Ironic in relation to the movie... Review on Contact - Carl Sagan

I was intrigued by the movie based on this book... and took that as a chance to learn about Carl Sagan and his work. After reading reviews of the book, I thought it was worth some time to really explore his thoughts on what our first contact would entail with life from other worlds. Overall, I was disappointed, and very surprised that I consider the movie to be more entertaining.

For those who have seen the 1997 movie of the same name, surely some of the details are too tidy in the movie, and far to quick to come to fruition. I had a hard time with the scale of time passing in the movie, as it clearly would have taken years to undertake such a massive endeavor as building something based on a message from aliens. But I thought that Jodie Foster brought Ellie (the main character) to life in a way that Sagan, being more the astronomer then the writer, did. The book was entertaining and much more plausible then the movie, but I left wanting more. It was too tidy in the end, to matter of fact. The single greatest discovery in the human experience shouldn't be easy to explain, and shouldn't have a definite conclusion. And Sagan's painstaking detail of characters didn't seem to result in anything tangible... like... why tell me all of this about a periphery character... I am so intriguied by this story, please take me in deeper!

Taking nothing away, and not being a mathmatician, I still enjoyed this book in parts. But I just felt that the story dragged in many places and in the end, left me a little less inspired and fascinated, and a bit more resolved to the fact that some things will not change in our world, and a discovery like this, could end up being political.