10 Movie Scenes Too Crazy For Cinema
7. The Destruction Of The Arms Industry In Contact
Contact is fundamentally about abandoning old divisions and borders, overcoming differences, and embracing the possibility of new frontiers, as Jodie Foster’s character leads efforts to construct a communication wormhole device based on plans sent by an alien civilisation.
The Pentagon, Secret Service, Treasury, and NASA all worked on the script, with the Pentagon requesting the most significant changes, including where Foster criticises the military for “communist paranoia right out of War of the Worlds”.
The most significant change was the removal of the whole concluding scene. In the original script, the US President gives a stirring speech at the UN about the building of this great new technology, intercut with a military convoy and Apache helicopters approaching the construction site. The ditched script had described how ‘Encircling the installation is a vast graveyard of discarded aircraft—the detritus of Twentieth Century war-making.’
This rather obvious but powerful symbolism represents how technological efforts are moving from the violence of the 20th century to peaceful 21st century space exploration - a good look for NASA but much less so for the military.