Contact opens with a shot of Earth in space, a cacophony of audio signals -- music, news, radio, television -- then a long pull back, Earth shrinking and vanishing, signals thinning into the shuddering "silence of the infinite spaces" that so terrified Pascal. The theme, clearly, is separation from and quest for the Other. Cut to a little girl, left motherless at birth, raised by a beloved father who also dies; after his funeral she cries into her ham radio, "Dad, are you there?" The suggestion is that her later career is but the search for Daddy in the Sky. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) becomes a radio astronomer, involved in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The late Carl Sagan, who wrote the 1985 novel on which the film is based, was passionately involved in SETI his entire career.

The story, minus filler: Ellie's SETI project receives a signal from space, plus plans for building a spaceship. In an effects-laden climax, she travels in the completed ship to meet an alien disguised as her father. He reveals that the galaxy is teeming with life, and most happily, neither the Earth nor she is alone.

In Sagan's final days, he must have felt he was on the verge of obtaining his heart's desire: recent months had seen new planets found outside our solar system, water discovered on the moon, new theories about the conditions under which life might develop, and a meteorite offering new hope for finding life on Mars. Such exciting developments no doubt gave hope and strength to Sagan as he battled the blood disease that finally claimed him last year.

I have fond memories of Carl Sagan, in his black turtleneck and longish hair, back in the sixties. On television with "Science Editor, Jules Bergman," he held plastic models during Project Apollo, teaching viewers the difference between the Command and Service Modules. I already knew the difference, of course, but the fact that such a hip-looking grown-up also knew proved a love of science didn't necessarily turn you into a buzzcut NASA nerd.

As the years went by, I lost some of those warm feelings toward Sagan as he degenerated into a sort of PBS Hal Lindsey, soberly intoning that the cosmos is "all there is, was, and ever will be" and other such religious convictions which rendered his science suspect. (That plus the fact he still wore the same sixties "hip-scientist" costume all through the eighties and nineties.)

Sagan identified himself as an "exobiologist," an expert on extraterrestrial life. He modeled conditions under which life might have developed on other worlds as he waited for specimens to be obtained. Not just waited: Sagan actively encouraged SETI on all fronts. He sat on panels and committees and organized debates on the subject. He helped create the greetings inscribed on satellites sent beyond our solar system. He founded the Planetary Society, dedicated to search for ETs. And whatever Sagan may have thought of the killjoy depiction of scientists in the film, his society was the grateful recipient of a $100,000 donation from Steven Spielberg, a share of the profits of that most beloved of space alien movies, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

The lonely child of E.T. was Elliot; in Contact, Ellie discovers -- in the novel, but not the film -- that the father she had loved and longed for all her life wasn't really her father after all. In other words, Ellie's personal "creation story" proves to be a myth; this painful truth had been kept from her until she was "mature" enough to receive it. Carl Sagan spent a lifetime trying to get people to give up their pseudoscientific beliefs in a Father in heaven who created the earth. Why, he asked, in an age of science, do people continue to turn to religions and other superstitions? Yet even as he was busy pointing out the dangers of scientific ignorance, Sagan was never shy about turning that ignorance to his advantage when delivering his opinions on history, religion, ethics, philosophy, and public policy behind the fog of his own fundamentalist faith in "Science."

Contact, both book and film, wastes a lot of space (to borrow a too-often repeated phrase from the film) with a showdown between the religious nuts and boneheaded bureaucrats on one side and the truth-seeking scientists on the other. (For a guy so big on "objectivity," Sagan sure knew how to stack the deck.) The board selecting a pilot for the spaceship asks, "Do you believe in God?" Ellie replies, "I don't understand the relevance of that question." Neither did I, and Ido believe in God. Why not just send somebody honest to observe and then come back and report? That's science, right? But Sagan, in book and film, feels the need to keep shoving religion into the story, a confession, apparently, of the frankly religious nature of the SETI quest.

Yet the film, directed by Robert Zemeckis _(Forest Gump, Back to the Future),_ differs from the book on a number of levels. For one thing, it's much stronger in suggesting that Ellie's aloneness is what drives her Ahab-like quest for contact. The book features a "Reverend Palmer Joss," a dopey fundi who hates science for undermining religious faith. The film Joss (Matthew McConaughey), though, offers a compelling criticism of materialist science: "We are so technologically advanced, but we feel more lonely and cut off than ever. So we look for things to fill holes in our lives." In Sagan's book, Joss and Ellie have an odd but growing friendship: a picture of religion gradually abandoning faith in God for faith in science. In the film, Joss and Ellie become lovers, the picture of science and religion in embrace. In a subversive reinterpretation of the material, Zemeckis seems to be lumping Carl Sagan's SETI quest with people he would have derided as devotees of superstition. In his boldest move, Zemeckis includes a character in his film most definitely not in the book, a coworker of Ellie's who hovers over the action: a blind astronomer who looks just like Sagan.

Oddly enough, the moral of both the film and book versions of Contact is a form of "You gotta have faith." Ellie's demand for proof of God's existence is echoed by her lack of proof of her experience. Yet Sagan's point in the novel is not an unexpected apologetic for theism, but for SETI: keep looking to the sky, he says, even if there's no evidence anybody really is out there.

The message of the movie is slightly different, and like the signal from space, it's kinda hard to decode: Zemeckis seems to be telling us to "have faith in faith." Ellie bets her life on the goodwill of the aliens, insisting everybody must trust them. ("They're advanced. They have to be benevolent.") On her return, everybody must take Ellie's word that her experience was real -- just like an alien abduction. In my favorite shot, the crazy rich guy who funds the mission -- a dead ringer for Heaven's Gate cult leader Marshall Applewhite -- fills the frame, saying, "Wanna take a ride?" And I'm thinking, "You mean on a UFO trailing the comet Hale-Bopp?" Sure. Just have faith, right?

Likewise, it's hard to know what to make of the advice Ellie gives to a group of schoolkids at the end of the film to "Keep searching for your own answers." What does _that_ mean? Be objective and empirical? Make sure you can personally prove something before you believe it? Or be _subjective_ -- have faith in whatever truth works for you? The blind astronomer was a nice touch; Contact would have been even more true-to-life if among the characters it had included a blind filmmaker, too.

And yet, we are reminded that the blind often possess a special sensitivity in other ways; no doubt both Sagan and Zemeckis are tuned in loud and clear to our longings for Somebody Out There. As I was leaving the theater, I overheard a guy telling his girlfriend he'd seen _Contact_ three times in the last month, and that he couldn't wait until the film went to the cheap theaters so he could see it a few more times. "Why?" she asked him. "What was it about the film that you liked so much?" He got all starry-eyed and confessed, "This film is the embodiment of everything I've ever dreamed about since I was a little kid."

One recalls young Elliot in E.T.: excluded, misunderstood, ignored, wishing upon a star for Somebody Out There who will listen. Or Dorothy, trapped in her black-and-white world, longing for "a place where there isn't any trouble." Or even grown-up Judy Garland, mired in ever more serious troubles, singing her trademark song to the end, longing to fly away. The original SETI, pioneered by Sagan's colleague Frank Drake, was "Project Ozma" -- named by Drake after a princess of Oz.

Carl Sagan once suggested in his Cosmos TV series that the deep longing we feel standing on the edge of the sea is due to the fact that the sea is where man began and where a part of him longs to return. Of course, Sagan also insisted humans came from primeval goo and never said anything about a common sense of longing for mud. C. S. Lewis gave the same data a different interpretation: "All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever."

One final, poignant note. Among the revelations in the book version of Contact, but not the film, was this: the aliens tell Ellie that the universe is not the product of random chance, after all -- _but was designed,_ with a message from the Designer(s?) embedded in higher mathematics, encoded in the distant digits of pi. An unexpected and very human find in such a purportedly materialist vision: a longing for definitive, mathematical proof of human value and purpose -- and for Intelligence and Will behind it all. Here is a glimpse of what must have been the most frustrating mystery of all for Carl Sagan: why does God, if He exists, hide in the shadows; why, when He could banish all doubts, does God insist upon faith?

If there is a message from the Designer woven into the fabric of the cosmos it seems to be this: He refuses to allow Himself to be reduced to an equation, universally accepted and ignored. The cosmos are constructed so God cannot simply be known about, but must be known -- not as a fact, like the boiling point of water, not as an "It" but as a "You" with whom we can have contact.

I feel a sense of profound sadness that Carl Sagan died before he met Somebody Out There. Maybe that sounds like a coy way of wishing he had "found God," but that's not what I mean exactly. Not that simply. What I wish is that Carl Sagan had been given a chance to meet some extraterrestrial intelligence, a space alien, and so be able to prove to himself -- empirically, conclusively -- whether that was the kind of contact he'd been longing for all along. And I wonder what'd he'd have wondered after that.