A few decades ago, I read The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I love Dickens and I have been seeing television versions of it since I was a child, probably at least two dozens. Heck, even the Six Million Dollar Man did a version of it. I was curious as to how accurate they were to the book. I discovered that reading it wasn't as enjoyable as I'd expected. Really. It was beautifully written of course, but because I knew the story so well, there were no surprises, same characters, nothing new. Most of these film and play productions of the Christmas classic, it ends up, are actually quite accurate. I was expecting my reading of Carl Sagan's Contact to be like this because I had seen the movie so many times. It was not, at all.
Contact, the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film, is one of my favorites. Jodie Foster in a thought-provoking hard science fiction (a real sci-fi story, not like Star Wars) with ethical and theological paradoxes ... what could be better? Not much actually. I have seen this film many times. Much is different in the book, which makes it an enjoyable read, but unfortunately, it might be one of those few books where the movie is better than the book.
**Fair warning: I tell you now, if you have not read the book or seen the movie, there are spoilers coming. You have been warned. You may want to stop and watch the movie now. You won't regret it.
The first thing you should realize is that it was originally conceived of as a movie, not a book, in 1977. Sagan and Ann Druyan (whom he later married) wrote the story. It bounced around Hollywood for a few years taking on many different forms, in the meantime, Sagan decided to write the novel which was eventually published by Simon and Schuster in 1985. It reached #7 on the New York Times Best Seller list. It returned to the list in 1997, briefly, when the movie came out.
In the book, we get a lot more of Ellie Arroway's (Jodie Foster) back story. She was based on Jill Tarter, an astronomer for SETI. Her name comes from Eleanor Roosevelt and Francois-Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire). We do get the scene of her with her father conversing about the stars and he dies while she is still young, but the book also shows her mom remarrying a very pious man whom Ellie does not get along with and there are some surprises to their relationship as well. In the movie, her mother dies while giving birth to Ellie and is a non-entity in her life. She calls her mother throughout the book. We also read about Ellie going to college with her sexual exploits and the continued sexism she gets exposed to her in her field. Many characters are in the book that don't make it into the movie. Her lover is Presidential Science Adviser Ken der Heer. He isn't even in the movie. The movie has Ellie in a relationship with Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) which is only hinted at in the book. She seems to be attracted to him but is more interested in their intellectual sparring than anything physical.
Some characters from the movie are not in the book at all, like the guys in the lab. They are there, but they aren't named. Remember the blind guy, Kent (portrayed by William Fichtner). Not in the book. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is when Kent actually hears the message from space in the static, he hears structure while others cannot. I could imagine this scene was added to create drama to the moment of discovery. This character is based on a real guy, a scientist that worked at SETI, Kent Cullers. Rob Lowe's Richard Rank is a parody of Ralph Reed and is not in the book. The book does have Billy Jo Rankin but he is less extreme and less cartoonish. I can understand this change since the book came out in the 80's and much had changed with religion in American, a la the Christian Coalition, by the late 90's when the film came out. It needed an upgrade. James Wood owns the character of Kitz. Kitz who is in the book and is still quite obnoxious but Wood pushes him into the realm of belligerence which makes him much more interesting. He is a character you love to hate.
One big change is that the US President, in the book, has a big role and the president is a woman. The movie only shows the President once and it is Bill Clinton. Zemeckis very creatively uses news footage from 1996 of Clinton talking about a Mars rock, but the clips are so vague it appears that he is talking about the message from Vega. Zemeckis received a complaint letter from the White House because they never granted permission for the footage. The original plan was for Sydney Poitier to play the president but he turned the role down. So the president wasn't a woman in the film but was supposed to be black, both of which were quite progressive for their time.
There is more science in the book which is a good thing. Carl Sagan is one of the best science educators of the 20th century and it makes sense that even in his only book of fiction, he continues to educate. As I read I learned about the star Vega and Polaris, about the moons of our solar system, about message decoding, radio and television waves, and about the general nature of the universe. A number of compelling conversations/arguments take place between scientists and religious folks throughout the book. These are fascinating, as they are in the movie, but the book has more of them.
Of course, the movie is filled with stuff not in the book that must have been added because it works. Another memorable scene is Ellie laying on her Thunderbird's hood with headphones listening to the "cosmic static." Not in the book, but it is a fine scene. Her relationship with Dumlin (Tom Skerritt's character) is strained, but it is a much bigger part of the movie than it is in the book. He was her faculty adviser and was disappointed in her career choice of searching for E.T.
The message is prime numbers (mathematics is the language of science) and is being broadcast from distance aliens with hidden instructions to build a machine. They don't know what the machine is, a Trojan Horse perhaps. It takes about a decade to build in the book, but it doesn't seem that long in the movie. The world builds two in the movie, but three in the book because the USSR had to build one as well. Written in 1985 after all, the Cold War is still raging in Sagan's future. The book's machine has five seats while the movie's only has one for Ellie. In the book, her trip across the galaxy takes place on New Year's Eve 1999; there is no mention of the Y2K bug. The trip takes 20 minutes Earth time while the movie has it taking just a few seconds.
The oddest thing about the book is the terrorist attack. This is a big moment in the movie. Ellie recognizes a religious fanatic at a testing of the machine and he has a bomb on him. It goes off and destroys it. It is quite a spectacle. While reading this in the book, I was reminded that Sagan is not a novelist, but a scientist. It only took place in one paragraph that ended the chapter. I wasn't even sure it had happened so I reread it. It was there, but very vague. The next chapter started with Drumlin's funeral so it was there. I don't think I would have known what happened if I hadn't seen the movie.
I am a non-believer. I call myself an Atheist but at times, I found this to be extreme. Atheism seems to be fundamentalist approach to science. If I had to come up with a name for what I am, in regards to the whole God question, I would have to call myself an Agnostic leaning strongly towards Atheism. I have always wondered what I would need to convince me that there is a God, any god. I've never been able to come with anything. What I love about the end of Contact, is that it answers this question. The movie didn't come near this. When Ellie talks to the alien (in the guise of her father), they talk about the number π (aka pi). They talk about how it goes on and on, never repeating, but somewhere in there, the alien says, is a string of ones and zeroes. In this string of binary digits is a message. The book ends Ellie spending her time looking for this message. A message being discovered in pi would do it for me. It is interesting that a book by a great scientist, helped me figure out what I'd need to believe in God.
