As usual I am late to the game when it comes to seeing this movie. I do not get to the cinema very often. I think it was on Netflix a while back, but was gone before I could watch it. Luckily it was UK TV last weekend.
Hidden Figures tells the true story of some of the African-American women who worked at NASA in the early days of space flight and played an important role in getting men into space. It is based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly that I have not read. Mathematician Katherine Johnson also featured in an episode of Timeless.
I did not grow up in the segregated society of the USA that this movie portrays, but they make it clear that it was a white male dominated world. 'Coloureds' had separate schools, toilets, water fountains and dining facilities. It seems that some of the aspects of NASA portrayed in the movie are not totally accurate, but they have taken some artistic licence to show things that were going on generally. I am sure it was no easy ride for Johnson to become a top space scientist, for Dorothy Vaughan to supervise computing teams and for Mary Jackson to become an engineer. Those were not expected careers for black women at that time.
It is actually a fairly gentle movie. Nothing too traumatic happens, but the women have some struggles and it may over-dramatise some scenes. For example, having Johnson check the figures for John Glenn's flight did not happen at the last minute. Movies are always a compromise to reach a wide audience to justify the cost. It can seem odd that they shift events to different characters, but you have to accept
They mix in some archive footage of rocket tests, which suffered a lot of failures. It was a tense time politically as the Russians seemed to be taking the lead in space. A few years back I visited an exhibition at the Science Museum of Soviet space hardware. That included a lunar lander that they kept secret and abandoned after the Americans got there first. The movie hints that the manned space programme had a military aspect.
I enjoyed this movie. The cast do a great job and there is lots of nice period detail. As someone who grew up watching various space missions I have always been interested in space, but the role of these women never seemed to get mentioned. It is only a couple of generations ago and Katherine Johnson is still alive at 101. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2015.
I see this movie has featured a few times on Steem before. Maybe we need ways to consolidate those. I used the Steem search to find them.
