Carl Sagan's novel Contact is about a girl named Ellie who has a deep passion for astronomy. Her passion for Science comes from her Father who only encourages her to explore more into the universe. Ellie always believed there to be extraterrestrial life and worked throughout her life to discover it. People don't understand her or believe her determination to find what she's looking for. Until the day she received contact from a star known as Vega and is soon to physically experience this journey for herself. In Contact, Sagan's message is received through the different parts that occur in the book although, in the movie many parts were left out getting away from the point of the idea. In the novel Ellie's father died when she was 10 but her mother was still alive. Ellie's mother soon found a new husband, who wasn't very encouraging to Ellie. Ellie's step-father always told her to not seem so smart since she was a girl in order for her to make more friends and to attend these different schools. This is a big part in the message because Ellie proved him wrong by her discoveries even if she was a girl. In the film, Ellie didn't exactly have any push to prove her full ability, there was no person telling her what to do. She simply did it for her passion as well as she did it in the novel but there was more of a personal determination for it. Her mother was a a huge factor because it showed more of who Ellie was and to help her realize how much time she was putting into this contact.

In the novel when Ellie discovered the message, it decoded to instructions to build a machine to go to the star Vega. The machine can hold only 5 people, they decided to chose 5 people from different countries. They sent them onto their journey as a group rather than Ellie going alone in the film. This is one the parts that shouldn't have been changed in the film. Instead of focusing more on the peoples experiences from the contact, it focused more on Ellie. The film should have included the other people on the machine because what discovery should only be seen by one scientist. The group of people in the novel were able to experience this together and to come back to earth with more than one pair of eyes witnessing the biggest scientific discovery in history.

In the novel, the machine took them to Vega, which then took them through many black holes that led to a door to a beach. The main point was to talk to the aliens and to see why they even sent them there or how it was even possible. Each of the members boarded on the machine each found a loved one that was deceased. They found them through a door that they found on the beach expect Ellie was the only one that never went though the door. Her father who is an alien explains everything to her and to the whole crew. In the film, she only has a brief discussion with her father with less detail, less scion related topics. Of course in the film he answered the many questions Ellie had but the novel focused more on the how and why. This is one of the parts that should have also been kept the same, for its purely evident message Sagan wanted to write.

Carl Sagan's message had many factors to it, that were proven and somehow dealt with along the course of the novel. Each important aspect of the book had detail that should have purely stayed the way it should have. The film did take the story of Contact but it felt more of fiction with less science. The parts a reader looks most forward to is the main points in a novel that we want to see in a film. The movie would have been good for a separate piece but it did not go about Sagan's novel as well as it should have.