Overcoming Adversity in the Movies "Seabiscuit" and "Contact"

There are spoilers for both movies in this piece.

Have you ever had a time in which you felt on top of the world? Have you felt like this, just to crash down in what seems like a moment to a point where recovery seems impossible? If your answer is “yes” to these questions, you are definitely not alone. Most people face some type of adversity that they have to overcome in their lifetime, and overcoming adversity that occurs after a point in which you feel very accomplished can be a painful and long task. The parallel stories of the characters Ellie in the movie “Contact” and Red in the movie “Seabiscuit” show how people can overcome adversity that is crushing as it follows amazing accomplishments.

The two characters seem very different at first, as Red is based on a real-life 1930's jockey of the same name and Ellie is loosely based on the real-life SETI scientist Jill Tarter (although most of the events in the movie, unlike many of the events in “Seabiscuit”, are fictitious). However, both characters spend most of their respective movies accomplishing more and more amazing feats. Red starts out the main portion of the movie as a reluctant young jockey and street fighter. He ends up meeting with a talented horse trainer and upstart horse owner, and with great luck he becomes the jockey of the small but fast racehorse Seabiscuit. As underdogs, Red and Seabiscuit win most of a series of races, and they prepare to face off with the huge, formidable racehorse War Admiral. Ellie starts out the main portion of the movie as a passionate SETI scientist trying to continue the hunt for extraterrestrial life as funding for the project is cut. One night, her and her team find a signal from the star Vega that they recognize as coming from intelligence. When more messages are found, some of them turn out to be instructions for creating a spacecraft. The craft is built, but Ellie loses out on her shot to become the craft's lone passenger. After a disaster that Ellie almost prevents kills the first passenger and destroys the first craft, Ellie is informed that a second, secret craft was built. Soon she is inside the craft, ready to be launched into the cosmos.

As a movie watcher, it would make sense for one to expect that Seabiscuit would have a miraculous win against War Admiral with Red on his back, and that Ellie would have an amazing journey in space. In fact, Seabiscuit does race and win against War Admiral, and Ellie comes back to the ground with an amazing journey to talk about. However, Red and Ellie are both thrown curveballs of adversity that take a while for them to recover from. Red, while training a horse for his friend just before the big race, falls off the horse and badly shatters his leg. Ellie, after having an amazing experience in which she travels through wormholes and meets an alien disguised as her dead father, is told when she comes back to Earth that only seconds had passed and that her craft had simply fallen from its launching point to the ground.

Red and Ellie have common experiences after these curveballs are thrown. Both face much adversity. Red is told that he might not walk again and that he will never ride a horse again, and Ellie is told that her experiences did not happen and that the message from “aliens” was made up by a now-dead businessman who helped crack the “alien” messages. Both strengthen friendships. Red recruits an old friend, George, to be Seabiscuit's jockey in the race against War Admiral. Ellie becomes closer to her occasional romantic partner Palmer, a religious author, as they both now believe in something that they cannot prove. Both eventually overcome the adversity. Red and Seabiscuit, who suffers a serious leg injury of his own, recover together and eventually get back to the racetrack to win a race that they had lost by a tiny margin years before. Ellie maintains her belief in her experiences and gets much funding to continue SETI. Faith in themselves helps both characters overcome the adversity they face, as Red believes that he will still have the ability to ride even when the doctor tells him otherwise, and Ellie believes that her experiences really happened even when there is a lack of evidence (although there is some that she doesn't know about) for them.

Ellie from the movie “Contact” and Red from the movie “Seabiscuit” are both striking examples of characters who overcome adversity that results from demoralizing instances that end a run of amazing accomplishments. Maybe by relying on faith in yourself and by strengthening bonds with friends, you can overcome adversity that you may face in the future in a similar way as Ellie and Red overcome adversity in their stories.