both advisors for the President, kind of different, representing different Aspects of Christianity in the country. So there you go.
• 25:03
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 25:04
  Speaker A: It's fascinating, this movie. The book is way weirder than the movie is. And we'll get to it. There's a lot more. The book is way stranger. The movie plays a lot of, like, gets rid of all the stuff that's really interesting and weird.
• 25:17
  Speaker B: Okay. So he and Ellie meet and they have a romantic encounter, as it says in the Wikipedia summary. And then she one night stands him with a swiftness. Yeah, he's like. He, like, leaves her his phone number and is like, please. Well.
• 25:36
  Speaker A: And he. The whole time he's like trying to. Yeah, he like keeps being like, so where can I find you? What are we. We should get dinner. And she's like, really?
• 25:43
  Speaker B: He really wants to continue this. And she's like, nah.
• 25:47
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 25:48
  Speaker B: So is that from the book?
• 25:49
  Speaker A: No, but I liked this one thing it nails is there. And especially later. But even in this very first scene is their flirty repartee. I know people complain about their chemistry in this movie and about their lack of chemistry in this movie. I completely agree. Other than this very first scene, I think the scene where they meet in wherever Arecibo is. Yeah, Puerto Rico, and they're like chit chatting over the table. I actually think they have pretty good chemistry in that single scene. And I also like this dynamic after they have sex and she's like, leaving. I think that's really good. But they have a very flirty repartee throughout the book. What I do really like that is a movie addition is having them both meet this way early because they don't meet in the book until way later in the story. They meet for the first time after the message has been discussed, discovered. Oh, she's aware of him on, like the news and stuff. But they don't meet that early. So I like having them hook up and know each other from when they were young and she was working at Arecibo. And then when they come back, by the time we get to the message, they have this history together. Yeah, I. I like it a lot. Also, I love. Because this is where we introduce. He gets that compass out of the Cracker Jack box and gives it to her. And I like that. That is a movie change. In the book, right before the mission, he gives her a locket that he like as a memento kind of keepsake thing to take with her. But it's just like a locket engraved with like some quote from like Roman history or something like that. It's. It's interesting, but it's not like I don't think it's quite as like interesting from a character perspective as like a compass.
• 27:27
  Speaker B: Really works from a thematic viewpoint too.
• 27:29
  Speaker A: Yeah. But yeah, she gives her like this very strange little lock it with. Not strange, but it's locket with like a quote from some Roman something I don't even know. So I like, I like that it's a more personal item and, and the backstory tied to it and all of that sort of stuff. And it helps. It's one of the ways that they help work or tie into the overall kind of thematic message which is one of the main ones in the book. Arguably the main thematic message of the book and one of the main ones in the movie is her struggle to maintain relationships. She's looking everywhere else for relationships other than on Earth. And so yeah, I liked having that work and we'll talk more about that later.
• 28:15
  Speaker B: But yeah, so then we get another flashback to her childhood and we see her dad pass away and really heart wrenching scene after the funeral where she's on the CB radio trying to contact her dad.
• 28:35
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 28:35
  Speaker B: Just like see if he's out there somewhere. Is that from the book?
• 28:40
  Speaker A: No. And this is. I have this as absolutely. As a better in the movie moment. Specifically the line she says in the movie is, dad, this is Ellie, come back. Which is like the radio lingo for like come back is. But it the double meaning there. Very, very clever and good. No, that moment is not in the book. Again, she doesn't have a CB radio or anything or at least it's not mentioned in book. So yeah, I really like that scene.
• 29:04
  Speaker B: Another moment that I enjoyed when she's trying to get funding from Hadden and she goes before his like board or whatever and they're like, nah, we don't want to give you funding because we think this is like cuckoo bananas and not worth money. And then she goes on to list scientific achievements that were once considered crazy, which charms Haddon, who is watching via security camera, via closed circuit tv, any of that from the book?
• 29:39
  Speaker A: So no, this doesn't happen in the book. There are issues with funding and specifically the movie does nail that. Drumlin is not a fan of SETI and is constantly pushing for it to be shut down because he thinks it's a waste of time. But it never actually happens that they get shut down. They are like approaching the time where they might get shut down and it's like a looming threat, but they discover the signal before that happens. I thought this was a good movie addition. I like Adds a little bit of first act drama. That helps. I also like the moment in the movie, which I don't believe is in the book, where Drumlin claims that he's doing her a favor by shutting it down because he, he's like, you won't get published and your career will be over.
• 30:17
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 30:17
  Speaker A: Which the movie or the book alludes to that. Like people don't like doing steady. Or there's people warn people not to go into steady because they're like, you're not gonna be able to publish anything because you won't find anything.
• 30:26
  Speaker B: Right.
• 30:26
  Speaker A: You're just not gonna be able. It's gonna ruin your career. So I like the movie putting that in there. But Drumlin delivering that is great because it's the exact kind of patronizing that all the time and like paternalistic bullshit where he just, he thinks he knows best and is always going to get what he wants, basically in every situation.
• 30:45
  Speaker B: So they, they get their funding and they've been out at the Very Large Array for a while and then they hear this message of the prime number.
• 30:56
  Speaker A: The message.
• 30:57
  Speaker B: The message. And they confirm it with, I guess, another, like Rey in Australia. And then one of the other guy, one of the guys that she's working with says, who are we gonna call now? And she says, everybody.
• 31:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, not in the book. Absolutely. Better in the movie. It's a great moment in the book. She gives her like the way, the kind of dramatic moment in the book, and it's not nearly as dramatic, which is why it's better in the movie, but they're like, they've kind of confirmed that this is probably an alien signal. And she gives her co worker a list of a bunch of things to do, people to contact, all this sort of stuff. And then at the very end of this list, she says, then get me the President's science advisor. Again, it's not nearly as dramatic, but it's, it's the same moment kind of. But yeah, no, the movie's version's way better.
• 31:47
  Speaker B: So then we're tracking this message and they realize there's a video embedded in it. Is that video the aliens sending back Hitler giving the address at the 1936 Olympics?
• 32:04
  Speaker A: Yes, that is exactly what happens. It happens a bit later in the book. Everything does in the book. We'll get to that. But there's a much more realistic timeline for everything happening in the book. The movie condenses, which is pretty common for movie adaptations, but it condenses everything a lot, or at least it appears to the way it's presented like, for instance, them decoding the signal with Hitler. Happens like mere. Not mere moments, I guess. Because it is long enough later that they. Drumlin and everybody is showing up.
• 32:33
  Speaker B: But it seems to happen fairly quickly.
• 32:35
  Speaker A: Fairly quickly within like a day or so. In the movie or in the book, it is. They travel. It's after they have found the signal. They travel to somewhere they might be even in. I think they're at the White House or something like that. And there is. When they decrypt it and realize that it's Hitler, I think. But everything is just a little more spread out anyways. But yes, it is. The image that comes through is Hitler doing the opening of the 1936 Olympics Games. Because that was the first television signal powerful enough to leave Earth, which they mentioned in the movie.
• 33:07
  Speaker B: Another little moment that I was wondering about. After we get the presidential address, they're gonna take questions from the press and Ellie steps up thinking she's going to be the one answering questions. And then Drumlin dips in there in front of her and gets up. So I was wondering if him stealing her spotlight is from the book.
• 33:33
  Speaker A: So there's no specific scene like that in the book where Drumlin takes over an address to the nation or whatever. But he does take over the project and overshadow her throughout the book. A project which he was literally ready to shut down and did not believe in and all that sort of stuff. And the movie absolutely nails their entire dynamic. 100% completely nails. And I can't remember the actor's name who plays him. Does an incredible job. It's exactly what I envisioned reading the book like. He is exactly nails that guy. And it's the thing where he's not really like a bad guy necessarily. He's not like evil. He's not like, working against her necessarily maliciously. But he absolutely steals her spotlight at every turn. He's patronizing as hell. And he's also just generally like a pompous who. It's more so an oblivious, pompous asshole than like, he's just used to being the smartest guy, being getting credit for everything because he's a very smart white guy in 1980s America. And so he just kind of naturally flows through life that way where everything is just, yeah, obviously, I'm gonna go do this. It's not. Like I said, it's not even necessarily malicious most of the time. He's very clearly a specific type of guy that I imagine Carl Sagan had been around a bunch in science and stuff like that. And was just very aware of a line in the book that they mentioned specifically. David Drumlin, however, was being made out as the hero, the man who had really decrypted the prime number and the Olympic broadcast. He was the kind of scientists we needed more of right now. She sighed and changed the channel once more. It's one of the book's very intentional commentaries on sexism. And they also. She also mentions that herself and some of the other scientists who worked on the project. A guy named Vega who is a. That's his nickname. I can't remember. He's a Russian or Soviet scientist. Another guy named Valerian who is an old friend and like, colleague of Ellie's. We're all working on this. But they all are kind of castigated and ignored by the media because they're communists or atheists or. And they like kind of accuse them of like hoarding the message for themselves. But Drumlin is celebrated as kind of the champion of the people, Right? Yeah, that kind of thing.
• 35:39
  Speaker B: Another scene that I really liked, which we talked a little bit about in the prequel, was when all of the. The different types of crazy people descend on the Very Large Array to celebrate there being aliens. Is that from the book?
• 35:57
  Speaker A: Yeah. So this is exactly from the book down to the specific moment where they stop briefly and they listen to like a Chris, right wing end of the world preacher, like doomsday preacher. And he like points at them and is like, it's them. They're the one like that. It's Jake Busey in the movie. But that exact scene happens in the book and everything else about it is exactly the same. There's. There's all kinds of different religious sects and. And like hippies and just UFO crazy again. It becomes like its own little town, his own little commune outside of the Very Large Array.
• 36:30
  Speaker B: So then Ellie gets taken on to Haddon's, his private jet.
• 36:37
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 36:38
  Speaker B: Where he's living. And he has like a bunch of Bond supervillain introduction where he spins around in a chair.
• 36:46
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 36:47
  Speaker B: Does that happen in the book?
• 36:49
  Speaker A: So not the chair part, but he absolutely has a Bond supervillain introduction in the book. The movie nails Haddon and it just. In a very different way. So one thing this movie does not do, and I mentioned to it earlier, is it cuts out a lot of the weirder stuff. One of the things it cuts out is that this book takes place over the course. It starts in like 1989 or whatever, like when it. Roughly when it was written. But then it goes all the way to the year 2000. Ah, it takes place over the course of like 15 or 10 or 15 years. Like that's how long it takes for all of this stuff to like to build the machine and decode. Like it takes forever. That's what I was talking about, takes forever. So we get Carl Sagan gets to do a little bit of like speculative, right?
• 37:31
  Speaker B: So there's some retro futurism in this.
• 37:34
  Speaker A: Exactly. And this isn't necessarily that, but he also does some like, some of its retrofuturism, like not even retrofuturism, but just futurism, like speculative, like kind of stuff. But he also just does some interesting world building of like other things he think could. Thought like maybe could happen in the future in the US and one of the things is Babylon, which is not in the movie at all. Haddon built a recreation of the ancient city of Babylon in New York that is by day a museum slash field trip site where children go to learn the history of Babylon and blah, blah, blah. And by night is a legal brothel and adult amusement park. Okay, the idea, this is like, again, this is a little bit of the speculative, like this, like this billionaire who has more money than God, right? He's this weird, eccentric, crazy person and he's obsessed with history and immortality and the future and religion and science. And so he builds this very strange city that is like his obsession, where he stays. So that's actually where Ellie meets him for the first time. She goes to Babylon and meets him in like his, his giant tower in Babylon or whatever. So I liked the plane scene. It's a similar vibe of again, he feels like a Bond villain or whatever. But I love the idea of to meet him in his weird city of debauchery that he built. And there's more about that. Like eventually it gets destroyed by like religious fanatics because they think it's like sacrilegious and stuff and like blah, blah, blah. But yeah, so that's. No, not exactly, but it's pretty similar.
• 39:19
  Speaker B: Another, another thing in the scene with Haddon that I really liked, he's kind of alluding to his enormous wealth and starts to say like, I don't remember exactly what he said.
• 39:33
  Speaker A: He starts to say something along the lines of something, give back to the people or give something to the people I have given. And he cuts himself off.
• 39:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, he cuts himself off and corrects to from whom I have taken so much.
• 39:48
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 39:48
  Speaker B: And I was like, wow, imagine a self aware billionaire. Is that from the book?
• 39:54
  Speaker A: No, but in a different way. In the book, his wealth is actually acquired a bit more heroically, maybe, or, you know, ethically in some way, you could argue. So the way Haddon made all his money in the book is that he made a ton of enemies this way too. But he invented an ad blocker for television called Ad Nix, that was a device that you would like plug into your TV that would literally just get rid of commercials. Essentially. Basically an ad blocker for TV networks. The TV networks conspired to sue him over this. So he. And they're like, he ended up the lawsuit, nothing ended up happening with it, but he kind of like got screwed out of a bunch of money or whatever. So he ends up hiring an ad agency that he bought like a partnership in, in New York to specifically advertise his ad Nick's device on the networks. So they then conspire to stop him from being able to broadcast those commercials. And then he ends up suing them for like conspiracy and blah, blah, blah, to like stop him from running these ads and wins an insane settlement, like an absurd amount of money over this. So much so that the book says that it was part of what led to the fall of the original TV networks, I assume, like NBC, abc, that sort of stuff. So that's how he made all of his money. He actually made all of his money from like suing the TV networks. Oblivion. He also mentions invented a product, a spin off product called Preach Nicks, where you could put it on your TV and it would block religious programming, which I always thought was funny because I'm like, you just don't turn it on. I don't know. But again, TV was different than whatever. But. Yes. No. So he doesn't. He's not self aware in that same way. But again, he made his money seemingly, or at least most of it, according to the book, by suing TV networks and not from like exploiting people necessarily. Anyways, I thought it was interesting, I guess. Yeah. Again, there's a lot of weird stuff. Again, this is. The book cuts all. Or the movie cuts all the weirder stuff.
• 41:57
  Speaker B: Yeah. Interesting. So then Palmer and Ellie reunite. They have a conversation about proving God's existence. Is anything from that conversation from the book?
• 42:12
  Speaker A: Yes. So there are. Yeah, there is. There are multiple recurring theological debates between Joss and Ellie in the book. They at least two or three times when they meet up, they discuss God and religion and science and all this sort of stuff and kind of have classic debates. And it was very clear to me, especially in the first interaction they have where they meet up, that Carl was Using this book as an excuse to win some religious debates or more accurately share some of his atheist talking points in the midst of his novel, kind of, kind of Trojan horse some arguments against religion into his, you know, his science fiction, like mystery novel or whatever. So yeah, that is all in the book. I'll have more about this later. It's way better in the book. The movie is watching it now as a 37 year old atheist who's read a lot of religious books and debates and all that sort of stuff. It is very surface level, like baby's first arguments about religion kind of stuff. And the book is similar because it's intentionally being very surface level or introductory. But it's handled with a lot more nuance and finesse in the book because Carl was a lot more thoughtful person than probably the script writers who had final say on these scenes. But yes, that is absolutely. They. They debate religion quite a bit in the book.
• 43:34
  Speaker B: So then we have this sequence where there's a. A panel who are interviewing people for who gets to go in the transportation machine.
• 43:45
  Speaker A: It's called the Machine.
• 43:46
  Speaker B: The Machine. Okay.
• 43:48
  Speaker A: They have, they have. This is like the message the machine. Yeah, and they're all capitalized.
• 43:54
  Speaker B: And so they're interviewing Ellie. And then Palmer Joss completely derails her chances of getting to go in this thing by asking about if she believes in God because he knows that she's an atheist and then he knows that
• 44:12
  Speaker A: that will be a problem.
• 44:13
  Speaker B: Yes, because she can't represent America if she's an atheist. I guess. So does that happen in the book? Does he do that?
• 44:24
  Speaker A: No, he does not. So Drumlin is selected over Ellie to be on the crew and it is because he's a man and Christian specifically, and he'll be more palatable to the religious masses. And Ellie is an atheist and in the book she's too brash and honest. In her interview she has a thing where they ask her about like, how do you feel about overpopulation? Or something like that. And her response to is overpopulation is why I'm in favor of homosexuality and a celibate clergy like she has. She's just very like sassy and doesn't like give a shit about any of this. She's a wise ass, basically. I like the idea of what's going on here in the movie, but I really think the writing in this scene is clunky and on the nose. Specifically from the writing for Ellie's character, I get that in this scene she's supposed to be nervous and kind of awkward because she's a scientist or whatever, and it's like this scary, like, big, you know, hearing where there's all these people. And so she's supposed to be kind of nervous. But book Ellie is not afraid of authority figures and she's not particularly nervous. As I mentioned earlier, she's not nervous in these hearings. The reason she doesn't get chosen is because of sexism and because of the atheism thing. Like, it is because she's an atheist. That's part of it. They. They specifically choose Drumlin because he's an atheist or because he's a Christian and a man. But she isn't, like, sweating and nervous. That was the thing I hated in this scene in the movie is how, like, she's, like, stumbling over her words and, like, is trying to, like, figure out how to, like, answer it with that. She's like, I don't know why that question's relevant, blah, blah, blah. That's not Ellie in the book. She is confident in her beliefs. She. And. And, like, that's like, the whole thing is she's so brash. She will. She offends people all the time because she'll just say she's not religious and she'll attack religion. Like, you know, she'll, like, question people's religious beliefs to them and stuff like that. She's kind of your typical. Not religious, just, you know, Reddit, atheist or whatever. In a little. A little bit. Not. Not that so much, but a little bit. And so I really did not like in the movie that she's, like, stumbling and nervous and, like, I don't know how to answer this. Like, I, I just. I hated that depiction of her character because to me, it just completely is not who she should be. There's a. There is a great line in the book, though, when Drumlin. The President. So the President. I don't know if she's picking or if she. I don't know exactly how it works, but she's talking to her advisor about, like, the choice between Drumlin and Ellie. I guess the President probably does get the pick because we'll get to it later. But they're debating between Drumlin and Ellie for the seat and the President says to her science advisor, she goes, why do we have to send a scientist? Why can't we send someone normal? Because they're like, they're reviewing the answers that they gave and they're. Yeah, I thought it was really fun, but similar to the. It's actually not similar to the movie in the book. Ellie does directly become Drumlin's backup. Yeah, she is like, if Drumlin can't go for some reason, gets sick, whatever.
• 47:24
  Speaker B: I guess she eventually kind of does in the movie.
• 47:26
  Speaker A: Defactos into it in the movie. But in the book, from the beginning, she is his backup. Like, okay, Drumlin's one and you're two.
• 47:33
  Speaker B: She's his understudy.
• 47:35
  Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
• 47:36
  Speaker B: Is the transportation device the machine, is it described in the book? And does it look like it does in the movie? If so.
• 47:45
  Speaker A: So no. And I think I'm gonna put this better in the movie for me, because I think the machine in the film is incredibly cool. I think it looks really neat. Since I was a little kid, first time I saw this movie, I've always thought that machine was really, really cool. The book is intentionally nebulous with its description of the machine, I think, so that you can build it in your mind kind of, and imagine whatever you want. The main thing that the book does describe is that the crew pod is a dodecahedron in the movie. It's a sphere, but it is kind of have like a dodecahedron frame around the sphere. But the actual shape of the crew pod in the book is that dodecahedron. The book has no mention of it falling from a giant arm or anything like that. But the book does mention these things called Binzels that are described as spinning or rotating when the machine runs. They don't really sound like what we see in the movie based on other descriptions in the book. But it's also hard to tell because it's intentionally vague and it's all sciencey words. And it's intentionally vague because it's an alien device. So you're not supposed to really know what it looks like. But there are these things that supposedly spin, but I interpreted them spinning in place or something. I don't really. It doesn't. I don't imagine it looking basically anything like it does in the movie. They make it much bigger and much crazier. I don't. I like the movie's version because it's just. I think it's really cool.
• 49:09
  Speaker B: Does a suicide bomber then blow up the machine? Because that was one hell of a security breach. He just, like, walked right in there, apparently.
• 49:18
  Speaker A: Yeah. So there is a very similar scene, but not exactly the same. While they are touring the site in the book, Ellie is actually there with Drumlin and a group of other people. They're touring the location, like the machine site, and they're like near the machine and they walk around this corner and an explosion happens and Drumlin is killed. Ellie actually survives based on where she was. She was behind a bulkhead or something to where she ends up completely unscathed and is not injured at all. But Drumlin, who is like, a few feet ahead of her, is killed. Later, she realizes at his funeral that he actually, at least she thinks he, like, dove and, like, pushed her and ended up, like, saving her life basically at the last second, you know, and kind of like in a last moment, even though she hated this man her whole life and he was an asshole the whole time, like, he might have actually saved her life kind of at the last second. The big difference is it's not a suicide bomber. One of the pieces of the machine that came from a manufacturer in Indiana had a bomb in it. Oh, it was sabotaged by. In the book, they never figure out who did it. In the movie, it's that religious guy. They, like, find his videotape. It's the preacher from earlier, Jake Busey's character. He's just part of, like, a religious extremist organization. In the book, they never figure it out. They speculate a bunch of different religious organizations that it could be terrorist organizations. They think the Russians might. Or the Soviets might have done. I keep saying Russians or Soviets. Still in the book, Carl didn't predict the downfall of the Soviet Union, apparently, when he was writing.
• 50:47
  Speaker B: Oh, he can't get everything right.
• 50:49
  Speaker A: They ultimately rule out the Soviets and they just never figure out who did it. They have no idea. So I'm indifferent on this change because I actually love that scene in the movie. I've always thought that scene was really, like, intense and, like, the way they're, like, trying to stop him from blowing it up and stuff like that. I also really like the book's version. I like that they never figure it out. Like, it's just like, I don't know, somebody. Yeah, whatever. And I thought that was really interesting and it's a bit less Hollywood. It feels a little more realistic in the book to me. The movie's version, again, is very Hollywood, where he's like. Like, got a suicide vest and they're trying to stop him and blah, blah, blah and all that. But again, I think that movie's a lot, like, super intense and fun in the movie.
• 51:28
  Speaker B: So do we meet up with Haddon again? And is he living on a space station that's owned by Russia?
• 51:35
  Speaker A: He is living on a space station, but it's not Mir, which is the Russian space. The real life Russian space station that was in orbit at the time, which was decommissioned in 2001, I believe he's living on Methuselah, which is a private retirement space station. Again, this is the speculative sci fi stuff.
• 51:51
  Speaker B: I feel like we're probably not far off from that.
• 51:53
  Speaker A: Yeah. So the book explains that there are essentially retirement homes in orbit because it. It'll extend your lifespan by like 10 to 20% based on the gravity and the oxygen or whatever. And I don't even know if that's true. It's just. It's what he says it might be. Most of the stuff in here is at least based on some real signs. So I don't know. But they have these retirement homes and the whole thing is that once you go up to them, you can't come back down. Because if you come back down, you'll die. Because like, like the. From being up as an old age, like if you go up there when you're like in your 70s or 80s and you spend like years up there, you can't come back down because the gravity will like give you a heart attack, basically.
• 52:31
  Speaker B: Interesting.
• 52:31
  Speaker A: Yeah. So the wealthy kind of go up there for their retirement. But a little thing that the book mentions I think is really interesting is that once they're up there, they have. And it's got a name. I think the astronauts have a name for it. They experience that moment of looking at the Earth from outer space. And the book actually says that it like, makes all these billionaires, like, like turns them into like humans and they actually start caring about the world and they actually start trying to like, fund and support projects to like, help people and unite the world. But this spawns a bunch of conspiracy theories about them being up there, like secretly pulling the strings behind everything. It's interesting. And I think this is better in the book. In the movie, she just talks to him on like a satellite phone or whatever and he's up there. In the movie or in the book, she goes up to the space station, she flies. She gets to take a. She get rides on a shuttle. Flies up to the space station and gets to hang out with him and a Japanese war criminal that he's hanging out with who's like, living up there. Yeah. But yeah, she gets to go visit him on the space station. Basically. A very similar scene plays out. He tells her about the other machine and all that sort of stuff.
• 53:35
  Speaker B: But yeah, which brings me to my next question. Sorry, Is there a secret second machine that Ellie will now get to go on?
• 53:45
  Speaker A: Yes. In the book, they're actually building two machines from the start.
• 53:50
  Speaker B: So we know about the second machine.
• 53:52
  Speaker A: Hold on.
• 53:53
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 53:53
  Speaker A: They're building two machines from the start. One in the US and one in the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, one of the two, which is why they suspected the Russians of sabotaging that at one point. They are working. Everybody's working together. Like the machines are being built simultaneously mainly to like. Like in case there's issues with one. It's like whichever one gets done first, that's the one they're gonna use. It's not like so much. It's a little bit of a space race. But it's not like if the Russians get done or the Soviets get done, they're gonna like send their own crew for like they're all kind of working together. The parts are all being built by the same companies and stuff, but they're just building two of them. After the US one gets blown up, the Russian one, they just never get working. They have a bunch of issues with the stuff. It's a bit of a commentary on Lysenkoism. Soviet Union had a big issue where their science sucked in a lot of ways because they, they trusted like their science was corrupted by the bureaucratic system of. There's a whole thing. If you look up Lysancoism, it's its own whole thing. It's very interesting. Basically. It's also led to like a lot of the famine and stuff because. Because Lysenko was this guy who had a different alternative theory about like, as opposed to evolution. And that became like the Soviet like propaganda, like this is our version of evolution is Lysenko ism or whatever. And it ended up causing a bunch of fucking issues and stuff like that. So this is kind of a commentary on. They can't get their machine working because they're bad at science. They're not bad at science overall, but their bureaucracy is bad at science basically. So that one never gets working. The US one blows up and then hadn't reveals much like in the movie, that one of their system integration test sites where they were testing parts, they figured they may as well just build another machine there to test the parts in before they ship them to the ones in the US and the Soviet. But then they kind of realized, well, you may as well just finish building it and actually use it because it'll be faster than either fixing the US one or getting the. The Soviet one working. So it all plays out the same very similar. Like there's this one that nobody knows about and that's the one they end up using. And it is in Hokkaido Do.
• 56:03
  Speaker B: So did they give her a suicide pill before she goes on just in case she gets stranded in outer space?
• 56:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, this is not in the book. I don't have strong feelings on it either way. Also, according to all NASA reports, as well as direct testimony from like multiple astronauts and stuff, it's not true. Again, the movie references that by saying like, this is top secret, we deny, blah, blah, blah. Like, says it's like, you know. But again, as far as I could tell in front, like, I don't think it's actually true that they do that. That another. This is also another instance of don't trust AI when you're searching on the Internet. I found an article debunking this on. So the AI said a thing. I found an article debunking. Debunking the. The cyanide tablets. Like, do astronauts get it on. It's called IFL Science now. But I think it was like. I fucking love Science was like the. The old page. And that article is debunking it. But it says the rumor may have been from Carl Sagan's novel Contact or its film adaptation. And the AI summary specifically mentions that the rumor may have started in the novel. Yeah, again, it's not in the novel, so it's only in the movie. Now this one, again, it's AI basing it on a person being wrong. Yeah, I think, I assume this article was from years ago.
• 57:17
  Speaker B: Well, I mean, then that is.
• 57:19
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 57:19
  Speaker B: Not to go on a tangent about a like. But that is how like the AI search results work. They pull things from sources on the Internet. The AI just can't vet those sources and tell what they're actually saying and whether or not it's accurate. Yeah, which is why you shouldn't trust the AI summary.
• 57:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, but again, a person could have done the same thing. A person could have went and said, oh, they might. Maybe it's from the book or whatever. But yeah, no, it is. Yeah. So anyways, just another way where you gotta double check things because. Yeah.
• 57:48
  Speaker B: So Ellie goes. She goes in the device. Does she fall through a wormhole or at least appear to.
• 57:54
  Speaker A: Yes, they initially think they are traveling through black holes, but ultimately do realize that it is a wormhole. A guy named Ada or Etta or Ada, I think he's a physicist in the book that doesn't appear in the movie. He specifically at the end calls it a wormhole and says they are similar to black holes, but they have no evolutionary connection. They're not. They're similar in ways, but they're not, like, directly related to black holes.
• 58:19
  Speaker B: Gotcha.
• 58:20
  Speaker A: Same kind of thing, though.
• 58:22
  Speaker B: Does she go to a space beach and talk to her alien dad?
• 58:27
  Speaker A: That's actually exactly what happens, yes. She ends up on a beach in outer space. Although in the movie they make it look like you can see space and stuff. Yeah, in the book. Or, sorry, in the movie I can't. I do that all the time. I can remember which I said, in the movie, they make it look like crazy and like she's in outer space. In the book, it's just an exact. She thinks it looks like being on Earth. Like, it literally just looks like Earth. But yes, the exact same thing ends up on a beach. Dad shows up. They have a very similar but much longer and more nuanced conversation in the book. They have, like, a few lines in the movie and that hits, like, some of the high points of the conversation in the book, but there's a lot more.
• 59:08
  Speaker B: Is the line, you contacted us. We were just listening from the book.
• 59:13
  Speaker A: No, that line is not in the book, but it does reflect the general idea of what happened here. The aliens on Vega, or They're not on Vega. That's where their satellite or their radio telescopes are. But they do receive our radio signals and they hear us. And Ellie ends up asking him, like, are we taking some sort of test? And here's what her alien dad says about that. Then why didn't you leave us alone? I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm only curious at how the Office of Galactic Census works, which is how he kind of describes what they. He's like, don't think of us as, like, sheriffs. Think of us more of an Office of Galactic Census or whatever. I'm only curious is how the Office of Galactic Galactic Census works. The first thing you picked up from us was that Hitler broadcast. Why did you make contact? The picture, of course, was alarming. We could tell you were in deep trouble. But the music told us something else. The Beethoven told us there was hope. Marginal cases are our specialty. We thought you could use a little help. Really? We can offer only a little. You understand there are certain limitations imposed by causality. But yes, they do hear us broadcasting and decide to contact us. Because they're kind of like, welcome to the club, welcome to the space faring, welcome to the Universal Club kind of thing, right?
• 1:00:30
  Speaker B: Do the aliens not know who built the transit system? The machine?
• 1:00:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, they do not. It is a great mystery to them as well, and I really like that. It's the same thing in the book. And the whole point there is that it works to humanize them, for lack of a better term, makes them feel like just another part of the universe in the same way that we are. These very immensely old and smart aliens also have old things that are older than them that they don't fully understand. See, we're all the same. Like, that's the idea. Like, you didn't understand the signal and how these, like, all this stuff happens. Or in, like, the world that they've created, where they can perfectly recreate Earth and people from your past and stuff like that, that seems insane and super magic and you could never fathom how that works. Works. The same thing exists for them in the universe. There's stuff that they don't understand. So.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker B: So then when she gets back, does it seem like she didn't go anywhere? And, like, the pod just. They say in the movie that it just, like, drops straight through.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, yeah, we see the video of it just falling straight through. So, yes, essentially, this becomes the central conflict of the final few chapters of the book. There is no dropping because the machine appears to not go anywhere in the. But. Or. Sorry, there is no dropping in the book. The machine just sits there. The pod just, like, sits on a thing and, like, stuff spins around it, but it doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. In the book, 20 minutes passes, as opposed to a few seconds, but the effect is the same. She was gone for 18 hours in the movie. In the book, it was over a day, like, almost two days or something like that. But to everyone else who is watching on Earth, she appears to have not gone anywhere, and a much shorter amount of time has passed on Earth than has passed for her.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker B: So then we have a hearing after this where they're questioning her about what her experience was. And James Wood's character, Kits, posits that reclusive billionaire Haddon faked the entire thing.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker A: He's like, well, we have no evidence.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker B: And the radio signal and the plans for building it and everything. Is that from the book?
• 1:02:44
  Speaker A: So this is very similar in some ways, but he does not specifically accuse Haddon of doing it as a hoax. Kitz does lead an investigation and argue that the whole thing was fake, but he actually argues that Ellie and the other scientists faked it themselves. They even get a report at some point during this that shows that the machine had been under significant physical stresses and had been exposed to radiation and stuff.
• 1:03:08
  Speaker B: Stuff.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker A: But he's like, no, you just faked all that. Because they're like, well, this report says like it got exposed to like gamma radiation, all this sort of stuff. Like how did. And he goes, you guys are smart. You guys faked all that. He also claims that they put a transmitter in orbit around the Earth to send the message. They faked the message. He even implies that she's responsible for killing Drumlin because like she hated him or whatever. Some of the other people on the board in the book do stick up for her and are like, man, what are you talking about? Like, like in the movie everybody's kind of lets him take over and run or whatever. But Kit' in the book same way, just bulldozes through and is like, no, this is, none of this happened. You're lying. His final piece of evidence in the book that I, they don't mention in the movie, but it's his big like knockout piece of evidence in the book is that the message stopped broadcasting like the one they had been receiving since the beginning. The message stopped broadcasting exactly the moment that they quote unquote launched. And that that would be impossible for the aliens to do to stop the message at that precise time because in order for them to do that, they would have had to have known exactly when the launch was going to happen and stop the message 26 years earlier. Because it takes the message 26 years to get to Earth, right? So in order for them to have, have it stop at that precise moment that they launch, they would have had to stop at that precise moment 26 years earlier. And he's like, that's. How could they possibly have known that? Now we know that the aliens causality, they don't. Time is not. Time is a flat circle to them. Like they don't perceive time the same way and stuff like that. And there's causality stuff that's weird. But yes, that's his like kind of final big knockdown, drag out thing. So the big question that I think I had in the movie and that you definitely have in the book is why the hell is he doing this? Like, why is he insisting this is fake? Like, why is he being such an asshole hole? The main reason for it in the book, and I think it's basically similar in the movie, the main reason is one, it was a giant. They see it as a giant waste of money because they come back with literally nothing that the government can use. No weapons, no technology, no, no nothing. They don't bring any physical stuff back. It's just information. Like, this is, this is what I saw. This is what, this is what the aliens said that kind of stuff. And to the government, they're like, well, this is useless. I can't do anything with this. And the second reason is that Ellie realizes that he's doing this is because she told him that the Caretakers, which are what she calls like the aliens, are using their technology to literally create a new universe. So in the book, when she's at. On the beach talking to her dad, he explains that intelligent life throughout the galaxy has been working together to cultivate a new universe. Because our current universe is expanding. And the more it expands, eventually we will experience this thing called heat death, where new stuff starts for stops forming, and the universe will eventually die. So all of the aliens are essentially working together to use their technology to create, like, a new universe in our universe worth of stuff. They're doing this in a real place in the sky called Cygnus A. You can look this up. It's one of the strongest radio sources in the sky in space. So they're. They're dumping all of this material and stuff into this place to help kind of create and cultivate and prolong the universe. Like, that is what they're doing. She explains this to the. The government when she gets back, she tells them that they're doing this and the fact that the Caretakers are kind of like, using their technology to work together and create life. And in contrast, Kits is basically. He's the head of defense in the book. He's like the head of the department of Defense or whatever. And he is the master of this dwindling nuclear arsenal. He basically, he's the master of death. These aliens are kind of the masters of life. And he sees this thing she tells him about, like, what they're doing as kind of a rebuke of his entire being. He feels kind of like dwarfed and mocked by the universe of like. Like, basically, she's like, kind of the ultimate thing these aliens are doing is, like, creating, like, look, what they're doing is this incredible thing. And he's like, he's on Earth feeling his power and influence slipping away. And the only thing he has any control over is, like, death and murder and all of that sort of stuff. And again, just feels like he. He kind of rejects this. Is like, well, that can't be what they're doing, because that means what I'm doing is, like, awful, basically. So he refuses to accept what she said. Initially. I really had a tough time with this in the book. I really thought it was ridiculous how absurdly he resisted all of the evidence because similar to the movie, they don't have any hard evidence. The photos and videos get all erased. There's no mementos. They didn't bring back any souvenirs or anything like that. But unlike the movie, there actually are some other specific test results like I mentioned earlier, that showed something happened like the, the radiation and the stress and all that sort of stuff as well as one really big other thing that we'll get to here shortly and lost an adaptation that you may be picking up on as I'm talking about this. But I was like, it's so dumb that he's just gonna steamroll through this. Deny obvious evidence. Again, not super hard evidence, but there is evidence. Other people telling him like, what are you talking about, man? Like other people on the board are like, she's not lying. Like what are you talking about? And I'm like, so I found it really hard to believe that he's going to be that dumb, steamroll through it, deny obvious evidence, and that the other people on the board were just going to like let him do this. Then I thought about it for like five seconds and I thought about how our government currently operates and I was like, no. Yeah, that completely tracks. No, that's 100% tracks. That this one asshole with a bone to pick because he feels intimidated by his place in the fucking universe is going to be a giant asshole and ruin her life. Kind of of like. Yeah, no, no, 100% Carl, you nailed it. Yeah. In the movie, I don't know if his motivation really comes across for why he's doing it. They make an allusion to him like running for office. And I think the idea is supposed to be that like he's grandstanding.
• 1:09:19
  Speaker B: Right. Like taking this like hard ass line.
• 1:09:22
  Speaker A: Yeah. As like I'm saving the people, you know, I'm going to hold people to account and like that sort of thing like I think is what they're to going. Going for. Because it would be hard to explain his very subtle, weird, nuanced. Because again it's all in Ellie's head where she kind of during the, the hearing is like figuring out why he's doing this. I think it would be very hard to kind of show in the movie. I guess you could ever have a conversation with Palmer about it or something like that. But. But yeah, so that's what, that's what all it is very similar in a lot of ways. But it makes, I think it's fleshed out a little bit more in the book in a way that's interesting. Although there is an element that makes it a little tough to swallow, which we'll get to in a second.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker B: So my last question here. In this. In this final testimony that she gives, she ends up having to be like, I don't have any evidence. I can't explain it. So you're. I'm asking you to go on faith and just like, believe me. Is any of that from the book?
• 1:10:21
  Speaker A: Oh, boy, here we go. So, yes, to some extent, that is part of the, like, twist of the story. And maybe not twist, but the subversion of the story is that Ellie has to argue from a place of minimal evidence, which is akin to her having to argue from faith. But in the book, it's not like this big core thematic moment. It's more of a. Like, isn't this kind of ironic thing? Like, the skeptic has to, like, argue from a place of, like, minimal evidence and try to get people to believe her? And it's kind of. Again, it's more of, like, it's a little ironic. The movie to me, feels like it absolutely turns this into a what now, Skeptic? Not so tough now, are you skeptic? Kind of, like, thing that I kind of hated. I kind of, like, genuinely hated the end of this movie. I'd love to hear an argument for why I'm wrong on this, but to me, it really felt a little bit like a slap in the face to Carl Sagan's legacy because he was such a skeptic and stuff. The book absolutely plays a bit more both sidesy than I was expecting in terms of the faith versus science science. Like, I was not expecting this book to be as charitable to religion as it is, but it does it in a much more nuanced way. Like, it is much more subtle and nuanced. Like, at one point in the book, Palmer Joss asks her, what is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil? And I think we're genuinely meant to take that seriously and consider that, like, I do think that is like. Like Palmer Joss does voice opinions that Carl Sagan thinks are, like, meaningful and important. Because the whole point of this book kind of is about marrying humanity with science. The book isn't necessarily saying faith and science can coexist equally, but there are elements of spirituality in science and vice versa, which I wasn't really expecting. I was expecting the book to come down much harder on, like, science science. Like, I had no idea. But I. But it really does. It does come down on the side of rationality and skepticism. But in a way that is human and that is focused on humanity, and that is an element of spirituality, in a way. He calls it numinous. We'll talk about here in a second. The idea of, like, anuminous experience. Like I said, it does highlight similarities in Ellie's experience and that of a believer, but it doesn't feel nearly as judgmental of her as the film does to me. Yeah, like, the hearing at the end,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker B: it feels like a gotcha.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker A: Yes. The hearing at the end with the pointed question about faith, to me, feels like the movie bashed. Bashing her over the. And us, the audience, over the head with like, huh, not so clever now. Are you not so sure of yourself now? Are you skeptic? The book does not do that. The book does go, man. Isn't it kind of ironic that you have to argue with a bunch of people who doubt what you're saying? Like, that is part of it. And it does soften her in a way and make her understand a little bit more of, like, where Palmer's coming from and stuff like that. That. But again, it's just so much more nuanced. The book is like, hey, maybe be a little bit more sympathetic, a little bit more understanding with people of faith. Their experience is not so different in a lot of ways to how you're experiencing things. Maybe don't be quite such an asshole sometimes when people are talking about religion is kind of the general vibe of the book. But it's still very much like. But you're right. And, like, science is right and skepticism is right and atheism is correct. And like, it's. And the movie to me feels like. Like, ah, fuck you. I don't know. I did not like that ending at all. Really big. I had a really big problem with it. And I. I'm kind of glad Carl Sagan didn't get to see it or if he had gotten to see it, I would have been interested to hear his thoughts on it. Like I said, I would genuinely be interested to hear other people's thoughts. And if I'm. If you interpret that ending differently than me or what. But. Yeah, all right, that was it for. Was that in the book. We got a couple things to talk about in Lost in Adaptation. Just show me the way to get out of here and I'll be on my way. Yes, yes. And I want to get unlocked as soon as possible.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker B: Okay, so we already know the answer to my first question here, which was, does Drumlin want to go in the transportation device?
• 1:14:36
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:14:36
  Speaker B: So we know that he did and he was selected for that mission in the book. But I have, I had questions about this watching the movie because I was like, surely he's too old. Because I know that there are requirements to be an astronaut. There are like physical fitness requirements, pretty strict physical fitness requirements to be an astronaut and to go into space. And I would have thought that whoever they were gonna send in this transportation machine would have to have the same physical capabilities. So is there anything about that in the book?
• 1:15:13
  Speaker A: So they do actually comment on this in the book, but it's pretty simple. And the answer is no, they don't really have those concerns ultimately because of the aliens capabilities and the level of technology that the aliens have and kind of how they imagine this machine might work. They're not particularly worried about the, the age or the physical capabilities of the people they send because they, they, they think that the aliens will have kind of not worried about that or thought about or not not worried about it, but that this machine won't, it won't matter for how this machine works. They're not gonna like fly it through space for like years. They don't really, they think it's gonna be a pretty straightforward, simple, relatively like the, their thing is like, these aliens are so smart, so advanced and so far ahead of where we are. We kind of just trust that they took care of all of this. So the other thing I have here that I added to Lost in Adaptation, I put it here because I didn't know where I wanted to put it otherwise. And this felt like a good place to put it, which is the crew size. So I don't know if people have been picking up this whole time. I've said they a lot over the past hours. I've been talking about this when referring to the mission, but a huge change they make is the crew size. In the book, five people go in the machine.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker B: I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker A: Ellie is initially not in it. Drumlin is in her spot and like I said, she is the backup. He ultimately dies and she takes over. But there are four other spots and four other scientists from around the world that go. There's a woman named Devi who is a molecular biologist in her 40s from India. Vega Lunikarsky is the Soviet physicist. He's an old friend of Ellie's. He's kind of a main character who he actually briefly is mentioned in the movie. I think I have a note about this later, but at one point Drumlin says like, oh, we need a decryption person. I Think Luna Karski is at California or Caltech or something right now. He mentions the character's name and he might even show up later. There's a moment where they're looking at all of the images from the message on a light board and they're trying to piece it together. And there's a guy with a Soviet accent there that might be supposed to be. He's like a main character in the book. He's like in a lot of it. And he's like Ellie's. She's been friends with him for a long time from like astronomy and physics physics conferences and stuff like that. She Q Mu. Cow moo. I don't know how to pronounce it. He is Chinese. He's a politician and an archaeologist from China. And then Ada, who I mentioned earlier is a Nigerian physicist who Ellie essentially explains is like the modern day Newton or Hawking. He's like on the leading forefront of discovering new physics and stuff like that. And he's the one later who's like, no, this is a wormhole. And kind of figures out like what's going on. But Ellie, a little detail about him is. Ellie mentions that when he is chosen, there's a bunch of racist backlash to him being on the crew.
• 1:18:13
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:18:14
  Speaker A: I have mixed feelings on this change. I really like all of these characters in the book. I really like, like reading their. I really enjoy their camaraderie. The little elements of their character we discover over the course of the book. But having five people with identical stories when interviewed separately at the end makes the COVID up a bit harder to believe. So they come back and they all tell. They get interviewed separately and they all tell identical stories again. His I thing is, well, you all planned all this. You all worked together, you all rehearsed your stories or whatever, I guess. But it's a little bit harder to believe. I get why the movie changed this. Ellie's the main character. It makes the ending a little bit more believable and it makes it a bigger like her belief against the world thing. It makes her like test of faith more, you know, bigger because she doesn't have other people to like share it with or whatever. And the story is even in the book about her journey. It's not really about these other people people, but a big part of her journey is learning to connect with people. And some of that comes from her experiences with these crew, with the other crew and, and like what they go through. Because one of the things, and I actually don't remember if I have this Anywhere else. So I'll mention it here is when she gets to the end, when they get to the beach, they go to the beach. Her dad is there. But they also all have a loved one there. So like they each have a loved one. They're not all dead either. Some of them are alive still. Like some of them are dead. Some of them are like, like Ada's like wife is there like who's currently alive on earth. But so, and, but they talk about like she talks to them about their relationships with those people and stuff and it all ties into her character journey. But again, I completely understand this change in the movie. It would not really. I don't know, it would be a very different movie to have a crew of five people going on this mission versus just.
• 1:20:06
  Speaker B: Yes, that is a different movie.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker A: It's a whole different movie. And so I totally get why they changed it, but I do actually quite like it it in the book. All right, speaking of what I like in the book, it's time to find out everything I thought was better in the book. You like to read?
• 1:20:21
  Speaker B: Oh yes, I love to read.
• 1:20:24
  Speaker A: What do you like to read?
• 1:20:27
  Speaker B: Everything.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker A: Carl Sagan, a fan of our podcast. I was cracking up. I sent you a photo of this. We'll have to share it online. On page eight of this novel there is a line where Carl Sagan writes, the book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more of it or a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie. But in both, Pinocchio, a life sized wooden boy who was magically roused to life where a kind of halt of goes on. She's talking about Pinocchio. But is Ellie commenting on the fact that she thinks that the book of Pinocchio is better than the movie of Pinocchio?
• 1:21:08
  Speaker B: A thing we've never covered.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker A: A thing we've never covered. But I thought that was so I just literally. It was like, it's literally the start of like a page. It was like the book is better than was better than the movie. I was like, ah, sent you a picture like immediately. There's another great line. A lot of this is just lines because boy, Carl could write some bangers at times. So talking about for all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration goes on to talk about how the stars were comforted, how they demonstrated that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans and all this sort of stuff. And then goes on to say at the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. He does a lot of commenting on how we suck as humans. It's a lot of of the book in ways that is very apt and ever timeless. A little detail I thought was funny is that Ellie as she's growing up, at one point in college or high school, I believe, she starts going to Vietnam protests and joins activist groups and discovers that she likes the people there a lot more than the people at her school. They're all a lot smarter and friendlier and, she says, more alive than her schoolmates, which I thought was interesting. This is really. I gotta read this section. There's a little aside about. Because a lot of the big beginning part of this book is about how Ellie has to learn how to exist as a woman in a field dominated by men. Like I said, this book is a lot about sexism. And there's this little section here that basically talks about how she learns to talk so that men will listen to her. But there was a problem with her central interests. She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first, they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause and then they would go on as if she had not spoken. Occasionally, they would acknowledge her remark, even praise it, and then again continue undefect, deflected. She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it, but only a part she knew, was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice, clear, competent, and many decibels above conversation. With such a voice, it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments. It was hard to continue long in such a voice because she was sometimes in danger of bursting out laughing. So she found herself leaning toward quick, sometimes cutting interventions, usually enough to capture their attention. Then she would go on for a while in a more usual or in a more usual tone of voice. Every time she found herself in a new group, she would have to fight her way through again just to dip her ore into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware, even that there was a problem.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds about right.
• 1:23:53
  Speaker A: Yeah. A little detail in the book that I thought was interesting is that she talks about how she has Dreams about musical patterns that she thinks are vague. Memories of listening to radio static, like she would listen to radios. And so she would write down these dreams and then as music notes, and then play them on a recorder, which I thought would be fun to see in the movie.
• 1:24:11
  Speaker B: She, like, turned her recorder like, you learn it.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker A: Yeah. Like a little kid, elementary school. Yep, yep. Yeah. She would play her dream music, which I thought was fun. There's a great line in here, which I don't think this is where this sentiment originates, because this is a very famous, like, line. And I do not think it's from this. Like, not this exact line, but this sentiment is, like, a thing you've heard. But I don't know if this is just a version of it, because I truly don't think Carl Sagan is the one who invented this. But if we like them, they're freedom fighters. If we don't like them, they're terrorists. In the unlikely case we can't make up our minds, they're temporarily only guerrillas. One detail that I do like. So I'll get to a thing. I like how the message all. Discovering the message all plays out in the movie. But one little detail that I do really like in the book is that when she discovers, when she gets the call, that the message has been discovered in the book, she's actually at her weekly visit with her mom at a nursing home. Her mom is not dead in the book. We'll get more to that here in a minute. I had this line written down because this is the first time I realized there's a line very early in the book.
• 1:25:14
  Speaker B: Book.
• 1:25:14
  Speaker A: You're the president's science advisor. What do you advise her? And this is where it's revealed that the president in the book is a woman. And I wrote, oh, Carl. Again with the speculative fiction and Carl being optimistic. But again, I don't actually, as I thought about it more, I honestly don't think it's so much him trying to be, like, being optimistic, like, oh, well, maybe we'll have a woman president in the 90s or whatever.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:25:36
  Speaker A: I think what it actually is is him trying to write the world he wants to see, kind of like willing it into existence. The idea of like. Like fiction always writes he was trying
• 1:25:44
  Speaker B: to manifest a female person.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker A: I think, honestly, a little bit, and maybe less than manifest. More so like all fiction, the part of the reason that we only have male presidents is that fiction only depicts male presidents. So he's like, well, that I'll make a woman president. So, yes, the president in this book is a woman. Oh, speaking of, she, they. He. When Ellie goes to visit her, they discover they're walking through the hallway and they stop at this bust of Thomas Paine. And I think it's Der here who is. And I'll talk more about him later. Ken Der here, he is the science advisor for the president and relationship with. He ends up in a relationship with Ellie at one point, but they're talking about it and he explains that Mrs. President had restored the bust of Thomas Paine to the White House that the previous president had removed. Implying that Ms. President is a little more. A little, maybe more liberal, a little more high minded, a little less, you know, because Pain is obviously a very famous atheist and free thinker and that sort of thing. They have a whole thing in the. Another one of Carl Sagan's asides, similar to his religious debates where they go through and explain that UFOs are all fake. Like, they're like, okay, so this alien signal is real. We're gonna go and talk about the fact that every UFO ever and every story about it has not actually been aliens. Like the government is like, we don't have aliens hidden anywhere. Blah, blah, blah. That kind of thing, like goes through a bunch of explanations for the things that people think are aliens. All that kind of run down all of those normal explanations, that sort of stuff. There's a great line when all the religious. So after the call gets. After the message gets received sparks a whole bunch of religious stuff. New sex, new all kinds. Is obviously as it would. The existence of aliens kicks off all kinds of religious stuff. And Vegae, who is her, and that is how you pronounce his nickname, but is. It's short. I don't know why it's pronounced that way. I guess his nickname is like. Or his name is like V. His initials are VG Leonikarsky and they call him Vega, short for his nickname or initials or whatever. But like I said, he's a Soviet. He has a great line. He says the main religious question in my country will be whether the Vegans have properly denounced Leon Trotsky. Another thing that is not depicted in the movie that I really like is that in the book, the message is so long that it takes dozens of sites all across the world to capture the whole thing. Because the earth is spinning, right?
• 1:28:02
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker A: And this is intentional by the aliens. It forces the earth to work together in order to actually get the entire message. And so, yeah, they. They talk about how they have to kind of everybody has to work together. All over the world to. To capture the entire message. They also mention a satellite in orbit. Would have helped with this if they had had a satellite up there, like a satellite radio telescope that. That could have made this all a lot easier. But the plans that they had submitted for one had been removed from the budget for three straight years. They're like saying this to the president or whatever, like, yeah, so like, it'd be a lot easier if we had a satellite, the one that we had been asking for for like a while. Carl Sagan goes on a little rant about all the slop on TV in the 80s, which is hilarious.
• 1:28:49
  Speaker B: Oh, Carl, if only you knew.
• 1:28:51
  Speaker A: Yeah, he also, in his speculative fiction way, wildly hopeful or maybe trying to will it into a existence. Ellie is watching a new show where half of the show is. The second half of the show is fact checking the first half of the show. Yep, exactly. And then another one is a show that it literally is just debunking myths and prejudices and bigotries and stuff. Like it's like a whole half hour weekly television show that is just like debunking bullshit and like racism and stuff like that. And another one that literally all it does is highlight unfulfilled campaign promises, politicians. And I was like, oh, Carl. Yeah, that'll all be very popular. That'll definitely be popular enough to be an actual show that people watch again. He. I think a little bit of, yeah, trying to create the universe, the world he would like to see there. There's an ad again on the speculative fiction thing. At one point she sees an ad for the first generation of household robots that Haddon Cybernetics has created. So they're at the beginning of like having robots in their house and stuff like. Like that. At one point I thought, this is really fun and a great, a cute little character moment. She finally has some downtime after all of this stuff. It's been like a year or something since the message. I mean, maybe not months since the message. And she checks her email and she has like thousands of emails from amateur radio operators who are sending her stuff that they think they might, like, SETI might have missed. And she feels obligated to respond to all of them with encouraging messages like, no, well, we got that, but good job. Thanks. Her, like, she's like trying to like, you know, she wants to like, keep them looking and keep them interested in science and stuff, which I thought was really funny. So der here. I mentioned earlier he's the president's science advisor. I'm glad he's not in the movie just because his name's annoying to say. He's literally Kender here. He's a science advisor and him and Ellie end up in a relationship early in the book. They basically kind of combine his character with Palmer Joss's character a little bit. There is a ton of great lines about their relationship in this book. One of them is that describes him as a considerate and inventive lover, which I thought was funny. And then I have to read this section because it's. I sent you a photo of this. It's some of my favorite stuff I've seen written about love in a book. Like and doesn't mean a lot, but it's. Yeah. She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self esteem. She liked herself better because of him. And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship. At least that was how she described it to herself. In the presence of so many of her friends. She had felt an undercurrent of loneliness. With Ken, it was gone. She was comfortable describing to him her reveries, snatches of memories, childhood embarrassments. And he was not merely interested, but fascinated. He would question her for hours about her childhood. His questions were always direct, sometimes probing, but without exception, gentle. She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker B: Another.
• 1:31:46
  Speaker A: There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the 1 year old, the 5 year old, the 12 year old and the 20 year old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub Personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. With her previous partners, it seemed at most one of those selves was able to find a compatible opposite number. The other Personas were grumpy hangers on. So I just think it's a really like.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, that is a really. It's a very interesting way to describe like I. Yeah, I agree.
• 1:32:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And I was like, wow, all right, Carl. That's what I said. It's like. A lot of this book is like science stuff. But he, it's. It's everything. It's. He put him whole, his whole self in this book I mentioned earlier. But the book talks about the concept of numinous, which is a spiritual religious awe, that feeling of like awe. Ellie specifically gets it from science, but Compares it to the feelings that people get from religion. The idea of, like, when she. I. This is. I have experiences. I can tell you very distinctly at least twice in my life, if not more. But the two times for sure, was seeing the eclipse.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:33:01
  Speaker A: The total. Like, that is. I. That is the exact feeling that. It's. That. It's that feeling of, like, pure, kind of spiritual awe at the universe that is the closest I've ever felt to a religious feeling. I thought this was interesting, and it confused me, briefly, is that at one point, when Ellie actually first meets Joss, I think she meets him with Rankin, that she goes to Rankin's, like, Creation Museum. He invites her there, and she's, like, walking in, and as she's walking in, like, outside, there's, like, a person with a dinosaur or whatever. It's like, literally, like a Creation Museum thing. And they're, like, having this conversation, and he's talking. She's, like, kind of debating both of them about religion, but they ask her about her religion, and she actually calls herself a clip Christian. And then later, Joss asked her. He's like, said, you were a Christian in there. You don't really strike me as a Christian or whatever. And she explains that. Well, she's, like, a huge fan of Jesus's teaching. And she goes on and on about the Sermon on the Mount and all this, that and the other. And she's like, yeah, I don't believe in God, but, like, I'm a Christian in the sense that I like a lot of what Jesus had to say. And he's like, all right. And she. She doesn't. That's. She's doing it tongue in cheek there with them, kind of to spite them, because she thinks she's a better Christian than they are, or at least than Rank is for sure, in the sense that she doesn't think that he. Yeah, but she doesn't describe herself as a Christian anywhere else in the book. And it took me aback. I was like, wait a second, did she say she was a Christian? Again, I mentioned this earlier, but the passage of time. It's very hard to tell in the film how long this all took. I couldn't tell you how long it was supposed to be from the beginning to the end.
• 1:34:31
  Speaker B: The only time, like, the only indication of time we really get is the four years later.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker B: When she's at the. The vla.
• 1:34:39
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And then after that, we don't get after that.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker B: It could. It could have been months, could have been years.
• 1:34:44
  Speaker A: The book takes place at least Over a decade, if not. And one of the lines we get in the. Is after the message. It takes, like, I think, years to decrypt the message. But she has a line in the book where it says it took years. It was a technological dream and a diplomatic nightmare. But finally they got around to building the machine. They mentioned that there was a. After the message shows up, a nuclear disarmament treaty is signed and the world becomes a lot more agreeable and peaceful in a lot of ways. And they all start working together a lot more and they start disarming all their nukes, or at least most of them, which, again, is part of the whole thing with kits later. This I like so much better in the book, and I do not understand why the movie changed this. The way they figure out that it's a transportation device and that a person goes in it in the movie is that there's just like a drawing of a human.
• 1:35:40
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:35:40
  Speaker A: Like in the circle. They're like. It's just like a little, like, cartoon person, like, waiting. In the book, after they decrypt everything and they get the plans all put together, they look at it and they're like, are those armchairs inside the sphere thing? The dodecahedron? They literally just find there's five chairs. And they say. They describe them as looking like armchairs in your living room. And they're like, well, I guess people are supposed to sit in those. And I'm imagining that as the reveal in the movie is such a funny, you know, like, just feels like such a better moment of like, yeah, for sure. Chairs. Like, what is. Yeah, this is a great line. I think she's talking. I think she's talking to she about this. And they're trying to decide whether or not they should do this. Build the machine, whatever. And she says about it, we have received an invitation, a very unusual invitation. Maybe it is to go to a banquet. The earth has never been invited to a banquet before. It would be impolite to refuse. We get a great little aside where they talk about how weed was just legalized in France.
• 1:36:44
  Speaker B: Nice.
• 1:36:45
  Speaker A: And about how they're growing a sick new strain under UV lights. By the way, Carl Sagan, lifelong weed user and advocate, big fan of it, daily user. And he had to throw a little thing in there about how there's a sick new strain of weed. I thought that was very funny. As I mentioned, the whole world does start trying to translate the message, or I think I mentioned the whole this. But at some point they can't figure out the message. And the whole world starts trying to translate it. They print coffee books of the diagrams.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker B: Nice.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker A: And, like, so people, like, have them at home and they're, like, pouring through them and stuff like that, which I think is a lot of fun. There's a really funny line where somebody is. I think it's kits or vegae. Or somebody says, who's that one who thinks he's a Roman general? And Ellie goes, valerian. I don't think he thinks he's a Roman general. That's just his name. Because his name's like, something like Paul Valerian or something like that. And the Russian guy, Soviet guy's, like, who's that one who thinks he's a Roman general? There are lots of descriptions of building the machine and testing new processes and materials and stuff. That's kind of interesting, kind of not. But I included it here. I'll talk more about how it's not super interesting later. I like. In the book, it's mentioned that at the end, when they get to the machine in Hokkaido, the crew is all. Or the engineers and everybody working on it are all Japanese. And they wear these traditional Japanese outfits that. And they wear these headbands that are, like, normally, like a sports thing, but they have. That would normally have, like, the Japanese logo or whatever print or Japanese flag symbol, like the rising sun printed on them, but they instead have a map of, like, the Earth printed on them. In the book, they just have, like, those helmets, like the. Or in the movie, they have those, like, helmets or. It's not as interesting. I like the headband thing. I mentioned it, but at Drumlin's funeral, Ellie realizes. Oh, I didn't mention this. She realizes that her immediate thought after Drumlin died was that him dying meant that she would get to go. Yeah, and she feels very horrible about that. But she also, in that moment, realizes that she had wanted him to die for, like, humiliating him. Like, she hated him and, like, was not really mad about him dying because he had, like, humiliated her in front of students and stuff and had been, like, a paternal, like, asshole the whole time. And so she feels kind of guilty about his death. It's just an interesting.
• 1:38:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, I imagine that would be a whole range of emotions.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker A: One of the things this book does at several different times is it gives Ellie some very ugly inner thoughts that she tries to deal with where she. There's another one later that I didn't include where she talks about how she's a little worried about meeting aliens because she has always had a revulsion to malformed Humans like an innate. She doesn't like it about herself, but that if she sees somebody with a physical disability or something, it's like it like, icks her out. And so she's worried about the. She's like, I don't. Probably not a great person to meet an alien or whatever, but the book does that several times where it has her kind of grapple with internal thoughts that she doesn't like having but does. And then. But she. I think it does this thing. I think the whole point of it is like, it's okay to have. Not necessarily okay to have these thoughts, but like, everybody sometimes has weird bad thoughts, but it's how you deal with them and how you act on them. Them that is important. And she's not like a prejudiced person or anything. You know, like she. She kind of has this innate weird revulsion to like, people with like, disabilities and stuff, but she doesn't behave in that way. And she. And she works hard not to. To like, change that about herself, which I think is really interesting. There's a brief mention of the fact when she's up on the space station with Haddon about. They talk about sex tourism, about people go up to the space stations to have sex and stuff. And it's fun. Ellie and Vega have dinner at one point with the abbot of the Most. At the abbot of the most? Or no, with the abbot. He's the head monk at the most famous Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan. And he explains a bunch of stuff about communication and how he thinks you can share with a rock and stuff. It's very interesting passage. Basically comes down to saying that he asked them what they think the point of communication is. And then he explains. And he basically says the point of communication is compassion and love. And he says, why do people study the signs left by ants? Meaning like the. The like chemical trails they leave behind. And he says an entomologist would say is to understand or. No, I think Ellie says an entomologist would say it's to understand the ants in an. And ant society. Science scientists take pleasure in understanding. And then the monk responds, that is only another way of saying that they love the ants.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker B: Oh.
• 1:41:16
  Speaker A: Which I thought was nice. She asks Ada, the Nigerian physicist, if he's ever had a religious experience. And he mentions all the times that he has learned new science or discovered new things. And she's like, no, you know what I mean? Like apart from science. And he goes, no, just that. Again, that's kind of reinforcing the idea of the numinous and the shared experience of religious awe and secular awe and how they're really not that different. They're doing the same thing in your brain. And so I just like it. I thought this was fun. The launch is specifically mentioned to be planned for the final week of 1999. They literally ring in the new year by traveling 26 light years away. When they leave, it is 1999. When they come back, it is 2000. But because Carl is a pedant, they mentioned the fact that 2000 wasn't technically the new millennium and that 2001 is when the new millennium started, because that is technically true. But Everybody still celebrated 2000 like it was. And he makes a joke. There's a joke about how some people did it just because they wanted to. An excuse to party two years in a row or whatever. Like, super. Go super hard two years in a row. This is great. So after they do all the math with the plans for the machine and everything, they realize there's a pretty small weight allowance between how much the machine weighs and how much the maximum weight capacity is. So they were like, okay, here's how much the crew and the stuff they can take can weigh. And so some people have suggested, well, maybe we should send all women because, like, generally speaking, they're smaller and lighter and, like, so that way, if we send all women, they could bring more stuff with them. And the book said this had been dismissed as frivolous. It's just again, leaning on an idea of like, well, people are like, well, wait a second. So like, it would actually practically make more sense if we want to send more, like, recording scientific devices if we had a crew of, like, women, because they're all smaller. They're like, well, that's silly. Obviously we're not going to send all women. Yeah. Ellie, in her stead, thinks it's kind of silly. Just bring provisions at all. All. She's like, look, if they can get me to Vega in a chair, they'll probably be able to provide some amenities. And she thinks the same thing about the camera. She's like, if I don't, why do I need to bring a camera? I could just ask them for a camera and they could probably materialize one or whatever. And there is some joking discussions about them going naked because clothing wasn't specified in the plans. But they decide now we should probably go with clothes. She does take a palm frond with her, which I thought was interesting. She finds before she goes up to the space station to be visit Haddon on the beach at Cape Canaveral. Or whatever. She finds a little like palm frond. She ends up taking it with her on the trip. And it references the fact that pilgrims used to bring a palm frond back with them when they would go on a pilgrimage from the Holy Land as proof that they had been to the Holy Land and to her. Earth is her holy land. Der here thinks it's dumb, but Vega says he gets it. Vega is very mad that he can't smoke inside. He can't bring his cigarettes with him on the trip. He's a Lucky Strike man also. Yeah. Which I thought was funny. But yeah, he. We're watching Mad Men right now, but he. Yeah, he's very upset that he can't bring his cigarettes on the trip. And that's the other thing. Going back to your point about like them being healthy or whatever. This guy's like a lifelong smoke. He's chain smokes constantly and he's. Yeah, he's going on the trip, though. They add restraints to the chair in the movie. Like those things on her back that lock her in. There's a specific conversation and they do. She does question. She's like, there's. There's no restraints in the plan or whatever. Like, we gotta do it. The book, they have that conversation too. They're like, should we put seatbelts on these seats? And they're like, they're not in the plans. And they're like, all right, we won't put em on there. This is a little passage I wanted to read. Cause I thought it was really nice. Drumlin, like many others she had known over the years, had called her an incurable romantic. And she found herself wondering again why so many people thought it some embarrassing disability. Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of the delights advocate and practitioner of romance. She was off to see the wizard. I thought that was nice.
• 1:45:10
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:45:11
  Speaker A: In the movie. This is the thing I don't like in the movie. In the movie, I don't love her child face superimposed over her face briefly. When she sees. When she first gets the Vega, did you notice that her face like morphs? She's looking out the window, like floating.
• 1:45:25
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:45:25
  Speaker A: And she's like, it's beautiful. And then her face briefly turns into Jenna Malone's child face. And the effects are not quite. It just looks weird. And. And you almost can't notice it because it's subtle, but it just almost looks like a weird, like AI filter over a face. It's. I was. I get what they're they're going for this is evoking her childlike one. That's what we're doing. But I. You can just have her evoke like act that you don't need to actually put the child's face over it. I think it's really cheesy. It's one of those things that like you have that idea in the script and like in the early stages of like storyboarding or whatever and then you think about it a little bit more like, and now we shouldn't do that. That's dumb. When they get to Vega, I thought this was fun is they. They look back behind them, they get to the, the star Vega out and they come out of the wormhole and she's kind of looking back behind them where they came from and she can see kind of gravity waves and perturbations like in the, the. The stuff near where they came out and there's a bunch of like material in the area. And she kind of realizes like we could very likely be the reason that a planet forms here eventually. Like us coming through here, disturbing the material in this environment might be the reason that eventually a planet forms here and life forms here or whatever. Which I thought was kind of fun. Vegae explains the black hole slash the wormhole in the very classic way that everybody does, where he talks about like imagine like a sheet of paper and then you like fold it and poke a hole through it or whatever. The Neil Breen way, the way that everybody does ever. But this movie or this book even references that it's dumb because what are you saying? They change the geometry of space? Yes, we're saying that space is topographically not non simply connected. It's like. I know Aba Nimma doesn't like this analogy. Abanima is ADA. It's like A2. A2 flat dimensional surface, the smart surface connected by some maze of tubing with some other flat two dimensional service. The dumb service. And he goes on, on. But he basically is like. Like points out that the, the super smart physicist is like that's not a good analogy. But he still uses it to explain it to like the other people who aren't physicists or whatever. And I thought it was funny when they're on the beach. A thing that doesn't happen in the movie that I thought was fun is that a magic door appears on the beach and they like, it's just a door, nothing else. When they walk around behind it, it disappears like, like looking at it from behind, there's nothing. But from the front There's a door and when they open it, they're like, well, I guess we go through. They take turns walking through through. Ellie ends up deciding to go last, but she never goes through. She stays there and then her dad shows up and finds her on the beach and is like, hey, you didn't go through the door. They all go through the door and then they eventually come back through the door with their respective loved one or whatever. The alien. A thing that doesn't happen in the movie that I thought was interesting, it ends up becoming relevant later is he gives her an example of something numinous to them, which is that he relates finding a message similar to them finding. Finding a message but finding a message in PI, very complicated in Mathy. But he explains how we think there's this message somewhere in PI. Basically implies some kind of grand design of the universe. And as they leave, she asks about the message in PI. And he says. And he says like, well, we haven't figured it out yet. And she says, well, when you do, give us a call. And the book actually ends on that message, which we'll get to in second. I'm almost there. They finally leave, they get back to Earth. And I love this. When they arrive back home, they open the doors, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And kinder here is waiting for their, like, waiting for them there to like debrief them or whatever. And she. The doors open and she says, ken, my boy, have I got a story for you. Which I thought was funny. Haddon's fate. Holy shit. So in the movie, Haddon just dies on the space station because he has camera answer. Not at all what happens in the book. There's a whole chapter at the end about what happened to him. In the book, he's on his space station. He fakes his death by pretending that he got stung by a bee on a space station. Yes, that somebody sent him flowers that had a bee on it.
• 1:49:21
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:49:22
  Speaker A: And it stung him and he had allergic reaction and died. But that was fake. Didn't actually happen. That was like staged death. What he actually does is he launches on a rock rocket out into the the space to eventually be cryo frozen in the hopes that one day he will be discovered by an advanced super alien species that will be able to bring him back to life so he can live forever.
• 1:49:48
  Speaker B: Taking a real leap of faith it is.
• 1:49:50
  Speaker A: But so the idea is that he wants to live forever. And so he's like, this is the best chance I can think of. And. And he does it. He's not as Old as he is in the movie. In the book, he's like in his 50s or 60s. And he intentionally does it early enough in his life that his body's still in good shape because he's like, if I do it when I'm 70, if they bring me back, I might immediately have a heart attack and die, whatever. So he does it when he's in pretty good shape, but he actually launches on the rocket and flies through the whole solar system awake because he wants to see it all. And then he's like, once I get far enough out, then. Then I'll, like, just freeze myself and then hopefully get woken up eventually. So that's what happens to him in the book. He doesn't die. He gets launched into. Well, I guess he essentially kind of does, but he gets launched into space and frozen forever. When they're dealing with all the political fallout, Vega has a great line where he says, I tell you, Ellie, the only remaining open question in the existence of intelligent life is in the Politburo, which is their version of the Soviet version of the government or whatever. After they don't believe her and everything like that, she writes up her account of events, multiple makes multiple copies of it, locks a couple copies in a safe, and then hides one in one of the telescopes at the Very Large Array and burns all the carbon paper from the copies she made. And then Joss. Palmer Joss visits, she tells him everything. And she actually goes. They go up and they stand on the telescope and they're like, talking because she's being monitored. They were like, you can't tell anybody this. If you tell anybody this. They basically work worked up psychiatric reports on all of them that are fake, that if they basically say, if you tell anybody about this, we'll leak these documents, it'll basically say you're crazy and blah, blah, blah, whatever, and ruin your life. So she ends up telling Palmer Joss about this, and he gives her, or she gives him a copy of her report about everything that happened to eventually publish. They have a really great exchange that I really like at the end where he says to her. Because she basically is like, explaining how the aliens told her about this, like, secret message in PI that implies, like, this grand design or whatever. And he's like, so you think God is a mathematician? And she says something like that. If what we're told is true, if this isn't a wild goose chase, if there's a message hiding in PI and not one of the infinity other transcendental numbers, that's a lot of Ifs. And he says, you're looking for revelation in arithmetic. I know a better way, which I thought was fun. There's a lot of, like, quipping Be Palmer Joss, like, comebacks. It's great. He does just try to convince her to go public without evidence, but she is insistent that they need to find, like, hard evidence to, like, support their claims. But she says if she can't find evidence, like, within the year, she'll consider just going public anyways. But he's trying to be like, no. You just tell people. And she's like, no, I gotta find evidence, because she's the quintessential scientist. And then I gotta read Joss's monologue about Ellie's God and faith because it's. It's very compelling and interesting. Oh, no, Eleanor, he said, I'm not a skeptic. I'm a believer. Believer? Are you? The story I have to tell isn't exactly about punishment, reward. It's not exactly Advent and rapture. There's not a word in it about Jesus. Part of my message is that we're not central to the purpose of the cosmos. What happened to me makes us all seem very small. And she's talking about her experience. It does, but it also makes God very big. She glanced at him for a moment and rushed on. You know, as the Earth races around the sun, the powers of this world, the religious powers, the secular powers, once pretended the Earth wasn't moving at all. They were in the business of being powerful, or at least pretending to be powerful, and the truth made them feel too small. The truth frightened them. It undermined their power, so they suppressed it. Those people found the truth dangerous. You're sure you know what believing me entails? I've been searching, Eleanor, all these years. Believe me, I know the truth when I see it. Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean, the real universe. All those light years, all those worlds, I think of the scope of your universe, the opportunities it affords the Creator, and it takes my breath away. It's much better than bottling him up in one in one spot. Small world. I've never liked the idea of Earth as God's green footstool. It's too reassuring, like a children's story, like a tranquilizer. But you, your universe has room enough and time enough for the kind of God I believe in, which I like. I like that he again. He kind of comes around to her a little bit, and we get, like, the Meaning of. Of everything. And then kind of their last interaction is really good. Joss asked her, ever been in love? Love? The question was direct. Matter of fact, halfway, half a dozen times. But she glanced at the nearest telescope. There was always so much noise. The signal was hard to find. And you never. He replied flatly. There was a pause, and then he added a faint smile. But I have faith, and to me there's an implication there. So in the course of this book, they never get together. To me, there's an implication there that one day they are gonna be together, which I think is where the book or the movie.
• 1:54:38
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:54:39
  Speaker A: Gets their relationship from, is kind of the way it ends here. And then basically, my final thing here before the final, final thing is the relationship with her mom in the big reveal. So as I mentioned, in the movie, her mom is dead. In the book, her mom is alive after her dad dies, right around the same time her mom remarries this obnoxious sexist physics professor who constantly tells illy Ellie that she shouldn't worry about science because it won't help her find a husband. And all this sort of stuff. He's very similar to Drumlin, is like, the idea. So she hates him. She kind of. Because of that, she kind of, like, doesn't like her mom. She resents her mom for marrying this guy. All this sort of stuff. Her mom ends up late, years later. So she stops after the message and stuff all happens. She stops talking to her mom. Not even, like, intentionally so much, but a little bit. It's like. It's kind of a thing of like she. She's. She's finding excuses not to talk to her mom and all that sort of stuff. Her mom ends up having a stroke. Her stepfather ends up sending her a very cruel but kind of truthful message about it, about the way she should have talked to her mom more and stuff like that, and how she. She's very selfish and stuff like that. She does eventually then go visit her mom, who, after she has the stroke, who doesn't seem to realize she's there. So we get this kind of thing where they're constantly missing each other. They're like. They're not able to communicate. Like, again, that's the kind of. The whole thing here. After the trip, she gets back and at some indiscriminate amount of time after the trip, she. She goes to the nursing home to visit her mom, who is. Is, like, sick and is dying. And she gets to the nursing home right after her mother passes away. And John, her stepfather, is there, and he gives her a letter that her mom wrote in 1964. And in the letter it is revealed that her father is not her father, that John is her actual biological father. So Ted, the guy in the movie, and who she thought it was her dad in the book her mom reveals was not actually her father. Biological father, father. She had had an affair briefly with this John guy, got pregnant, and that was her biological father. And so she has to kind of deal with this, like, revelation at the last thing. I'm just going to read the very, very ending of the book because I think it kind of helps wrap everything up here. Her mother had given her another gift with this letter. Ellie had cycled back and come upon herself all those years ago. She had learned so much since then. There was so much more to learn. Learn. Above the table on which the chattering telefax sat was a mirror. In it she saw a woman, neither young nor old, neither mother nor daughter. She had been right to keep the truth from her. She was not sufficiently advanced to receive that signal, much less decrypt it. She had spent her career attempting to make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all. She had been fierce in debunking the creation myths of others and oblivious to the lie at the core of her own. She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message. For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. The Argus computer was so persistent and inventive and inventive in its attempts to contact Eleanor Airway that it almost conveyed an urgent personal need to share the discovery. Right before that last part, the computer she had given the computer told the computer at Argus, which is at the VLA computer base, basically calculate PI forever, and if you ever find a series of numbers that look weird and interesting, tell me about it. Basically, the Argus computer was so persistent and inventive in its attempt to contact Eleanor Airway that it almost conveyed an urgent personal need to share the discovery. The anomaly showed up most starkly in base 11 arithmetic, where it could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Compared with what had been received from Vega, this could be at best a simple message. But its statistical significance was was high. The program resembled the reassembled the digits into a square raster. An equal number across and down the first line was an uninterrupted file of zeros, left to right. The second line showed a single numeral, 1, exactly in the middle with zeros to the border left and right. After a few more lines, an unmistakable arc had formed, composed of ones. The simple geometrical figure had been quickly constructed line by line, self reflexive, rich with promise. The last line of the figure emerged. All zeros except for a single center entered one. The subsequent line would be zeros, only part of the frame. Hiding in the alternate patterns of digits. Deep inside the transient, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of knots. The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough and uncover a miracle. Another circle drawn kilometers downstream of the decal point. There would be richer messages further in. It doesn't matter what you look like or what you're made of or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is written small, the artist's signature standing over humans, gods and demons, subsuming caretakers and tunnel builders. There's an intelligence that antedates the universe. The circlehead creatures closed. She had found what she had been searching for. And that's the final line of the book. But, yeah, and that's how it ends. And I. Yeah, it's really. I don't know. I really. Yeah, I think it's a good ending. All right, let's go ahead and talk about what I thought was better in the movie. Jesus Christ. I forgot how much I hadn't. Better in the book?
• 2:00:01
  Speaker B: You had the whole book. The whole book.
• 2:00:05
  Speaker A: My life has taught me one lesson, Hugo, and not the one I thought it would. Happy endings only happen in the movies. There's a great line where Ellie at one point is trying to listen to something and she says, I'm gonna need a bigger antenna. And then it cuts to her at Arecibo.
• 2:00:24
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:00:25
  Speaker A: And I was like, that's a. We just did Jaws, obviously, and we'll get to it. This movie is very clearly referencing Spielberg because there's another one later. The Medicine Cabinet shot is great. We'll talk. I mean, we're gonna share a video of how they did it. But it's this very cool shot where she's. It. It. It's Pulling back, following her running up the stairs to get medicine. And then all of a sudden, it inverts, and the camera is pulling out of the mirror.
• 2:00:50
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:00:50
  Speaker A: And it's very trippy. And your brain cannot process how that happened. It's very complicated. They built two sets of the house, one of them with the stairwell flipped so that when they shot it, they could show it in reverse for the reflection in the mirror, but that the stairway would still be on the right side base. It's very complicated. Very interesting. Very cool shot. I love that shot. I really like introducing the specter of Haddon earlier, specifically having him fund the SETI research at the vla. And the boardroom scene with the camera watching her. I think that's all a lot of fun that doesn't happen in the book. I love the shot of her at the Grand Canyon. I don't know if I saw this post somewhere or if I had just invented this as a modified version of that leg letterboxd review you shared, but movies don't have enough panoramic shots of Jodie Foster at the Grand Canyon anymore. Such a good shot. I really love the signal arriving right as Joss is talking about on the TV about how science has fundamentally made us more cut off and more alone. We see him on the TV broadcast being like, you know, has science helped us? It's made us more cut off and more alone. And then we cut the space and the signals hit it, and it's. The movie's going, oh, yeah. Like. Like the movie does play both sides a little bit here. But, yeah, I liked that. I really like her sitting on the hood of her car and listening to it and listening and hearing the signal, and then racing to the office, talking on the walkie talkie. And what? It's much more exciting than how it works in the book. She's just like. Again, she's at her mom's, and then she gets a message, and then she comes back, and it's all very much more. It's more realistic.
• 2:02:20
  Speaker B: Right.
• 2:02:21
  Speaker A: But it's much more mundane. The movie's drama is very fun there. Also, specifically, the tracking shot following her running into the control room room, where we start outside and go all the way up inside, is very cool. It's just like throwing doors open and everything. I love this specific line delivery where they're trying to figure out where the signal is coming from. And that one, like, assistant guy or whatever goes, whatever it is, it ain't local. The way he delivers that line cracks me up, and I love it. I love Ellie not. Not having any patience for the military being there. And she. She's like, when Kits shows up with the military guys, she goes, could you ask the guys with firearms to wait outside? This is supposed to be a civilian facility. I like that. And then the moment right after that where as soon as they decrypt that, it's the video and Hitler pops up, Kits goes, okay. And then waves the guys with guns back in. I thought that was very funny. It's a very good moment. And then Haddon has a moment where he's talking to Ellie on the plane and he says, clever girl.
• 2:03:21
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 2:03:21
  Speaker A: And I'm like, okay, so we're just doing Spiel. There's probably another ones that I missed.
• 2:03:25
  Speaker B: Probably. Yeah.
• 2:03:25
  Speaker A: Those were the two that. That I noticed was. I'm gonna. We're gonna need. I'm gonna need a bigger telescope. And. Clever girl. I like the line where she's talking to the. I think it's the president's Secretary of Staff or Chief Chief of Staff or whatever. And she's like, I have a problem. Can you tell me where I can find a really great dress? Because she's going to dinner that night and knows that Palmer Joss is gonna be there and she needs to look good in a very 90s dress. That is not.
• 2:03:49
  Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. It's something with very 90s hair.
• 2:03:53
  Speaker A: Yes. Very. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
• 2:03:54
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:03:55
  Speaker A: This is a great exchange in the movie that's not in the book. Drumlin says, I wish the world. This is after he gets chosen to be the person that goes on the mission or whatever. I wish the world was a place where fair was the bottom line, where the kind of idealism you showed at that hearing was rewarded, not taken advantage of. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. She responds, funny. I've always thought the world was what we make of it. And, yeah, it's great. I like the line when they're walking into the thing, when Kent Clark, the blind astronomer guy who is her partner on all this, when he walks in, he walks by Kits and he says, nice to smell you again. I thought that was funny because Kits sucks, but I like. So this. I have in better in the movie, that line. But then this is kind of a better in the book. Like, I don't know. I just want to talk about this. I like the idea of that character of Kent Clark, but I'm not sure how I feel about the execution. So I'm going to leave this to others to judge, get some feedback. And I. But I do know that that is not played by an actual blind man. The actor who plays that character is not blind, so that's one thing. But the character and his performance are based on a real life blind astronomer named Kent Cullors who passed away, like, a while ago. But there's literally nothing on his Wikipedia page about him being a good astronomer because of his hearing. And while is partially in the movie a Superman gag because his name is Kent Clark, like, that's the joke. And him having super hearing. I always thought that particular element of his character felt both super fake and dumb. For a movie that's trying to be relatively realistic, sci fi, and very Hollywood, but also really reductive. Yeah, as I said, he's based on a real guy. Kent Colors was like a brilliant astronomer because he was a genius who had developed advanced computing algorithms and helped detect stuff in space. And, like, it literally had nothing to do with him having super hearing because he was blind.
• 2:05:48
  Speaker B: Right.
• 2:05:49
  Speaker A: He just was one of the only blind, like, astronomer, radio telescope, astronomer guys and was, like, super talented in lots of other ways. I'd love to be proven wrong in that if maybe there is some element of, like, he was good at this something, but I could find nothing about that. So I think the whole thing ends up being very cheesy and kind of offensive. Like, he has, like, this superpower because he's blind, and it's. It's just dumb. And on that note, him being there at the end and being the one who hears her saying okay to go when they're, like, trying to decide whether or not to launch. That's a good idea from a screenwriting perspective, like a good setup and payoff and whatever. But again, it has a whole other mess of issues that I'm just not a big fan of, and I. I don't really like that element of that character. So. All right, let's go ahead and talk about a few other things. The movie nailed, As I expected, Practically
• 2:06:44
  Speaker B: perfect in every way.
• 2:06:46
  Speaker A: The pullback at the very beginning of the movie is a fun inverse of what a thing that happens in the book. At the beginning of each chapter in the book for, like, the first five chapters, you get a little excerpt of where the. The signals coming from Vega are in space on their way to Earth.
• 2:07:02
  Speaker B: Interesting.
• 2:07:03
  Speaker A: So it's like the. They moved past a blah, blah, blah, and, like, you get this little, like, paragraph about, like, what part of the universe or galaxy they're flying past or whatever. And then eventually, right before she detects the signal, that chapter starts with them hitting Earth, basically. Which we see in the movie. But I like the movie's open as kind of an inverse pulling Back from Earth as kind of a fun play on that. There's also a list on IMDb that has every single song and broadcast that we hear during that opening because it goes back through time basically. Or. Or yeah, through the history of like what we've been broadcasting. Nails her struggling with relationships and connecting with people. Specifically early on, the way she bails on Palmer and some other stuff like that. Someone will kill me for putting this in the movie. Nailed it. Because it's not the exact right car. But she does have a convertible classic car in the book. In the book it is a 1957 Thunderbird hardtop convertible. And in the movie it is a 1968 Chevy Impala SS. I assume that's like a branding thing or they just thought the Impala was cool. Cooler or who knows. But I will say I thought the thumb Thunderbird was a. Was a fun choice because it screams weird science nerd a bit more. To me. If you look them up, the Thunderbird is a more unique looking car. Everybody loves Impalas. They're like a classic like muscle car. They look cool. The. The Thunderbird has like a look that you're like, yeah, that's a weird. A weird science nerd owns that car.
• 2:08:25
  Speaker B: We sure it wasn't a Pinto?
• 2:08:28
  Speaker A: The signal is broadcasting primes. They mentioned that. I do like being able to actually hear it in the movie. Like obviously you can' hear while you're reading the book. Although the movie shortcuts that tremendously. In the book it's pulsing binary arithmetic. And they have to convert that to base 10. And then they do math in their heads to figure out what the numbers are. In the movie they're like, well, we can't do all that. It's just going to pulse the numbers that you can basically count them. But it's the same idea. And also in the movie it. It's only 2 to 101 are the primes. It does in the book they just keep going for like to like thousands and thousands. Like it just keeps going. And I believe the signal takes like years to repeat in the book. In the movie it repeats in like
• 2:09:07
  Speaker B: minutes or something like that.
• 2:09:09
  Speaker A: In the movie or in the book, they are listening to it forever before, I think literally multiple years before it finally repeats. The signal is from Vega. So they call them vegans. And there's a joke about vegans, like at one point in the book, which I don't think they make in the movie. But I mentioned this earlier. But Drumlin mentioned getting a decryption person and he says Lunikarsky is visiting Caltech and that's Vega. In the book the Rise of Neo Nazis in response to the Hitler signal we see that in a brief newscast that there's a rise in Nazism and stuff again which is mentioned in the book. They can't decode the message because they can't figure out the primer. But Ellie visits Haddon and he helps them crack it. It happens in both. There is a difference. In the movie it involves like folding the pages together. It's like a very dumbed down movie version. In the book he explains that he figured out that the aliens are broadcasting the primer at a frequency or wavelength or whatever that can't penetrate the atmosphere of Earth. Oh, so you specifically can't cannot hear and find the primer on a from ground based radio telescopes. And this is an intentional choice to filter out non space faring civilizations. So even if you can hear the whole message, if you don't have satellites or something up there, you can't get the primer which it's like. So you have the lock and the key in like two different places.
• 2:10:25
  Speaker B: Oh, that's interesting.
• 2:10:26
  Speaker A: Yeah, I thought that was really cool. And they don't. I kind of wish they had worked that in. But instead he just folds a piece of paper and is like look, you didn't think about folding it. Dum dum. It's like okay, whatever. The movie does a lot of that kind of stuff. Like briefly hadn't mentions her work on a ruby. The ruby Mazer. He's like your graduate work on the ruby Mazer. That is what she got did her graduate work on in the book. The specific little detail. They do consider that it might be a Trojan horse. In the book it's a Russian scientist at the World Message Consortium where they're all the world's top scientists and political leaders meet up in Paris to discuss this. The movie limits that to just the White House to streamline things and has kits suggest it. But it's the same kind of idea. I mentioned this, but Palmer Joss's ability to turn whatever Ellie says around on her. And specifically this is a line both in the movie and the book where she's like oh, but it wouldn't like if God exists. Wouldn't we. Wouldn't you expect to hear a voice from the sky? Or like wouldn't if he really wanted to prove to us that he existed, wouldn't We. He just send a voice from the sky. And he walks in and goes, but a voice from the sky is what you found. And that's the exact line from the book. And when I read that in the book, I wrote, all right, Josh Boss, you debate, bro. Just all right. Her stepfather. She mentions in the movie that she took Bible classes when she was younger. And in the book it is mentioned that her stepfather forced her to take Bible classes. She gets so annoyed by all the inconsistencies and tries to ask questions about that. And so she stops going because they don't answer any of the questions that she has.
• 2:11:46
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:11:46
  Speaker A: I think a little detail I love in the movie that feels completely accurate to the book version of hers. Even though she's really annoyed that she's not chosen for the mission and she hates Drumlin and all, all of this, Eve, right after that scene where Drumlin, like, is, like, the one chosen and all of that, she's still just so excited about all of it. Like, when she's in the thing looking at the machine, she has that look of just, like, wonder and joy on her face. And I love. She can't help herself. Even though she doesn't get to go, she's disappointed. It's still all so cool. And I just love that. That characterization, the description of what happens as soon as the machine starts is very similar to what we see in the movie, which is, is that basically she immediately starts falling into a tunnel and all the walls turn clear and she can see through it. That's exactly what happened. Or as it's described in the book. And then it is not the exact line, but one of the famous lines from this movie is that when she gets up to Vega and she sees it for the first time, she's floating there and she says, they should have sent a poet because it's so beautiful. In the book, when she visits Hadden on the space station, she looks. Looks out down at Earth and she thinks to herself, they should be sending up young poets and composers, artists and filmmakers to experience and share the feeling of seeing Earth from orbit. Because she's like, people need to know what this is like.
• 2:13:00
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:13:01
  Speaker A: And so I think that's where they pull that line from. So, all right, let's get to a handful of odds and ends before the final verdict. Thing. I didn't know. Did you know this?
• 2:13:19
  Speaker B: No, I don't think I even know what that word is.
• 2:13:22
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, I didn't either. So I was reading along and she was talking about how one of the. Is Very early in the book, she's talking about one of the perquisites of working at Arecibo is that you get dish time or whatever. And, like, you can. You can study whatever you want, or you can use the dish to, like, look for whatever you want. And I was like, perquisite? What the fuck is that? And I looked up perquisite. It's literally where the word perk comes from. Huh? So, like, you know, like the perks of your job. That is short for perquisite. P R Never thought U I S I T comes from. I had not either, but that is where it comes from.
• 2:13:58
  Speaker B: Little moment in the movie that made me be like, damn, no wonder she doesn't like religion. After her dad dies and the priest is like. Like, it's God's will.
• 2:14:11
  Speaker A: Yes, it is God's will. Yeah. Another word I had several times where I discovered new words that I had never heard of before. But I went on a journey on this one. There's this little. There's a sentence at one point where she's on a subway in Paris, I think. Then as the train entered a straightaway, the interior lights would come on again and she would become aware once again of the acrid smell, the jostling of nearby strafangers, and the miniature television surveillance. Surveillance cameras. So the word that I just read there is not actually how you pronounce that word, but that was how I read it in my head the first time because it is spelled S T R A P H A N G E R S. And my brain went strafangers.
• 2:14:51
  Speaker B: It also kind of looks like strap hanger.
• 2:14:54
  Speaker A: That's what it is. So the journey I went on was like, what the hell is a strafanger?
• 2:14:59
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:14:59
  Speaker A: And I googled it. And then I took a while to find it, but eventually, eventually realized, oh, it's a word for people riding a subway. Holding. Holding the things that hang down. Yeah, it is straphanger. But my brain just read it as strafanger. And I was like, what is a strafanger? So, yeah, it was a journey I went on. Another little journey I went on is while we were watching the movie in the scene where right after Joss and Ellie have sex, I'm like, 95% sure you can see Jodie Foster's boob in this PG movie. She leans up, and I was like, that was her entire boob right there. It's a PG movie and it's free on YouTube. I was like, all right. She does. I mentioned this in the prequel, but she does wear The Sagan fit. The Carl Sagan, which he goes to the.
• 2:15:45
  Speaker B: The board at Haddon to try to get funding.
• 2:15:49
  Speaker A: She's wearing his very famous. The. The brownish like camel colored turtleneck, the tweed jacket and the pants every like, exactly like Sagan. It's great.
• 2:16:00
  Speaker B: I just want to say, I know this is like a real place. The Very Large Array is an incredible name. That 10 out of 10 naming on that one.
• 2:16:10
  Speaker A: Scientists love naming like that, especially astronomers. They absolutely love giving stuff like very on the nose, just like this is what it is. Names. Yeah.
• 2:16:20
  Speaker B: In that little scene where we see Palmer Joss being interviewed about. Yeah. On the news and he says, I don't think I got the quote. Like, exactly. Act. But he says something like, he's like criticizing science because it doesn't make us happy. And he says, we buy meaningless things to fill a hole in our lives. Is it any wonder we lost our sense of direction? And I was like, buddy, your problem is capitalism, not science. Yep, it's capitalism.
• 2:16:51
  Speaker A: Yep. Classic stuff. You can see the problem, just not the cause. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:16:57
  Speaker B: And then I think I wrote this during the scene. Yeah. When they're like zooming in on the Hitler footage. And I wrote down a computer enhance.
• 2:17:06
  Speaker A: Yes. That part is very dumb. Not in the book at all. They do decrypt the signal in the book.
• 2:17:13
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:17:13
  Speaker A: And it takes a second, but once they figure out the decryption or whatever, it's just there. In the movie they're doing this thing where they're like, switch the interlace thing and like, oh, now flip it 90 degrees this way. Now zoom out, zoom out a little more. Zoom out. It's like, what are we.
• 2:17:27
  Speaker B: Can you clean it up a little bit?
• 2:17:29
  Speaker A: The whole point is just to like slowly, like, oh, is that a swastik? What's going. Yeah, and it's. Yeah, but it's. That's not at all how it works in the book. But I. It's fine for the drama in the movie, but it's very silly.
• 2:17:39
  Speaker B: It's silly. Like reminded me of like when you're watching like Law and Order or something and they have the grainy 100% footage from like a bodega and they're like, can you clean it up and make it crystal clear out of nowhere.
• 2:17:51
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 2:17:53
  Speaker B: Speaking of that kind of thing, though, I really liked the movie's use of the surveillance footage and the scene where she goes to meet Hatt and his
• 2:18:00
  Speaker A: private jet everywhere, like broadcasted on all the monitors. Yeah. No, I agree. I've always liked that scene. One of the reasons I loved that scene as a kid watching this movie is it always felt so incongruous from the rest of the movie. The rest of the movie is relatively like, straightforward and whatever. And then we just get this Bond villain in a plane with all these weird kids. Not a horror scene, but it's like, it's very interesting. I've always loved that. I will say, like I said, it definitely matches the tone of Haddon in the book. Like he is this weird, eccentric billionaire who feels like a Bond villain.
• 2:18:30
  Speaker B: I. I wrote this line after we. We meet back up with Palmer Joss.
• 2:18:39
  Speaker A: He walks in the presidential meeting.
• 2:18:41
  Speaker B: In the presidential meeting. And I was like, damn, she must have been an incredible lay because they had a one night stand like five years ago.
• 2:18:50
  Speaker A: If not more. Yeah.
• 2:18:51
  Speaker B: If not more Moore. And she walks in that room and he's making goo goo eyes at her.
• 2:18:56
  Speaker A: Immediately, my note. Have you seen Jodie Foster?
• 2:18:59
  Speaker B: I have seen Jody Foster.
• 2:19:01
  Speaker A: Parenthetical. I have had a crush on Jodie Foster from this movie since I was like 8. So I think a lot of. One of the issues I had with this movie this time is. I think a lot of it is overly cheesy.
• 2:19:13
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:19:13
  Speaker A: And the new scene where the astronaut drops out is one of the cheesiest things I've ever seen in a movie where his kids are standing there and they're like, daddy, don't go. And it's just everything about it is so awkward and she. I hate.
• 2:19:30
  Speaker B: I. Yeah, there is a lot of a very obvious, like, emotional manipulation stuff that just like.
• 2:19:37
  Speaker A: Oh, God. All right. It's. It's. Some of. It's Zemeckis's worst impulses. Like that is when Zemeckis gets bad is when he's doing that stuff and when somebody. He can dial it back and just. Yeah. And there's a little bit of that in this movie that does not work. I put this here because I didn't know where else to put it. But we mentioned in the prequel that at one point one of the producers said the core problem, like the core thing in the movie should be like, conflict. Should be that she has an estranged child.
• 2:20:11
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:20:11
  Speaker A: That she can't. She. She won't communicate with. And so she's trying to, like, go find. And like, again, that is kind of what the book's about. But it's not about her having a kid.
• 2:20:20
  Speaker B: And I.
• 2:20:21
  Speaker A: And they refused that idea. And I was like, oh, that's so dumb and bad. Because, like, again, the idea of, like this woman of science who's, like, doing all this stuff. The whole, like, core conflict. Being like that she's a bad mom is, like, deeply problematic for a book that is so much about sexism and stuff like that. And. But there is an element in the book, there's one moment where right before. Before, I think right before the machine launches, she has a brief thought. That was it. She wished she had had a child. It was her last thought before the walls flickered and became transparent and it seemed the earth opened up and swallowed her. And that's when they launch. I will say, I think this is another one of those moments where similar to, like, the invasive thoughts of, like, the. The. The thing about, like, the people with disabilities and the. The other thing about, like. Like wishing or thinking about how now she gets to go on the trip because Drumlin's dead and wishing he had died and stuff like that. I think this is not. Because she never has a kid in the book. It's never alluded to again. It's never mentioned again. It's just one moment. And I think it's supposed to be one of those things of just, like, she has that thought of, like, if I die, like, and I didn't, you know. You know, it's just kind of those intrusive thoughts we all have. I think it's supposed to be more of that because, again, it literally never come. I think one other time she has a similar. But then it's never touched on again at the end of the book. It's never mentioned or brought up again. And again, it's more about her having relationships with people and stuff and the people in her life already. It's not like she needs to have a kid or anything like that. So, yeah, I don't know. But I did think it was interesting that it is at least kind of mentioned in the book when I was very annoyed with that producer for that.
• 2:21:55
  Speaker B: Oh, I have to remember what this note was about in the movie. When she's getting. When she's walking out across the level, like the gantry. The. The gant. Is that what it's called?
• 2:22:07
  Speaker A: It's called the gantry.
• 2:22:08
  Speaker B: The gantry. The little bridge she has to walk across to get to the transportation device. I was like, I feel like they could have made that a little less terrifying.
• 2:22:19
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's like right over the machine and the machine is actively spinning, which. That's a little detail in the movie. It doesn't matter. It's more dramatic. I get why they do that. If you've ever watched any space launch or anything else ever. You go in the crew pod hours before anything happens so that they can do all the tests and do all the everything. But in the movie they're like, we already got the machine running and like ready to go. And then they put her in like right before they launch, which is not how it would work. But I get it, it's for drama.
• 2:22:47
  Speaker B: But yeah, she's like, she's like making her way across like shaking and rattling.
• 2:22:52
  Speaker A: And I was like, again, that's just for the drama. But yeah, in real life that would not be how they would do that. Yeah, before the Final Verge, we want to remind you you could do us a favor by hanging over to Facebook, threads, bluesky, Instagram, Goodreads, any of those places. We love, love, love to hear what you have to say about Contact the book or the movie. We'll talk about it on the next prequel episode. You can also help us out by heading over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Wherever you listen to this show, drop us a five star rating, write us a nice little review. We'd appreciate that. And you can Support us at Patreon.com ThisFilmIsLit Support us there. Get access to bonus content starting at the $5 level. We're about to put out our bonus episode for June, which we'll be talking about Tombstone, which is my birthday episode. Every month we put out a bonus episode. So look out for if you really want to support us, you can give us 15 bucks a month and you'll be access to priority recommendations. If there's a book or movie, well, book and movie that you would really like for us to talk about, you can request it and we will work it into our schedule as soon as we possibly can. It's time for the final verdict.
• 2:23:46
  Speaker B: Sentence passed.
• 2:23:48
  Speaker A: Verdict after.
• 2:23:50
  Speaker B: That's stupid.
• 2:23:51
  Speaker A: This was a fun and interesting experience. I fully went into this expecting to choose the movie. As I read the book, I was enjoying it, but the wordiness, the pages and pages of science and engineering lingo, and the asides to present atheist debate points all felt a bit clunky and made my reading experience less enjoyable moment to moment than I was expecting. On top of that, my perception of the film was filtered through the memory of a 10 year old. So I was very excited to finish the book and get to the movie. The superior version of this story. A I thought. But then we watched the movie and while the movie is not bad and for the most part I'd even argue it's pretty good, it is a pale Imitation. The actual act of reading the book was not the most fun experience I've ever had, but it is absolutely full of brilliant moments and observations about humanity, life, the search for meaning and relationships. The world building is weird and inventive at times. The characters are deep and unique and real, and the message is layered and nuanced. The film is a fun adventure mystery that manages to capture some of the magic of the book. The first two acts are genuinely good and I think full of some really smart changes, like introducing Joss earlier, giving him and Ellie a history and amplifying the drama as they discover the message, among some other stuff. But the third act is rough. I really did not love the look of the space beach scene with her first father. Most of the effects in this have aged pretty well, but that scene has not. The color is overcooked, the green screen is mediocre, and the whole thing ends up looking like one of those cheap art pieces that's like a neon beach with moving waves that were in every mall, kiosk and airport gift store in the 90s and early 2000s. I just kind of hated it. And that's such an important scene in the movie. And it looks like dogs. And then the big confrontation and debate about faith at the end lacks any of the nuance or subtlety of the book and ends up leaving the message. Feeling like a bit of a slap in the face to Carl Sagan's memory, in my opinion. So in the true spirit of science, I came into this with the hypothesis, ran the test, and discovered that I was wrong this time. And what is time, really? The book is better than the movie. Katie, what's next?
• 2:26:08
  Speaker B: Oh, up next. Next we are doing something really short that I can read in like an hour before we get started on our summer series. And we are going to be talking about Aquamarine, which is a 2006 mermaid movie based on the book of the same name by Alice Hoffman.
• 2:26:28
  Speaker A: I know nothing about this. I've never even heard of it.
• 2:26:30
  Speaker B: I actually think I've read this book before. I think I read it when I was younger.
• 2:26:34
  Speaker A: There's you go, come back in two weeks time we're talking about Aquamarine. But in one week's time we're seeing what you all had to say about Contact and previewing Aquamarine. Until that time, guys, gals, non binary pals and everybody else keep reading books, keep watching movies and keep being awesome. Sam.