Contact: Music From The Motion Picture [Soundtrack]

contact: music from the motion picture [soundtrack]

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Jonathan Darby's 1992 adaptation of famed astronomer Carl Sagan's sometimes muddled novel about human interface with extraterrestrials was admirable for its deft, artistic handling of the story's elusive spirituality and metaphysical vagaries. While composer Alan Silvestri doesn't quite reach the heights of John Williams's Close Encounters of the Third Kind here, he does provide a fine emotional underpinning for often intangible intellectual elements. The composer also provides a memorable main theme that bolsters audience empathy for Jodie Foster's often conflicted lead character; the best yet from Silvestri, clearly a talent to reckon with. --Jerry McCulley

Contact: Music From The Motion Picture,Alan Silvestri,Warner Bros / Wea,Pop,Soundtrack,Soundtracks & Film Scores

Contact: Music From The Motion Picture [Soundtrack]

Average customer rating:

Journey With A Beautiful and Unbelievable Feels into the Deep Space
Sounded better in the movie
`Revision..Not Concision'..Too Busy Planning the Y2K/9-11 Demolitions Part. II from DVD continues...)
Humanity redeemed through Ellie?
Subtle, moving score

Contact: Music From The Motion Picture
Alan Silvestri
Manufacturer: Warner Bros / Wea
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Movie Scores | Soundtracks | Styles | Music

Movie Soundtracks | Soundtracks | Styles | Music

General | Soundtracks | Styles | Music

1990s | By Decade | Soundtracks | Styles | Music
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ASIN: B000002NIY
Release Date: 1997-08-19

Tracks:

Awful Waste Of Space
Ellie's Bogey
The Primer
Really Confused
Test Run Bomber
Heart Attack
Media Event
Button Me Up
Good To Go
No Words
Small Moves
I Believer Her
Contact-End Credits

Amazon.com

Jonathan Darby's 1992 adaptation of famed astronomer Carl Sagan's sometimes muddled novel about human interface with extraterrestrials was admirable for its deft, artistic handling of the story's elusive spirituality and metaphysical vagaries. While composer Alan Silvestri doesn't quite reach the heights of John Williams's Close Encounters of the Third Kind here, he does provide a fine emotional underpinning for often intangible intellectual elements. The composer also provides a memorable main theme that bolsters audience empathy for Jodie Foster's often conflicted lead character; the best yet from Silvestri, clearly a talent to reckon with. --Jerry McCulley

Customer Reviews:

Journey With A Beautiful and Unbelievable Feels into the Deep Space.......2007-03-11

the music makes you feel that as if a sence brings you to the deep space, so don't surprise if you're lost in the space. Thank you Amazon.com, I also rated you 5 stars!

Sounded better in the movie.......2007-02-01

First off, Contact is one of my favorite movies of all time. I remember while watching it that the soundtrack was amazing as well. But after actually buying the soundtrack CD I realized that without the movie, its basically an ok soundtrack. The first track and the end credits are suitably haunting but the rest of it sounds rather average. The best I can say about it is that certain tracks bring back scenes of the movie to mind and it might be worth buying for that reason.

`Revision..Not Concision'..Too Busy Planning the Y2K/9-11 Demolitions Part. II from DVD continues...).......2006-07-22

Well anyway...maybe crop circles are a new form of implied signal sending of the same `ultimate weapon' nature...it could happen, and it bears all the signs of a Quantum Information involving momentum transport to the plant's DNA molecules, because not only are the basal cells of the grass stems softened (like they were put in a microwave), but the copies of those cell's DNA in the seed heads produces singeing there as well--otherwise, the whole plant would be non-rigidly bent.

The weirder part may be that what for all the exotic weapons they may have, world governments still can't claim responsibility, though they might like to. Then is some future or part of the universe directly communicating something to us, and avoiding the automatic obstructions of secrecy that any radio signal from the stars would have clamped down? What about contemporary neighbors in space who grow some of the same species of crops?

Anyway, the last chapter of the novel is skipped and maybe the reason is due to jealously, adversely possessed information pertaining to the implicate quantum information in all of nature, take the fundamental constants like pi that was central to this movie. Any experiment creating a record through an apparatus that senses something, like the pull of gravity, or the spin properties of the electron, records a value that can't escape the wave-picture template of quantum physics. So, like in the novel, we may indeed find circular function sampling information in the very digits of pi. For example, take the number 10.12227768 and raise it to itself by exponentiation and invert: The Gravitational Constant in SI units. Take the number 3.734333589 and raise it to itself exponentially and invert: The fine structure constant, and a dimensionless number. One more: 1.544495133, the mass of the electron in million electron volts per the speed of light squared, a physics unit. What we can see is a repetition in the pattern of decimal expansion common to all three examples, and there are many others. Why a repeated triple of the same digit? This puzzle is probably an inevitable restatement of very elementary Fourier Analysis that does indeed concern the circular functions. However, the mathematical road to demonstrating it covers much territory of analysis and even formal language theory that is not directly obvious--could invariantly translate experimental measurement, as a test parameter in computer models, very important before spending billions on tokomaks. Nature wiggles, get over it--in other words: solve for constants, not coordinates, by some mesh and massively parallel method, use a virtual Lagrangian frame then tune to the model's attractor, i.e. 5D. Why be robbed for a tank of gas by Crumbs R Us?

What does not fail to pass a certain degree of mention in all this, is the question related to the nature of human consciousness, awareness, self identity and being, or not being. Where is the metaphysical layer, in the movie it's very similar to the idea of a ghost returning to visit the astronomer. Why would alien technology choose to imitate a memory scan? I think they would represent themselves as whom and what they in fact are. It would be important maturation for humanity and the only way to build trust.

Going back to this technology idea however, applied deception as a warfare implement could be used for its psychological torture value, in dreams perhaps, or even in the mass media's projection of some very begrudging and infantile attitudes about facts and reality of recent and even historic events. Dare we consider the apparent pyrotechnics demolitions of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 ? Is it permissible, yet? Who or what is so uncomfortable about the exposure of all that? Or the US Autism Epidemic, cleared of any vaccine injury claim of causation. Or this rash of very makeshift and "mysterious" streptococcus-meningitis death diagnosis, in the wake of phony fluoridation elections and its implementations consecutively? We supposed to keep quiet about that and its inconsistencies too? Or how about our own childhood repeat nightmare struggles with autonomic paralysis and inability to breath through proper brain stem function? We're just going to let everybody drink that and be at risk while certain impostors float around on the tv or the movie screens with a smile on their faces? I don't think so.

The public, through its reviews, has to censure where necessary, because they are the victims of heinous misrepresentation that has and can kill or injure permanently to pandemic levels of incalculable human destruction; one of those misrepresentations being the joke that this ever had anything to do with religion or rural unsophisticated fundamentalism. That's just the same con artist calling the public stupid. What we instead find in reality is a complete domination of the news media by factional religious extremism of a different stripe. Even RAND's policy is to denounce people as suspect jihaddi supporters and recruiters if they say things on the web that indicate the clear and abundantly obvious circus of mass demolition obfuscation. I had to tell them that their endearing rival and favorite activity was their hobby, not mine. Quite an unexpected insult I'm sure. Too bad, they suck.

`Cause I'll tell you what, it's the same scum of the earth. And there actually was something else of a disappointment about this movie, I forget what it was.

For astronomers: the solar neutrino problem is aperture optics and the basic reality of re-budgeting solar output with accurate concentrated core fissile abundance. Science can go astray, and the same mismanagement is going to keep the public ignorant for the sake of scoffing at them. That is why CONACT is an unfinished motion picture--too many people to cheat and not enough time to cheat them, and nothing of an inclusion of other nationalities (the book's hallmark multiculturalism) is permitted on any par with the self centered, so called `American' perspective...one astronaut...one romantic fantasy...one religion.

Humanity redeemed through Ellie?.......2005-10-08

Here we have a score that is sweet and warmly affecting without being cloying and which is also adventurous and grandiloquent, but on an individual human scale - this is mainly Ellie's personal adventure - which also leaves enough space (pun not intended) for mystery. Thank the gods for a director like Zemeckis and a composer like Silvestri, who both like to keep things on a human dramatic scale, not giving in to spectacle for its own sake like many other directors and music-composers might do. There is enough suspense and adrenaline here, when needed, with some pounding percussion (like a nervous, apprehensive heartbeat) and soaring and quivering violin melodies, mainly in the scene when Ellie is receiving her long-awaited Message ('Ellie's Bogey' - a marvelous scene in the movie) and scenes about the Machine and its workings ('Test Run Bomber' and 'Good To Go'). But in moments of greatest human drama and mystery, Silvestri holds back with some of the most touchingly beautiful music one could imagine (essentially mirroring Ellie's state of mind, with all of her nobility, deep love, hope, anticipation ...), finding its pinnacle in, for example, 'No Words' (when Ellie beholds a celestial event), 'Small Moves' (when she comes into direct contact with the benevolent alien), and 'I Believe Her' (when Ellie and father Josh come to find out that actually, as human souls, they are set out on the same quest - the quest for ultimate truth).
I love the motion picture, because in my view it perfecly conveys Carl Sagan's own love for humanity and its destiny on earth as well as in space and the universe at large. This has often been wrongly understood as vague New Age mysticism, which Carl Sagan hated more than anything! No, if there are mysticism and fantasy in this film, then they originate from a genuine awe and wonder for the infinite beauties of the universe and of the humans in it. Carl Sagan's universe is the opposite of Arthur C. Clarke's bleak vision in that it is filled first and foremost with corageous and noble but at the same time humble human spirit. Humans (especially in the disconnected Modern world) start out on discovery first and foremost to find mirrors for themselves (who am I? Who are we? Why are we here?), but this voyage of discovery is taking place on more than one level of course, which Zemeckis and Silvestri have understood brilliantly.
Carl Sagan's hope and belief in a good future for all humans - albeit a maybe somewhat one-sided view (there always are other possibilities) based on the firm belief of the ultimate enlightening and redeeming quality of science (not technology perse!) for all mankind - is given a very convincing argument in this film, and the music completely fits this humanistic view of mankind. As such, this film and its fantastically fitting music-soundtrack must IMHO be seen as a complete success. This is all deeply moving stuff, voicing some of the deepest thoughts about the destiny of humanity - but ultimately about how we humans should make the world a better place for everyone to live in here and now - like Ellie saying, with a combination of disappointment, conviction and sincere hope, to David Drumlin: "Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it."

Subtle, moving score.......2005-09-24

Silvestri's score for Contact is an understated, introspective meditation on the primary themes of the eponymous film. Silvestri's music lacks the grand aural declamations of a John Williams' soundtrack, but his approach is in this case equally effective and entirely appropriate. The brief but poignant statement of the main theme in track one sets the tone for the succeeding movements. Track 2 is frenetic and thrilling, while track 3 conveys a sense of mystery and suspense. Tracks 9-13 should really be listened to in one setting in order to experience the full emotional impact. Overall, the lush strings and the evocative musical themes fully won over this reviewer! The last scene of the movie alludes to William Blake's immortal words, which I think best sum up both the film and the sountrack: "To see a world in a grain of sand // and a heaven in a wildflower, // hold infinity in the palm of your hand, // and eternity in an hour..."

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