The book was so bad that I was never tempted to watch the movie. I recall that Sagan kept inserting the phrase, “She wished she’d had a baby,” which had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Was liberal Sagan trying to relate to women by randomly inserting this statement? We’ll never know. In any case, I can’t imagine the movie would have been very good, unless the screenwriters could have worked magic. In which case, it would not have followed the book.
Actually the movie was seen as better than the book because Sagan’s zipper head tendencies were muzzled in the movie with a good streamlined and easy to follow narrative; religion and faith were actually treated quite fairly and reasonably in the movie(1996). No way, 23 years later would Christian religious faith be treated that way again!