Goofs for
Contact (1997) More at IMDbPro »

• Factual errors: At Arecibo, Ellie monitors 1221.5 MHz. This is in the GPS L2 frequency band (1227.6 +/- 10.23 MHz), rendering it unusable for SETI because of the interference.
  
  
• Continuity: In the VLA control room when the message is first received, the Tektronix 420 oscilloscope is in the "Trigger - Edge Source" mode when Ellie decreases the vertical scale. When the message momentarily stops, she glances back at the same scope and it is in the "Display - Style" mode.
  
  
• Factual errors: It is impossible for Dr. Arroway to have graduated from MIT Magna Cum Laude, as MIT gives no such distinctions.
  
  

• Continuity: The position of Ellie's headset microphone when she first gets into the sphere.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Joss implies to Dr. Arroway that he's not familiar with Occam's Razor (which, as a divinity student, he should be), but this is his style of joking banter, and he never flat-out says he's not familiar with it.
  
  
• Continuity: Ellie gets out of bed after having sex, pulls her sweater on and walks to the end of the bed, clearly braless. Seconds later as she leaves, she has somehow miraculously acquired a bra.
  
  
• Errors in geography: As Ellie steps down the stairs of the U.S. Capitol after testifying, the limousines drive away on a road that is on the west side of the U.S. Capitol. In fact, there is no road there at all, only steps that lead down to a small reflecting pool. This road was added via CGI.
  
  
• Errors in geography: During opening pull-back scene, our Solar System is incorrectly shown to be nearer to the center of the Milky Way than it actually is. Also, the M16 Nebula that we pass through (the three gaseous columns) are shown as we see them from Earth, and not "backwards" as it should appear.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the press conference, you can see 'Bill Clinton''s hair move just a little from the breeze when he gave the real speech outdoors. You can also see sunlight on it.
  
  
• Errors in geography: The canyon shown at the edge of the VLA does not exist where it is depicted. The VLA is located on the Plains of San Augustine, a large flat basin bordered by mountains.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: When Ellie first hears the signal, the crew is reflected in the glass doors as she goes up the stairs.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In a flashback to the early- to mid-'70s, we see a toy horse on young Ellie's nightstand. The horse is made by Breyer Animal Creations, but was produced in the mid to late 1980s.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When listening to the alien signal for the first time, the SETI crew discover that it is pulsing in a series of prime numbers. As the signal pulses seven times, the computer screen shows already the seven pulses and also the next sequence of eleven pulses before the pulses are heard.
  
  
• Continuity: When the VLA scientists receive the video transmission, the "zoom" slider on the computer screen is on 0. Moments later, when they are asked to zoom out on the video, the slider is on 4, and the scientists move it to 0.
  
  
• Factual errors: Vega (Alpha Lyra) the star from which the message is supposed to arrive only rises at Socorro New Mexico, the VLA facility, after 7:30 am MST around Halloween. The movie has it setting at around that time (message received 6:31 MST is announced at the presidential press conference).
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When Dr. Arroway first hears the alien signal at the VLA, she shouts into her walkie-talkie the Right Ascension and Declination that the signal is emanating from. Twice, she says, "Declination plus 36 degrees," but when she repeats it the third time, she accidentally says "Declination 36 hours."
  
  
• Factual errors: The date of Ellie's dad's passing was noted by Haddon as "November 10th", but the Leonid meteor shower (the only one spectacular enough to warrant staying up late for during school) peaks on the night of the 17th-18th.
  
  
• Factual errors: When the alien signal is heard for the first time and Ellie and her colleagues are excitedly recording data, they state that the star Vega is about to set. Yet outside the window the radio telescope array is clearly still pointing up at the sky, when it should be pointing to the horizon as it would be for a setting star.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Young Ellie runs to the bathroom to get medicine for her father, at the moment when we see her through the reflection of the pharmacy cabinet mirror reaching to open it, the red sleeve under her dark blue coat doesn't show in the mirror where instead we see a black sleeve.
  
  
• Continuity: When Ellie is flown to the Naval vessel in the VTOL plane, the wide-shot shows the plane as military grey. In the following close-up, when she steps out of the plane, it has a colourful livery.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): Ellie has two telescopes set up to watch the Leonid meteor shower (flashback). Telescopes are useless to view meteors because of their tiny field of vision.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the first test of the space travel device, in one shot you can see all three rings on the device starting to move and spin. In the very next scene which is a wide shot, you can clearly see that none of the device rings are moving, yet they are supposed to be.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: A camera is visible in Ellies glasses when she is talking for the first time with Palmer at Arricbo.
  
  
• Errors in geography: A satellite image of Earth is shown when Ellie first receives the alien signal in the evening, however, the satellite image suggest morning in New Mexico as the sun is centered off the U.S. east coast.
  
  
• Plot holes: At the end of the movie, it is revealed that Ellie's video recorder recorded 18 hours of static, suggesting she really did go somewhere. It is peculiar that scientists in the movie neglected to include a simple clock in Ellie's equipment. Surely they would have wanted to see if time inside the pod would slow down since that is what the theory of relativity says would happen when you travel very fast (relatively close to the speed of light). Although in the movie the opposite occurs (time moves faster for Ellie) that clock would nevertheless have shown that 18 hours had passed inside the pod, while from the outside it seemed to pass straight through the machine, adding credibility to Ellie's story.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: When the fundamentalist terrorist is struggling with the technical crew inside the launch structure, on the left of the screen we see one of the tech's hands holding the terrorist's thumb back from the detonator. For no discernible reason, the tech pulls his hand back and after a moment gingerly places it on the terrorist's forearm, allowing him to detonate the bomb.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): Ellie says to Palmer that her father died when she was 9. Yet later in the movie Mr. Hadden set her birth date to August 25th 1964, and her father's death to November 10th 1974, so she was 10 at the moment of his death.
  
  
• Factual errors: When the sequence of prime numbers is received, the next after 13 should have been 17. However the signals, which the crew had been counting, are now being talked over, and in the background they can be heard to continue well past 17.
  
  
• Factual errors: The Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico featured in this film does not listen for radio transmissions, but in fact takes radio "photographs" of space, utilizing the large dishes at long and short focus configurations. In their Visitor Center they acknowledge the filming of "Contact" but debunk the premise of the film that their dishes could be utilized for the purpose described.
  
  
• Factual errors: The opening sequence contain impossible physics with the four planets (Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) that appear completely desynchronized as the sequence zooms out. The Great Red Spot on the gas planet Jupiter appear larger and centered near the equator rather than slightly positioned at the middle lower line of the planet.
  
  
• Factual errors: The radio and TV signals that are said to have reached the star Vega could not. By SETI's own calculations, these signals deteriorate into noise within 2 light-years; Vega is 25.7 light-years away.
  
  
• Plot holes: The suggestion that a man-made Earth-orbiting satellite could have been used to simulate a signal emanating from a star is absurd. A satellite within Earth's or the Sun's gravitational fields can not carry enough fuel to maintain a position in front of a distant star for more than a fraction of a second out of every several hours. And since the signal was tracked from several locations on Earth, the sky would have to be filled with hoax satellites to fool more than one listening station.
  
  
• Continuity: When the signal is transmitting the prime numbers, we are able to hear and count the transmission to number eleven. However, after that, when the actors stop counting and start talking at once with each other, the signal never pauses after what would be the next prime number, thirteen. Later it is revealed that the signal transmitted all the prime numbers to 101.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: The opening sequence visualizing the travel of radio waves from Earth takes the viewer zipping outside our solar system, outside our galaxy, and through several other interesting galactic tourist attractions. Visually delightful, to be sure. However, the premise of the story is that the broadcast signal has just completed its round trip from Vega, which is only 25 light years away. Our solar system is more like 25,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way, so we'd barely get out of the astronomical neighborhood, let alone out of the galaxy. However, one shot in the ride in the pod shows that, when Ellie reaches Vega, some sort of receiver is set up. In the book, it's explained that the race that uses the wormhole transit system also has placed several of these devices that pick up on signals and transmit back to the original source the received signal and the data for constructing the machine.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): This is possibly intentional, but when Ellie receives the call from Mir, the Cosmonaut addresses her as "Comrade Arroway", a form of address that became outdated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): For an astronomer, Dr. Arroway is not very good at math. If there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and one out of a million of those has planets, and one out of a million of those had life, and one out of a million of those had intelligent life, we're down to a 0.00004% chance that civilization exists. Even if we assume that she was only being repetitive, and meant that one in a million of the 400 billion stars has intelligent life, that is only 400,000 possible civilizations, not the "literally millions" that she claims.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Ellie first hears the signal from space, she calls back to the guys with a walkie-talkie and they answer her as well. But, when the guys press the talk button, her conversation doesn't stop emanating from the radio. Which of course it would.
  
  

• Revealing mistakes: SPOILER: While working as a member of the ops crew during the test run of the machine, Ellie spots the cult leader on one of the monitors, as he has infiltrated the machine consortium crew. With the use of a joystick type lever in ops, she maneuvers the camera on the launch pad to scan back and locate the cult leader. She then turns around to warn the mission director of a security breach. As she is facing away from the monitor, the camera pans down the cult leader's body and zooms into his hand which is holding something. Ellie would not have been able to motion the joystick to do this without looking at the monitor directly.
  
  

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