Eleanor Arroway

Dr. Eleanor Arroway, ususally known as Ellie Arroway, is the main protagonist of the 1997 science fiction drama film Contact. She is a brilliant astrophysicist who lost her parents at a young age, but grew up to work at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program in Puerto Rico, eventually finding an alien signal that changed the world.
== Biography ==
Much of her childhood is revealed by the mysterious scientist, Hadden. Ellie's mother died in childbirth and her father died when she was only 12, and she tried to save his life by bringing him medicine, but was too late. After going through some foster homes, she ended up graduating from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and rejected a teaching position there to work at SETI.
She regularly convinced the American government to fund her program, and was successful, until the president's science advisor, Dr. David Drumlin, declared the program useless and threatened to shut it down.
Right before it gets shut down, Ellie finds a signal made of prime numbers, so it must be from aliens, and she rushes to examine it. Her team tells the world about the new message, but they zoom in and find a picture of Adolf Hitler, which sparks moral panic around the world.
A mass of people visit the telescopes for many different reasons, but Ellie finds a cult leader who rants about the scientists who destroyed the world and don't deserve to talk to their God.
Ellie finds out that Hadden hacked into her files, and asked her to meet him in his airplane. There he tells her about how he has taken so much from governments and people so that he could be a successful engineer just like Ellie, but he ended up going too far and became an outcast, so he made up for it by giving Ellie the code to the alien message. It was instructions for how humans could build a spaceship for a single person to visit the aliens in person.
Then the question the world was asking was, who would go? Palmer asks Ellie if she believes in God, but Ellie says she would need scientific evidence to believe in it. This counts against her chance of being the one to go in the ship, since all the other people in the room believed it was important that the person going to visit the aliens was religious, like most Earth people.
Danny Drumlin is selected to go, and Ellie congratulates him and wishes him good luck. Ellie is on the control team for the spaceship. However, she recognizes an intruder in the spaceship, it was the same cult leader who she saw back at the chaos when the message was first found. She immediately warns the crew, then warns David, and finds a bomb in the terrorist's hand. Security immediately arrives to stop the terrorist attack, but they fail, so the entire ship is blown up, killing Drumlin, the terrorist, everyone else on the ship, and nearly killing people on the ground due to the huge debris. The religious terrorist leaves a message that he did it to save the world.
== Personality ==
Category:Selfless
Category:Science Fiction Heroes
Category:Masterminds
Category:Doctors and Scientists
Category:Good Vs. Good
Category:Female
Category:Orphans
Category:Bond Creators
Category:In Love
Category:Tragic
Category:Big Good
Category:Neutral Good
Category:The Chosen One
Category:The Messiah
Category:Wise
Category:Genius
Category:Sophisticated
Category:Successful
Category:Honorable
Category:Honest
Category:Provokers