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   • j********o@***.com
     16/07/1997 00:00:000 UTC

     I have mixed feelings about it. Some of my complaints are technical
     ones.

     Like her listening for signals on headphones by the dish, or recognizing

     the signal instantly (it sure sounded like a pulsar to me!), and the

     excited dash to align the dish. And the way they pull back from the
     first

     image, which would be an impossible mistake in a Sagan-designed

     product-of-primes message format. Then there's the head astronomer who

     wants to focus science research on practical human interests: there is
     no

     such creature in astronomy! And, to my knowledge, SETI isn't regarded

     with the contempt portrayed among the astronomers in the movie. I liked

     the movie better than I had expected to, the reviews having given the
     end

     away already. I wonder if the movie softened the book's hostility to

     religion (not that there was any shortage of that on the screen). The

     Ralph Reed swipe doesn't make much sense in a Clinton administration
     (nor

     does the absence of Ms. Co-President!) We'd have to be insane to build

     any machine that we didn't _fully_ understand: anything that could
     perform

     as advertised could just as well destroy the Earth! (Why bother to send

     berserkers?) Not to mention that actual space travel violates the
     general

     Sagan world-view of worlds communicating across the uncrossable void.
     And

     a truly advanced civilization probably wouldn't bother sending an

     efficient message: they have all the dish time they want, and don't care

     if it takes centuries to decode a message (besides, these guys are

     responding to Earth's transmissions: they could have tailored their

     message to us instead of sending a generic coding). I'll save my

     observations about the end for the spoilers post I'll send

     contemporaneously to this one.

     Jodie Foster was doing this glamour thing for too long, but in this
     movie,

     she's got a cute Helen Hunt-thing going. I'd like to probe _her_ space!

     ("Hey, you're pretty cute for an Earthbabe... maybe later I can jam my

     germipositor down your throat!" "Uh, that's not the way it works with

     humans." "That's not what I heard!") Anyway...

     Gorno

     "My name is Exeter... Doug Exeter. And I'm not an alien. Really."

       • f*******e@n*****t.com
         17/07/1997 00:00:000 UTC

         I agree there were anti-religion statements here and there, but at
         the end, I felt a sense of

         religion vindication as Foster's character had to defend her belief
         that she met a Vegan to a

         religious person defending his belief in God. As for the contempt of
         SETI, I agree that came from

         left field.

         Jerry katz