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I’ve been a computer programmer for 29-1/2 years, so I suppose I would be a tad biased toward a film that uses FORTRAN as a means of exacting socially relevant revenge. In “Hidden Figures,” the FORTRAN punch cards coded by Dorothy Vaughan ( Octavia Spencer ) prove that she is not only qualified to be the first employee supervisor of color in the space program, but that her “girls” (as she calls them) have the skills to code the IBM mainframe under her tutelage. Vaughan’s victory comes courtesy of the programming manual she had to lift from the segregated library that vengefully refused to loan it to her because it wasn’t in the “colored section.” When her shocked daughter protests her unconventional borrowing methods, Vaughan tells her, “I pay my taxes for this library just like everybody else!”

Vaughan is one of the three real-life African-American women who helped decipher and define the mathematics used during the space race in the 1960s. “Hidden Figures” tells their stories with some of the year’s best writing, directing and acting. Co-writer/director Theodore Melfi (adapting Margot Lee Shetterly's book with co-writer Allison Schroeder) has a light touch not often found in dramas like this, which makes the material all the more effective. He knows when to let a visual cue or cut tell the story, building on moments of repetition before paying off with scenes of great power. For example, to depict the absurdity of segregated bathrooms, Melfi repeats shots of a nervously tapping foot, followed by mile-long runs to the only available bathroom. This running joke culminates in a brilliantly acted, angry speech by Taraji P. Henson that is her finest cinematic moment to date.

Henson plays Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who, in the film’s opening flashback, is shown to have a preternatural affinity for math in her youth. Her success at obtaining the education she needs is hindered by Jim Crow, but she still manages to earn degrees in math and a job at NASA’s “Colored Computer” division. In an attempt to beat Russia to the moon, NASA has been looking for the nation’s best mathematicians. The importance of the space race forces them to accept qualified candidates of any stripe, including those society would normally discourage.

We meet the adult version of Johnson as she’s sitting in Vaughan’s stalled car with her NASA colleague Mary Jackson ( Janelle Monae ). The dialogue between the three women establishes their easy rapport with one another, and introduces their personalities. Vaughan is no-nonsense, Jackson is a wise ass with impeccable comic timing and Johnson is the clever optimist. They are similarly educated, though each has their own skill set the film will explore.

Vaughan’s mechanical skills are highlighted first: Spencer’s legs jut out from underneath her broken down car as she applies the trade taught to her by her father. Her supervisory expertise is also on display when a police officer shows up to investigate. Though the cop situation is resolved in an amusing, joyous fashion, “Hidden Figures” never undercuts the fears and oppressions of this era. They’re omnipresent even when we don’t see them, and the film develops a particular rhythm between problems and solutions that is cathartic without feeling forced.

At the request of Vaughan’s supervisor ( Kirsten Dunst ), Johnson is sent to a room full of White male mathematicians to assist in some literal rocket science. The calculations have stumped everyone, including Paul Stafford ( Jim Parsons ), the hotshot whose math Johnson is hired to check. Parsons is a bit of a weak link here—his petulance, while believable, is overplayed to the point of cartoonish villainy—but the overall attitude in the room made me shudder with bad memories of my own early career tribulations. I’ve been the only person of color in a less than inviting work environment, and many of Henson’s delicate acting choices vis-à-vis her body language held the eerie feeling of sense memory for me. Though she remains confident in her work and presents that confidence whenever questioned, Henson manifests on her person every hit at her dignity. You can see her trying to hold herself in check instead of going full-Cookie Lyon on her colleagues.

In addition to the unwelcome men in the room, Johnson also has to deal with the tough, though fair complaints of her grizzled supervisor, Al Harrison ( Kevin Costner ). Costner is a perfect fit here; he should consider running out the rest of his career in supporting mentor roles. He and Henson play off each other with an equal sense of bemusement, and when the film gives him something noble to do, it hides the cliché under the nostalgic sight of “ Bull Durham ”'s Crash Davis holding a baseball bat.

While Johnson tries to keep John Glenn (charmingly played by Glen Powell ) from exploding atop a rocket and Vaughan fights FORTRAN and Dunst for the right to be a supervisor, Janelle Monae is secretly walking off with the picture. Mary Jackson wants to be the first Black engineer at NASA, yet as with Vaughan’s library book, she’s hindered by Jim Crow practices. Jackson takes her case to court, and the scene where Monae wordlessly reacts to the outcome is one of the year’s best. With this and “ Moonlight ,” Monae has established herself as a fine actress able to handle both comedy and drama. The awards praise for Spencer is certainly justified, but Monae is the film’s true supporting player MVP.

Watching “Hidden Figures” I thought about how I would have felt had I seen this movie 30 years ago, when I made the decision to study math and computer science. I might have felt more secure in that decision, and certainly would have had better ideas on how to handle some of the thorny racial situations into which I found myself. The strange thing for me is that I saw more Black programmers in this movie than I’ve encountered in my entire career. I had few points of reference in this regard, and the I.T. world reflects that. Even today, some of my customers look at me funny when I show up to fix the problem.

Hopefully, “Hidden Figures” will inspire women and people of color (and hell, men too) with its gentle assertion that there’s nothing unusual nor odd about people besides White men being good at math. But my secret fantasy is that this feel-good film will be a huge hit at the box office. Under its great acting, bouncy Pharrell score and message is a film that’s as geeked out about math as a superhero film is about its comic book origins. So much so that it does my mathematician’s heart proud. It deserves to make as much money as any planet in the Marvel Universe does. This is one of the year's best films.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Hidden Figures (2016)

127 minutes

Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson

Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughn

Janelle Monae as Mary Jackson

Kevin Costner as Al Harrison

Aldis Hodge as Levi Jackson

Kirsten Dunst as Vivian Michael

Glen Powell as John Glenn

Mahershala Ali as Jim Johnson

Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford

Olek Krupa as Karl Zielinski

Theodore Melfi

Writer (based on the book by)

Margot Lee Shetterly
Allison Schroeder

Cinematographer

Mandy Walker
Peter Teschner
Benjamin Wallfisch
Pharrell Williams
Hans Zimmer

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What Sets the Smart Heroines of Hidden Figures Apart

Movies about brilliant scientific or mathematical minds often focus on their subject’s ego—not so with a new film about three African American women who worked at NASA in the ’60s.

When it comes to historical movies about brilliant minds, especially in the realms of math or the sciences, audiences can all but expect a tale of ego. Films such as A Beautiful Mind , The Theory of Everything , and The Imitation Game all lean in some way on the idea of the inaccessible genius—a mathematician, computer scientist, and theoretical physicist all somehow removed from the world.

Hidden Figures is not that kind of film: It’s a story of brilliance, but not of ego. It’s a story of struggle and willpower, but not of individual glory. Set in 1960s Virginia, the film centers on three pioneering African American women whose calculations for NASA were integral to several historic space missions, including John Glenn’s successful orbit of the Earth. These women—Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan—were superlative mathematicians and engineers despite starting their careers in segregation-era America and facing discrimination at home, at school, and at work.

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And yet Hidden Figures pays tribute to its subjects by doing the opposite of what many biopics have done in the past—it looks closely at the remarkable person in the context of a community. Directed by Theodore Melfi ( St. Vincent ) and based on the nonfiction book of the same title by Margot Lee Shetterly, the film celebrates individual mettle, but also the way its characters consistently try to lift others up. They’re phenomenal at what they do, but they’re also generous with their time, their energy, and their patience in a way that feels humane, not saintly. By refracting the overlooked lives and accomplishments of Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson through this lens, Hidden Figures manages to be more than an inspiring history lesson with wonderful performances.

From the start, Hidden Figures makes clear that it is about a trio, not a lone heroine. Katherine (played by a radiant Taraji P. Henson) is the film’s ostensible protagonist and gets the most screen time. But her story is woven tightly with those of Mary (Janelle Monáe) and Dorothy (Octavia Spencer); the former became NASA’s first black female engineer , the latter was a mathematician who became NASA’s first African American manager . (It’s worth noting that, as a dramatization, the film makes tweaks to the timeline, characters, and events of the books.)

Hidden Figures begins in earnest in 1961. Katherine, Mary, and Dorothy are part of NASA’s pool of human “computers” —employees, usually women, charged with doing calculations before the use of digital computers. Due to Virginia’s segregation laws, African American female computers have to work in a separate “colored” building at the Langley Research Center. But the U.S. is so desperate to beat the Soviet Union into space that NASA becomes a reluctant meritocracy: Because of her expertise in analytic geometry, Katherine is assigned to a special task group trying to get Glenn into orbit. She arrives at her new job to find she’s the sole brown face in the room.

Katherine is closest to the excitement, but Hidden Figures widens its scope beyond her. Mary must navigate layers of racist bureaucratic hurdles in her quest to become an engineer. Dorothy is fighting for a long overdue promotion, while the arrival of an IBM machine threatens to put her team of computers out of work. The women consistently out-think their higher-ranked (usually white, male) colleagues, whether by learning a new programming language, solving problems in wind-tunnel experiments, or calculating narrow launch windows for space missions. Each is uniquely aware of the broader stakes of her success—for other women, for black people, for black women, and for America at large—and this knowledge is as much an inspiration as it is a heavy weight.

Early on, Dorothy shares her ambivalence about Katherine’s prestigious new assignment. “Any upward movement is movement for us all. It’s just not movement for me,” she says, disappointed after a setback at work. It’s a subtle, but loaded point, and one of the most thought-provoking lines in the film. Of course she’s proud of Katherine, and of course Katherine is paving the way for others. But individual victories are often simply that—Katherine knocking down one pillar of discrimination doesn’t mean countless more don’t remain. Still, Dorothy’s frustration with her stagnation at work doesn’t translate to defeatism or selfishness. She spends much of the film maneuvering to protect her team’s jobs, even if it means risking her own status and security.

Their intellect may not be broadly relatable (again, they’re exceptional for a reason), but their sense of rootedness is. Though most of their time and energy go to their careers, the women of Hidden Figures don’t take their relationships with each other and with their friends and families for granted. If one gets held up at work for hours, the other two wait in the parking lot until they can all drive home. On the weekends, they go to church and neighborhood barbecues and spend time with their children. They don’t “have it all,” but they do strive for balance and connection. (Another “feel-good film” from 2016, Queen of Katwe , also used the concept of community and interdependence to undermine the built-up notion of isolated talent.)

Despite the racism and sexism Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary face, Hidden Figures is a decidedly un-somber affair. The breezy script by Melfi and Allison Schroeder opts not to dwell much on the particulars of aeronautical science; instead, it revels in the intelligence and warmth of its subjects, in their successes both in and out of the office, and it wants viewers to do so too. Hidden Figures doesn’t hide its efforts to be a crowdpleaser—depending on audience size, you can expect clapping and cheering after moments of victory, and loud groans whenever egregious acts of racism take place (there are many). A buoyant soundtrack by Pharrell Williams, Hans Zimmer, and Benjamin Wallfisch and regular doses of comic relief help keep the tone light and optimistic despite the serious issues at hand.

Rounding out Hidden Figures ’ all-star cast are Kevin Costner, as Katherine’s boss and eventual ally; an appropriately un-funny Jim Parsons as a new colleague of Katherine’s who can barely tolerate her presence; Kirsten Dunst as Dorothy’s manager and the epitome of the racist-who-thinks-she’s-not type; Glen Powell as an affable John Glenn; and Mahershala Ali as Katherine’s kindly love interest, Jim Johnson. Because of the engaging performances that Henson, Monáe, and Spencer give, each main character is fascinating to watch in her own right. But it’s their dynamic that makes it a joy to see them onscreen together.

Hidden Figures doesn’t try to push many artistic boundaries, but it tells its story so well that it doesn’t really have to. The film also avoids the most glaring missteps of historical movies that deal with race: At no point does it try to give viewers the impression that racism has been “solved,” and its white characters exist on a constantly shifting spectrum of racial enlightenment. What’s more, the film’s straightforward presentation belies its fairly radical subject matter. As K. Austin Collins notes at The Ringer , Hidden Figures “might be one of the few Hollywood movies about the civil rights era to imagine that black lives in the ’60s, particularly black women’s lives, were affected not only by racism but also by the space race and the Cold War.”

The Hidden Figures author, Shetterly, has discussed how the film only portrays a fraction of the individuals who worked on the space program— and how the movie was meant to speak to the experiences of the many African American women working at NASA at the time. Watching this particular story unfurl on the big screen, it’s hard not to think of how many more movies and books could be made about women like Katherine Johnson—talented women shut out of promotions and meetings and elite programs and institutions and, thus history, because they weren’t white. Even today, barriers remain. A 2015 study found 100 percent of women of color in STEM fields report experiencing gender bias at work, an effect often influenced by their race. Black and Latina women, for example, reported being mistaken for janitors (a scene that, fittingly, takes place in Hidden Figures ).

With the complex social forces that shaped its characters’ lives still so relevant today, Hidden Figures is powerful precisely because it’s not a solo portrait or a close character study. Certainly, Hollywood will be a better industry when there are more films about the egos and personal demons and grand triumphs of black women who helped to change the world. But Hidden Figures shines with respect for sisterhood and the communistic spirit, and in casting its spotlight wide, the film imparts a profound appreciation for what was achieved in history’s shadows.

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Hidden Figures Reviews

This was a great historical film that shined a light on black excellency during one of the most important times in US history.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2024

Charming performances by an incredibly black cast make this sometimes redundant historical drama worth watching.

“Hidden Figures” is a polished Hollywood movie through and through, but the power and importance of its story along with the three central performances easily overshadow any hiccups.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

The right crowd-pleaser for the right time.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 5, 2022

This glossy historical celebration leans towards the sentimental, but is timely and important nonetheless.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 21, 2022

Brilliant performances by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae and a first rate ensemble make this a not to be missed revelation and righting of American herstory...

Full Review | Oct 5, 2021

To me, the film speaks of simple respect, due to every person because he or she is human.

Full Review | Aug 26, 2021

It's a story of greatness demanding acknowledgement.

Full Review | Aug 17, 2021

The film never relinquishes its tight focus on three remarkable individuals who repeatedly demonstrate that they, too, possess the right stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 17, 2021

Hidden Figures puts the familiar period-piece lens on an overlooked part of space history without glossing over the ugly bits while still feeling hopeful for what science and technology can achieve when the best and brightest can participate

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

A feel good, crowd pleaser of a movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 28, 2021

Any merely or largely "official" version of the political and historical issues bound up with these events, such as the filmmakers adopt, is fraught with contradictions.

Full Review | Feb 22, 2021

The movie features outstanding performances and pays tribute to three pioneering Black women who played a central role at NASA in the early 1960s during the "space race" between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2021

Bring the whole family to see an uplifting film about three women whose contributions to NASA and space travel should not be ignored.

Full Review | Nov 5, 2020

It's a feel good, inspirational and entertaining film with winning performances across the board and an incredibly valuable history lesson.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 10, 2020

One of the main problems of the film is that it builds the drama in a very naive, very artificial, very intentional way. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 27, 2020

All the three leads were fantastic.

Full Review | May 8, 2020

Very nice and entertaining.

A superb cast and a true-life story long overdue in the telling.

Full Review | Apr 30, 2020

Hidden Figures presented three brilliant black women who just wanted to do their jobs.

Full Review | Mar 31, 2020

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Film Review: ‘Hidden Figures’

Feel-good drama reveals the largely untold way in which race factored into the U.S.-Soviet space race.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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'Hidden Figures' Review: How Race Factored into the Space Race

Before IBM mainframes took over NASA’s number-crunching duties, the organization’s “computers” wore skirts. While an all-male team of engineers performed the calculations for potential space travel, women mathematicians checked their work, playing a vital role at a moment when the United States was neck-and-neck with (and for a time, running behind) the Soviets in the space race. As brash, bright, and broad as Hollywood studio movies come, “Hidden Figures” tells the story of three of these unsung heroes, all of them African-American, who fought a doubly steep uphill battle — as crusaders for both feminism and civil rights in segregated Virginia — to help put an American into orbit.

Today, there is nothing surprising about the fact that black women could handle such a task, and clearly NASA was realistic enough to recognize this at the time. What wasn’t necessarily evident in 1962 was that these “colored computers,” as they were called by NASA, deserved to be afforded the same rights and treated with the same respect as their white male colleagues — and what director Theodore Melfi (“St. Vincent”) illustrates via his simplistic, yet thoroughly satisfying retelling is just how thoroughly the deck was stacked against these women. “Hidden Figures” is empowerment cinema at its most populist, and one only wishes that the film had existed at the time it depicts — though ongoing racial tensions and gender double-standards suggest that perhaps we haven’t come such a long way, baby. Now 98, Taraji P. Henson ’s character, Katherine Johnson (after whom NASA later named a computational research facility), lived long enough to see a black president, but not a female commander-in-chief.

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If only everyone’s mind could so easily be changed. At work, Katherine is promoted to a job with the Space Task Group, where manager Al Harrison ( Kevin Costner , whose gum-chewing, crew-cut look nails the era) is too distracted to notice tension between his employees, especially boss’s pet Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons, playing the sort of reductive stereotype that talented minorities have been forced to settle for over the past century — not ideal, as characterizations go, though such payback seems only fair).

Meanwhile, Dorothy takes orders from a curt, condescending white lady (Kirsten Dunst), who addresses Dorothy by her first name, and offers little help with her request for a promotion to supervisor, despite the fact Dorothy is already doing the job. As a woman, Vivian can empathize with the challenges of a discriminatory workplace; and yet, as a white woman, she doesn’t get it at all, oblivious to her subconscious role in keeping her black colleagues down (“Y’all should be thankful you have jobs at all,” she says), for which Dorothy quite rightly puts her in her place.

As in “Mad Men,” so much of the gender and race dynamics are conveyed via body language, subtext, and the telling way characters look at one another. But unlike the wonderfully subtle writing for that relatively sophisticated series, the “Hidden Figures” screenplay — which Melfi and Allison Schroeder adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly’s newly published nonfiction book — has a tendency to deliver its message via direct, on-the-nose dialogue (e.g. after defusing the segregated-bathroom problem, Kevin Costner decrees, “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color!”).

The bathroom scene is by far the movie’s most satisfying, in that it follows a series of cartoonish vignettes in which Katherine must dash half a mile in high heels, clear to the West Computing Building, in order to relieve herself — a daily humiliation amplified by the sound of a new Pharrell track called “Runnin’.” (Also a producer on the film, Pharrell puts a playful, upbeat spin on the patent unfairness these women faced, culminating in his terrifically empowering, gospel-infused “Victory.”) As vital as these scenes are, it’s practically groan-inducing to watch Henson — a talented actress whose exaggerated portrayal of a math whiz suggests Michelle Pfeiffer’s smart, yet haggard pre-Catwoman secretary in “Batman Returns” — awkwardly pantomiming someone with a bladder about to burst, but that’s the broad acting style Melfi encourages, and it’s the kind that inspires spontaneous ovations at the end of implausible monologues. (As crowd-pleasing ingredients go, “Hidden Figures” has nearly everything except a scene of a cat being rescued from a tree.)

Henson’s co-stars manage to play their own recurring challenges in more convincing ways — best exemplified as the beautiful, self-confident Mary (Monáe, launching a formidable acting career, between this and “Moonlight”) petitions the judge to let her take the necessary night courses that will allow her to apply for an open engineering position at NASA. Spencer’s Dorothy also faces obstacles at every turn, but cleverly anticipates how the IBM (which amusingly can’t even fit through the door of the empty room that awaits its arrival) will render her division obsolete, and plans accordingly, making herself indispensable.

Among the male roles, Mahershala Ali is every bit as strong as Costner at playing a skeptical man quick to recognize Katherine’s talents — supplying the film’s only romantic subplot in the process — while all-American astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) doesn’t so much as hesitate to accept the computers’ contributions. Before the launch of his Friendship 7 vessel, Glenn says, “Let’s get the girl to check the numbers.” When Harrison asks, “Which one?” Glenn doesn’t miss a beat: “The smart one.”

Reviewed at Fox studios, Dec. 2, 2016. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 126 MIN.

Production: A 20th Century Fox release of a Fox 2000 Pictures presentation of a Chernin Entertainment, Levantine Films production. Produced by Donna Gigliotti, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Pharrell Williams, Theodore Melfi. Executive producers: Jamal Daniel, Renee Witt, Ivana Lombardi, Mimi Valdés, Kevin Halloran, Margot Lee Shetterly.
Crew: Director: Theodore Melfi. Screenplay: Allison Schroeder, Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly. Camera (color, widescreen): Mandy Walker). Editor: Peter Teschner.
With: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, Mahershala Ali, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Kimberly Quinn.

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Review: ‘Hidden Figures’ is a Grade-A Hollywood crowd-pleaser in the best way

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Like the calculating women whose lives it celebrates, “Hidden Figures” knows what it’s doing.

A Grade-A Hollywood crowd-pleaser that happily celebrates its shameless moments, “Hidden Figures” can be teased but it can’t be ignored. The film may not be restrained but stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe are powerfully effective and its little-known true story is so flabbergasting that resistance is all but futile.

Before the word “computer” referred to a machine, it was a job description used for people, often women, who ran the numbers and did the heavy mathematical lifting serious science required.

As detailed in Margot Lee Shetterly’s book (which veteran producer Donna Gigliotti purchased just from an outline), not only were a group of these African American women “computers” working in the segregated South, they turned out to be critical to getting America’s 1960s space program off the ground.

Shetterly writes in the book’s introduction that the never-before-told story “defies our expectations and challenges much of what we think we knew about American history.”

“Hidden Figures” never misses a chance to go for the heart-tugging and the obvious as scripted by Allison Schroeder and directed by Theodore Melfi, a veteran commercial director who corralled Bill Murray in “St. Vincent.” But, frankly, if the film’s aesthetic standards were more rigorous, the end product might not be as out-and-out effective as the result undeniably is here.

“Hidden Figures” begins with a brief 1926 prologue introducing us to a young black girl who is a math prodigy inspiring awe in all who know her. “I’ve never seen,” a teacher tells her parents, “a mind like your daughter has.”

Thirty-five years later we meet that girl as the adult Katherine Johnson, one of three women carpooling to work at NASA’s Langley Memorial Research Lab in Hampton, Va. Or at least trying to: Their sturdy Chevrolet has broken down.

Momentarily stranded, the three women soon reveal their core personalities. Johnson (Henson), is still the brainy one, a complete whiz with numbers. Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer) is the practical one, looking under the hood to see what the problem is. Mary Jackson (Monáe), momentarily occupied with her lipstick, is charismatic and ambitious.

These three are part of what is known at Langley as the West Computing section, a group of some 20 mathematicians who were all African American women. As Jeff Nichols’ film “Loving” made clear this year, Virginia in 1961 was as segregated as any state in the Deep South. These women could not eat in the same restaurants, drink from the same water fountains or even, as brazenly becomes a major plot point, use the same restrooms as their white colleagues.

Though they all work at Langley, each of the three has a different job challenge and a different way they have to contend with the inescapable racism of the time and place. Super-capable Vaughan, for instance, wants to be made a supervisor, but NASA is dragging its feet and her white boss Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) is not going out of her way to help.

Jackson wants to become an engineer, and despite how bleak her chances are (no African American woman has achieved that title to date) she is determined to make the attempt.

The most interesting trajectory, so to speak, turns out to be Johnson’s. NASA is in a dog-eat-dog race with the Soviets to put people into space, and the man in charge of the Space Task Group, crusty Al Harrison (a composite figure deftly played by Kevin Costner), is a tough nut known to eat computers for lunch.

Out of desperation as much as anything else, Johnson is given a shot at a place on his staff, and though we know that she is as much of a wizard as Albus Dumbledore, “Hidden Figures” milks the situation for all its worth.

“Hidden Figures” also provides glimpses of the personal lives of its characters. Mary, for instance, is married to the civil rights firebrand Levi (Aldis Hodge), who initially does not see her struggles as significant. Johnson, for her part, a widow raising three daughters, catches the eye of Col. Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali, a star, like Monáe, of “Moonlight”), a good man who discovers that she is more impressive than he realized.

Understandably excited to be playing significant women, the trio of lead actresses are uniformly excellent, but the film’s script is structured to make Henson the first among equals, and she takes advantage of her opportunities.

She has a showstopping speech (hint: it involves those bathrooms) and the actress’ ability to put enormously complex equations on a huge chalkboard is impressive because the numbers and symbols had to be faultlessly memorized. The real Katherine Johnson, still alive and vibrant at age 98 and a recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, couldn’t have done it any better.

‘Hidden Figures’

MPAA rating: PG for thematic elements and some language

Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes

Playing: In general release

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Hidden Figures Review

An overlooked chapter in america's space history..

Hidden Figures fills in an all too forgotten, or simply too widely unknown, blank in US history in a classy, engaging, entertaining and hugely fulfilling way. Superb performances across the board and a fascinating story alone make Hidden Figures a solid, an accomplished and deftly executed movie that entertains, engages and earns your time, money and attention.

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Hidden Figures

Three female African-American mathematicians play a pivotal role in astronaut John Glenn's launch into orbit. Meanwhile, they also have to deal with racial and gender discrimination at work. Three female African-American mathematicians play a pivotal role in astronaut John Glenn's launch into orbit. Meanwhile, they also have to deal with racial and gender discrimination at work. Three female African-American mathematicians play a pivotal role in astronaut John Glenn's launch into orbit. Meanwhile, they also have to deal with racial and gender discrimination at work.

Theodore Melfi
Allison Schroeder
Margot Lee Shetterly
Taraji P. Henson
Octavia Spencer
Janelle Monáe
599 User reviews
439 Critic reviews
74 Metascore
37 wins & 94 nominations total

Top cast 99+

Katherine G. Johnson

Dorothy Vaughan

Mary Jackson

Al Harrison

Vivian Mitchell

Paul Stafford

Colonel Jim Johnson

Levi Jackson

Karl Zielinski

Young Katherine Coleman

Mrs. Joylette Coleman

Joylette Johnson

Constance Johnson

Kathy Johnson
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia Astronaut John Glenn did specifically request that Katherine Johnson review all of the calculations for the Friendship 7 mission - (his dialogue in the film based on actual NASA transcripts*) - before he could be confident enough to proceed, but which in reality actually occurred a few weeks before launch: not as depicted in the film whilst awaiting the actual launch. And Katherine Johnson's calculations (more realistically) actually took (just!) three days to confirm. (*Director's own DVD commentary information.)
Goofs In the movie, the impression is given that John Glenn 's flight was to have lasted seven orbits and was curtailed after three orbits due to the problem with the heat shield. This is incorrect as the flight was always scheduled for three orbits. Where the confusion comes in, on reaching orbit Glenn was given a "go" for seven orbits meaning the systems, fuel, oxygen, etc. could sustain the astronaut for seven orbits IF needed.

Al Harrison : Here at NASA we all pee the same color.

Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Robert De Niro/Pharrell Williams & Kim Burrell (2016)
Soundtracks Crave Written and Performed by Pharrell Williams Pharrell Williams performs courtesy of i am OTHER Entertainment/Columbia Records

User reviews 599

May 5, 2017
Why did Katherine take her work with her to the "colored women's" restroom if she knew she had to get back to the large workroom in a hurry ?
What is the significance of the finger clicking when Jim Parsons holds up the newspaper?
January 6, 2017 (United States)
United States
arabuloku.com
Official Facebook
Bộ Ba Ưu Việt
East Point, Georgia, USA (Katherine's home)
Fox 2000 Pictures
Chernin Entertainment
Levantine Films
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$25,000,000 (estimated)
$169,607,287
Dec 25, 2016
$235,957,472

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 7 minutes
Dolby Digital

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“Hidden Figures” Is a Subtle and Powerful Work of Counter-History

The basic virtue of “Hidden Figures” (which opens on December 25th), and it’s a formidable one, is to proclaim with a clarion vibrancy that, were it not for the devoted, unique, and indispensable efforts of three black women scientists, the United States might not have successfully sent people into space or to the moon and back. The movie is set mainly in 1961 and 1962, in Virginia, where a key NASA research center was (and is) based, and the movie is aptly and thoroughly derisive toward the discriminatory laws and practices that prevailed at the time.

The insults and indignities that black residents of Virginia, and black employees of NASA , unremittingly endured are integral to the drama. Those segregationist rules and norms—and the personal attitudes and actions that sustained them—are unfolded with a clear, forceful, analytical, and unstinting specificity. The efforts of black Virginians to cope with relentless ambient racism and, where possible, to point it out, resist it, overcome it, and even defeat it are the focus of the drama. “Hidden Figures” is a film of calm and bright rage at the way things were—an exemplary reproach to the very notion of political nostalgia. It depicts repugnant attitudes and practices of white supremacy that poisoned earlier generations’ achievements and that are inseparable from those achievements.

“Hidden Figures” is a subtle and powerful work of counter-history, or, rather, of a finally and long-deferred accurate history, that fills in the general outlines of these women’s roles in the space program. Its redress of the record begins in West Virginia in 1926, where the sixth-grade math prodigy Katherine Coleman is given a scholarship to a school that one of her teachers refers to as the only one in the region for black children that goes beyond the eighth grade. She quickly displays her genius there—but the school’s narrow horizons suggests the sharply limited opportunities for black people over all.

The nature of those limits is indicated in the very next scene, which cuts ahead to a lonely road in Virginia in 1961. There, a car is stalled, its hood open. Katherine is there with her two other African-American friends and colleagues. She’s sitting pensively in the passenger seat; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is beneath the engine, trying to fix it; and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) is standing impatiently beside the car. A police cruiser approaches. They tense up; Dorothy says, “No crime in a broken-down car,” and Mary responds, “No crime being Negro, neither.” Their fearful interaction with the officer—a white man, of course, with a billy club in hand and a condescending bearing—is resolved with a comedic moment brought about by the women’s deferential irony. What emerges, however, is nothing less than an instance in a reign of terror.

Dorothy is the manager and de-facto supervisor of a group of “computers”—about thirty black women, all skilled mathematicians—that includes Katherine and Mary. Dorothy is awaiting a formal promotion to supervisor, but a talk with a senior administrator makes clear that it’s not to be; the clear but unspoken reason is her race. (Tellingly, Dorothy addresses that official, played by Kirsten Dunst, as “Mrs. Mitchell,” who, in turn, calls her by her first name.) Mary, endowed with engineering skill, is summoned to a team led by an engineer named Zielinski (Olek Krupa), a Polish-Jewish émigré who escaped the Holocaust and who encourages her to seek formal certification as an engineer. To do so, Mary will have to take additional classes—but the only school that offers them is a segregated one, whites-only, from which she’s barred.

When NASA astronauts ceremoniously arrive at the research center, the black women “computers” are forced to stand together as a separate group, conspicuously divided from the other scientists. (Only John Glenn, played by Glen Powell, greets them, and does so warmly, shaking their hands and lingering to chat with them about their work.)

As for Katherine—now Katherine Goble, the widowed mother of three young girls—she’s plucked from the pool of mathematicians to join the main research group, headed by Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). There, she’s the only black person and the only woman (other than the secretary, played by Kimberly Quinn). She once again rapidly displays her mathematical genius, but not before being taken for the department custodian; forced to drink from a coffeepot labelled “colored”; treated dismissively by the lead researcher, Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons); and compelled to walk a half-mile to her former office in order to use the “colored ladies’ room.” (Moreover, the contrast between that depleted and dilapidated facility and the well-appointed and welcoming white-women’s bathroom proves the meaning of “separate but unequal.”)

Each of the three women has a particular conflict to confront, a particular focus in the struggle for equality. Mary’s struggle takes place in a public forum: she petitions a Virginia state court for permission to take the needed night classes in a segregated school. She’s not represented by a lawyer, and speaks on her own behalf; but, rather than making her case in open court, she makes a personal plea to the judge that’s as much about him and his outlook as it is about her, and her work and its usefulness. What her plea isn’t about is law, rights, or justice.

The omission is no accident; it’s set up by dramatic contrast with the angry insistence of Mary’s husband, Levi (Aldis Hodge), a civil-rights activist, that she not bother pursuing a job as an engineer: “You can’t apply for freedom. . . . It’s got to be demanded, taken.” Mary says that there’s “more than one way” to get opportunities, but the deck of this debate is stacked by the terms in which Levi couches it, saying that there’s no such thing as a woman engineer—at least, not a black one—and blaming her for not being home often enough to take proper care of their children.

Dorothy’s pursuit of a formal promotion to supervisor also takes place against the backdrop of the civil-rights movement. She learns that her entire department of human “computers” will soon be replaced by an electronic computer—an enormous I.B.M. mainframe that’s being installed. A gifted technician, Dorothy seeks out a book from the local library (a segregated library from which she’s thrown out), in which she’ll learn the programming language Fortran; she soon becomes NASA ’s resident expert. On that trip to the library, in the company of her two sons on the cusp of adolescence, they witness a protest by civil-rights activists chanting “segregation must go” and see police officers, with police dogs, approaching the protesters. Dorothy and her sons pause and look, until she tells them to “pay attention that we’re not part of that trouble.” But, sitting in the back of the bus with them, she emphasizes that “separate and equal aren’t the same thing,” and adds, “If you act right, you are right.”

Katherine, too, fights for her dignity and for opportunities at work. Her calculations very soon prove indispensable to the effort to put the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, into outer space. (The scene in which she displays her calculations to the entire office of scientists features a small but brilliant stroke of film editing, which suggests that she envisioned the effect of that bold step before she took it.) She’s fighting prejudice against blacks, against women (none has ever been admitted to a Pentagon briefing, where she can get the information she needs for her analyses), and against bureaucracy itself. Paul, who has been the department’s resident genius, and to whom she reports, is resentful of his subordinate—a black woman, for good measure—outshining him in mathematical talent and analytical insight.

Eventually, upbraided by the head of the department, Al, in the presence of the entire staff, Katherine explodes with rage, setting forth the full litany of indignities to which she’s subjected because of her skin color, before storming out. But this sublimely righteous outburst is posed on a solid meritocratic basis. Katherine isn’t the only black woman to have worked in the main research department under Al; there has been a veritable parade of black women “computers” stationed in that department, and each has been found wanting and has been sent back to the pool. As a result, none has effected any change in the status of black employees or of women at NASA . Katherine’s outburst is effective because Katherine, unlike her predecessors, is indispensable. Taking her claims to heart, Al plays a heroic role, championing Katherine’s work and treating her with due respect—but his heroism is a conditional and practical one, spurred by his single-minded devotion to the space program.

In “Hidden Figures,” the civil-rights movement isn’t just a barely sketched backdrop; it’s in virtual competition with the efforts in personal advancement and achievement heroically made by the three women at the center of the film. In the movie, the three women never speak directly of civil rights. In the warmhearted romance at the center of the movie—Katherine’s relationship with Col. Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali)—the subject never comes up. (Katherine Johnson is now ninety-eight; a title card at the end of the film declares that she and Johnson recently celebrated their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary.) The movie presents three women whose life experiences have been extraordinary; their work, their personal lives, and their struggle for justice are uncompromisingly heroic. What the movie is missing, above all, is their voices.

These women are not in any way submissive or passive. On the contrary, each one speaks up and takes action at great personal risk. (For instance, Dorothy steals a book that the library won't let her borrow and then speaks sharply to the guard who hustles her and her sons out.) The movie's emphasis on individual action and achievement in the face of vast obstacles is both beautiful and salutary, but its near-effacement of collective organization and political activity at a time when they were at their historical apogee—for that matter, its elision of politics as such—narrows the drama and, all the more grievously, the characters at its center.

What the women at the center of “Hidden Figures” lived through in their youth, in the deep age of Jim Crow, and, later, at a time of protest and of legal change, remains unspoken; their wisdom and insight remain unexpressed. For all the emotional power and historical redress of the movie—above all, in the simple recognition of the centrality of its three protagonists to the modern world—it pushes to the fore a moderation, based solely on personal accomplishment, in pursuit of justice. This is different from the civil-rights goal of a universal equality based on humanity alone, extended to the ordinary as well as to the exceptional. This is, by no means, a complaint about the real-life people on whom the movie is based; it’s purely a matter of aesthetics, a result of decisions by the director and screenwriter, Theodore Melfi, and his co-writer, Allison Schroeder, about how they imagined and developed the characters. (I found myself thinking, by contrast, of recently published stories by the late filmmaker Kathleen Collins , with their incisive observations regarding participants and observers of civil-rights activism.)

Melfi and Schroeder are white; perhaps they conceived the film to be as nonthreatening to white viewers as possible, or perhaps they anticipated that it would be released at a time of promised progress. Instead, it’s being released in a time of resurgent, unabashed racism. The time for protest has returned; for all the inspired celebration of hitherto unrecognized black heroes that “Hidden Figures” offers, and all the retrospective outrage that “Hidden Figures” sparks, I can only imagine the movie as it might have been made, much more amply, imaginatively, and resonantly, linking history and the present tense, by Ava DuVernay or Spike Lee, Julie Dash or Charles Burnett.

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“Fly Me to the Moon” Lacks Mission Control

‘Hidden Figures’ Review: Three Women Make History in Inspirational Space-Race Drama

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Did you know that three female African-American mathematicians, working at NASA in 1962, were instrumental in getting the Mercury program into orbit and winning the U.S. space race against the Soviets? Me neither. That’s why Hidden Figures is such an instructive and wildly entertaining eye-opener. There’s nothing particularly innovative about the filmmaking – director Theodore Melfi ( St. Vincent ) mostly sticks to the record in the script he wrote with Allison Schroeder from the nonfiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly. But it’s the smart move. This is a story that doesn’t need frills. It simply needs telling, and the fact it gets three dynamite actresses to tell it does poetic justice to both these women and the Civil Rights movement at large.

Taraji P. Henson excels as Katherine Johnson, a math prodigy who extraordinary talent brought her to the NASA facility in Langley, Virginia in 1961. Now 98, Ms. Johnson has lived to see a research facility named after her. Things were far from that open-minded, however, when she and her colleagues, Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer, killer good), hit segregated Virginia to work on the space program. Known as “colored computers” – the latter word being the organization’s term for employees who did low-level calculations – these women soon made their mark against daunting odds. In an early scene, the car-pooling trio are pulled over by a white cop who finds it hard to belief that they work at NASA or even that Dorothy is capable of fixing a Chevy Impala herself.

Katherine is first to be promoted to a job with the Space Task Group, where manager Al Harrison (Kevin Costner, getting everything right) sees her talent – even if he clearly favors her peer Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons, nailing the casual racism of the period). Still, it’s Harrison who takes action when he realizes she has to walk half a mile to get to a “Colored Ladies Room.” “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color,” he says, tearing down the restroom-segregation sign in a scene that lets Costner spit out the words with spirited authority.

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Mary has to go to court for permission to take night courses needed merely to apply for an open job in engineering. Monáe is terrific in the role, showing here and in Moonlight that she has the right stuff to launch an acting career to match her success in music. Best of all is Spencer, an Oscar winner for The Help, who is funny, fierce and quietly devastating at showing the punishing increments it takes for Dorothy to inch up the NASA ladder. Her white supervisor, Mrs. Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst), refuses to give her a supervisor title even though she’s already doing the job. Spencer delivers a priceless putdown that pays gutsy respect to these boundary-breaking pioneers.

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The drama finds little time for the personal lives of its protagonists, though the widowed Katherine is allowed a romance with a National Guard officer, played with humor and heart by Mahershala Ali. The emphasis here is watching these remarkable women at work. Dorothy sees the future in the new IBM machines being tested to speed up the space program, and takes appropriate action. Mary tells a judge that ordering desegregation of the all-white school she needs to study at would make him a pioneer. Katherine faces the toughest obstacles, working against the NASA rule of denying security clearances to female employees. But even astronaut John Glenn ( Glen Powell ) dubs Katherine “the smart one.” The story may be corny at times, even simplistic, but that doesn’t stop you from wanting to stand up and cheer. Lots of movies are labeled as “inspirational” – Hidden Figures truly earns the right to the term.

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What Is Cinema?

You Can Feel Good About Enjoying Hidden Figures

Feel-good has a bad rap, and not entirely unfairly. Many movies made in that genre—pandering, problematic treacle like The Blind Side, bizarre movies about Jennifer Garner finding a plant baby in her backyard —are often pretty awful, syrupy with a manufactured, chemical aftertaste. So I went into Hidden Figures —a based-on-a-true-story feel-gooder about three black women working at N.A.S.A. during the space race—with some trepidation. Not because the subject matter didn’t interest me, but because I was sure a movie like this, all bright-hued and Oscar-ready, would handle that fascinating subject with clumsy cliché .

But I was wrong to be so pessimistic—and, sure, snobby—as Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi with a script by Melfi and Allison Schroeder, turns out to be a genuinely uplifting delight, a piquant and pretty movie about three determined women. They’re played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and, in her second stand-out performance of 2016, Janelle Monáe. They have a warm, lived-in chemistry together, anchoring the film with smarts and sensibility, keeping the proceedings from getting too soft or mushy. Befitting of its story—about mathematicians Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn, and engineer Mary Jackson— Hidden Figures has a dextrous wit to it. It’s a middle-of-the-road kind of movie, but the righteousness of its story, emboldened by the nimble script and performances, prevent it from being truly square.

Henson plays Johnson, a math prodigy who works in a pool of human computers, all of them black women, crunching numbers in the lead-up to N.A.S.A.’s first manned space mission. Johnson eventually gets plucked out of the pool and placed on a tough, high-level manager’s team, proving invaluable in calculating launch and orbit trajectories. The math and physics are complicated stuff that Melfi sorta glides over, but that’s O.K. We still get the sense of urgency and accomplishment, all the more hard-won by the myriad indignities and cruelties that Katherine is subjected to daily. Henson carries the film’s weight well, giving Katherine a bearing that’s both weary and optimistic, confident in her potential but unsure that the realities of her world will let that potential be realized. Fortunately, it was, though perhaps never with the appreciation it deserved.

Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn face similar obstacles. Mary is fighting to be allowed to attend night classes at a whites-only school so she can earn an extra degree and land her dream engineering job. Monáe gets a terrific scene when Mary has her day in court—it’s quieter and more intimate than one might expect, but it gives Monáe a chance to show us that she can speechify with the best of them. Spencer—playing Dorothy, who is working to prevent her and her staff’s obsolescence by teaching herself how to use N.A.S.A.’s giant new computer—does something more familiar, but Hidden Figures is a strong vehicle for those talents. She also squares off nicely, if gently, with Kirsten Dunst’s cool and imperious manager—she’s not a racist caricature, but rather a more nuanced example of how white supremacy manifested, and does still manifest, in otherwise “decent” people and institutions.

Henson does most of her scenes with a cadre of men, including a great Kevin Costner as Katherine’s stern but compassionate boss, and Jim Parsons as a jealous former favorite child of the team. And she has some sweet scenes of romance with Mahershala Ali, an actor finishing out a great year with this charming, easygoing turn. He doesn’t do anything flashy; he’s just nice to watch. As is true of the rest of the film.

But that niceness shouldn’t downplay the triumph and excitement of its story. Watching these three women flourish is thrilling, a heartening testament to their courage and intellect. But Hidden Figures is careful not to put the onus of transcending oppression on those who are being oppressed. It revels in its heroes’ successes, but not in a condescending, “see, you can beat racism if you just ingratiate yourself to enough white people” sort of way. There’s a frustration animate in Hidden Figures, one that doesn’t let Dunst’s character off the hook even if she’s polite to Dorothy by the end. This isn’t a white-people-learning-lessons movie—it’s about the amazing things three black women did within a system that was, and still is, rigged against them.

In that way, Hidden Figures feels entirely appropriate for this moment, something of a ray of hope in dark times. I suppose from one angle that sense of hope could be seen as false, something crassly produced to provide an empty kind of comfort. But I don’t think the film merits that cynicism. The movie is earnest and straightforward, but it’s not guileless. And it has genuine art to it, especially in Mandy Walker’s lovely cinematography. This is a movie made with care, not a sloppy, slapdash pile of corny sentiment. It’s a feel-good movie that actually, well, feels good.

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Chief critic.

Taraji P. Henson Leaves Cookie Lyon Far Behind in Hidden Figures

Review: 'Hidden Figures' performances, other elements add up

It takes the combined power of Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe to make math a joy like it never was in high school.

There are numbers and geometric shapes aplenty a plenty in the engaging and feel-good period drama Hidden Figures (***½ out of four; rated PG; in theaters Friday) but also a wealth of excellent performances and a variety of important stories.

There’s a civil-rights battle revolving around three 1960s NASA mathematicians having to prove their worth in an era of overwhelming racial and gender inequality, plus a Space Race thriller as America tries to compete with the Soviets by blasting someone into the cosmos ASAP. And for the most part, director Theodore Melfi ( St. Vincent ) and Allison Schroeder ’s have written a screenplay based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book that weaves them together well and creates some needed third-act tension.

Women of 'Hidden Figures' stand together as one

The only downside is that we don’t get enough of the three main actresses together. because It's those moments where their characters are driving home from work or gabbing at a church function when Hidden Figures really sparkles.

Henson stars as Katherine Goble Johnson, a child math prodigy whose genius goes unnoticed at the Langley Science Center until she ends up in the NASA science group tasked with getting John Glenn (Glen Powell) and other astronauts to and from space safely. She’s stuck dealing with unfriendly nerdy white guys such as Jim Parsons’ condescending Paul Stafford. — though However, head honcho Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) definitely sees her potential.

Katherine’s friends have their own obstacles to greatness. Young Mary Jackson (Monáe) is respected by the major-league scientist types at NASA, though she is forced to petition the state of Virginia just to be able to take classes at an all-white school as the next step to becoming an engineer. And Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer) is the elder stateswoman of their group who is wholly tired of having a supervisor’s responsibilities but not the salary.

Spencer is consistently solid as usual, and Henson gives Katherine a shy demure nature yet also a true fire when she’s had enough with the prejudiced establishment. Costner adds to his long list of gruff but goodhearted men’s men, while the film could have used more of Powell, impressive in limited action as the astronaut whose 1962 orbits grabbed the nation’s attention.

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The film's big breakout is Monáe, the Grammy-winning musician who impressed in a small role in Moonlight but showcases a wealth of talent as the youngest and most opinionated of the three main women. Mary is both genius and social activist, and her personality reflects a generation's aggressive movement toward real change in the ‘60s.

The situations of racism and unequal pay are very timely: Katherine and her friends garner suspicious police attention when they have car trouble, Dorothy and her children are kicked out of a library pretty much for being black, and Dorothy is constantly at odds about her financial situation with her boss (Kirsten Dunst). Helping lift the overall mood and the movie's momentum are Pharrell Williams' original songs. His catchy tune Runnin' accompanies Katherine having to hoof it across campus just to go to the bathroom.

Adding social issues to its many inspirational themes, Hidden Figures equals one satisfying slice of history that'll entertain adults as well as kids looking to the stars.

Hidden Figures

Three and a half stars

2 hours, 7 minutes

Plot: Three mathematicians (Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe) overcome racial and gender inequality to help America during the Space Race.

Director: Theodore Melfi

Upside: The film utilizes a strong cast as well as heady themes of civil rights.

Downside: The space drama sometimes takes the focus off the three stars' magnetic chemistry.

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Alien: romulus international trailer confirms return of deadly xenomorph detail, michael keaton & winona ryder’s beetlejuice 2 story pays off tim burton's 35-year-old horror spinoff show, hidden figures is the rare true story-based historical drama that succeeds at being as inspirational and feel-good as it aspires to be..

It's the early 1960s and the United States is in the heat of a race with the Soviet Union to be the first to break new ground in the final frontier: space. Mathematicians Katherine Coleman (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) are all black women working in the segregated West Area Computers division at the NASA Research Center in Langley when one day, Katherine is unexpectedly recruited to serve as a (human) computer for the Space Task Group that is concentrating on getting a man into orbit around the Earth - with gruff, but focused and goal-oriented, director Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) leading the charge.

Katherine, who has proven to be a mathematical prodigy since she was a child, struggles to keep up with the intense demands place upon her, largely because of the racist treatment that she must deal with - something that also holds true for both Dorothy and Mary, in their own efforts to work their way up the ladder at NASA. However, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the Soviets are pulling ahead in the space race, Harrison and the other bosses at NASA are faced with the reality: either they will all get there together, as equals, or not at all.

Octavia Spencer as Dorothy in church in Hidden Figures.

Based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly and adapted for the screen by co-writers Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi (with the latter also directing), Hidden Figures explores a largely unknown aspect of NASA history that - in an example of art imitating life - has taken longer than it should have to get its fair due, following the release of several movies and TV series about the 1960s Space Race. Nevertheless, that story certainly benefits from being told by strong talent on both sides of the camera, with Melfi applying the same warm and humane touch here that he brought to his breakout comedy/drama effort, St. Vincent . As such, Hidden Figures is the rare true story-based historical drama that succeeds at being as inspirational and feel-good as it aspires to be.

Hidden Figures ' three leads - Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer, Oscar-nominee Taraji P. Henson and award-winning musician/actor Janelle Monáe - further elevate the film with their respective performances as a trio of equally smart, but very different women making their way in a time and place that is openly segregated in more ways than one. All three of Hidden Figure 's stars deliver naturalistic and relatable performances too, making their characters' arcs and how they respond to the challenges that they are presented with, all the more satisfying for it. The script by Schroeder and Melfi is also thoughtful in how its frames its protagonists' experiences by juxtaposing them with major events of its historical setting in the background, creating an effective thematic throughline about how systematic prejudice only impedes the world's progress on multiple fronts, social and scientific alike.

Mary (Janelle Monae) stands with a crowd to watch a report on a television in a store window in Hidden Figures

The historical setting of Hidden Figures itself is brought to life through handsome visuals captured by Melfi and his cinematographer Mandy Walker ( Australia , Jane Got a Gun ), that are by and large seamlessly blended with archival footage from the decade, in combination with some of the best '60s costume designs - from the dress shirts worn by the men of NASA to the eye-catching dresses worn by the women - by Renee Ehrlich Kalfus this side of Mad Men . Further helping to establish a strong sense of time and place in Hidden Figures is the film's use of music, ranging from classic pop tunes to original music (including the catchy song "Runnin'" by Pharrell Williams) that matches the popular styles and trends of the time period. This more general aesthetic of historical accuracy with a touch of modernism, is reflective of how Hidden Figures as a whole paints life in the 1960s and quietly leaves it to moviegoers to draw parallels to present-day events (or not) as they will.

Similarly, Hidden Figures portrays its white supporting characters not as two-dimensional antagonists that are easy to disassociate with (for those watching the film), but as fully-developed individuals who have little reason to question or acknowledge their segregated way of life, unless they are confronted about it. Jim Parsons and Kirsten Dunst in turn deliver multifaceted performances here as the NASA Space Task Group's head engineer Paul Stafford and Dorothy's superior Vivian Mitchell, respectively; both of them characters in positions of authority who quietly undergo personal journeys of their own, over the course of the film. Meanwhile, Kevin Costner once again proves to be a strong fit for an objective-driven, no-nonsense, leader type in the 1960s (after his work in JFK and Thirteen Days ) with his turn as the NASA Space Task Group's director, Al Harrison.

Glen Powell as John Glenn meets the women of Hidden Figures

The supporting cast for Hidden Figures also includes a handful of recognizable character actors in less essential, but nonetheless relevant and enjoyable performances. While such actors as Glen Powell ( Everybody Wants Some!! ) and Aldis Hodge ( Straight Outta Compton ) are noteworthy for their appearances as the iconic (and charismatic) astronaut John Glenn and Mary Jackson's husband, Levi, the standout in Hidden Figures ' larger ensemble is easily Mahershala Ali as military man Jim Johnson. The romantic subplot involving Jim and Katherine is somewhat under-developed in the greater scheme of the movie, but thanks to Ali's charming performance and his easy-going screen chemistry with Henson, the relationship that forms between the two is convincing nonetheless.

Hidden Figures doesn't stray far from the tried-and-true Hollywood formula for how to transform a true story into an uplifting filmgoing experience - but thanks to its strong execution (acting and direction alike), it succeeds at turning its real-world subject matter into an equally captivating and entertaining story to watch unfold on the big screen. As such, Hidden Figures provides a welcome alternative to some of the more emotionally and thematically dark drama offerings of the ongoing movie awards season, as well as a nice and timely reminder for everyone: we're all in this (space) race together.

Hidden Figures is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 127 minutes long and is Rated PG for thematic elements and some language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

Hidden Figures

Based on the lives of Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, Hidden Figures tells the untold stories of the three African-American mathematicians and their work at NASA during the Space Race of the 1960s. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe star as Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson respectively, with a further cast that includes Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, and Mahershala Ali.

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Movie Review: Hidden Figures (2016)

Vincent Gaine
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--> February 25, 2017

Mathematics and mathematicians may not appear to be the most dramatic material. Filmmakers seem aware of this potential failing, and thus produce subtle, nuanced and often very impressive films based around this topic, which end up being award contenders. Such is the case with Hidden Figures , for in the tradition of (Oscar winners) “Good Will Hunting” and “A Beautiful Mind,” Theodore Melfi’s tale of African American women working at NASA in the 1960s is a heartwarming story of oppressed people who triumph over adversity through the power of numbers, who go from being hidden figures to pioneering leaders.

Whereas the other films mentioned feature white men dealing with the adversity of social class and mental illness, Hidden Figures features the double whammy of race and gender, as the three protagonists Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson, “ Larry Crowne ”), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer, “ Allegiant ”) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe, “ Moonlight ”) repeatedly encounter prejudices against both women and black people. All three work in the NASA space program, as “computers,” the name given to staff that perform manual calculations for the engineering and flight sections. Dorothy does the work of a supervisor, but when she pursues actual promotion, her superior Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst, “ Midnight Special ”) repeatedly denies her. Mary investigates a transfer to the engineering section, but needs college courses that are only taught at a “whites only” school. And math prodigy Katherine, whose gift is displayed in a pre-title sequence, is assigned the role of computer for the Space Task Force under Al Harrison (Kevin Costner, “ Man of Steel ”), where she must check the calculations of her white male colleagues, including Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons, “The Big Bang Theory” TV series), who assume they naturally know better.

Such a set-up could run the risk of being a tedious diatribe against prejudice, especially as there are two major societal attitudes present here. Melfi and co-screenwriter Allison Schroeder avoid this pitfall by presenting the prejudices that the women encounter as deeply institutionalized. Rather than thugs or outright aggression, as seen in “ A United Kingdom ” and “ Loving ,” the depiction of racism in Hidden Figures is subtle but pervasive. A police officer is suspicious of three black women travelling alone; Dorothy and her children are expelled from the public library for visiting the white section; Katherine must run across the NASA complex to find a “colored bathroom” and her colleagues object to her using the same coffee urn as them. The viewer may well find themselves angered by these historical instances of segregation, but tellingly the characters themselves take it in their stride. Dorothy takes the library book that she requires, arguing (privately) that her tax dollars paid for it. Mary petitions the court to allow her to take the requisite courses, and Katherine declares the difficulties of her working conditions in one of the film’s few grandstanding moments.

For the most part, Melfi opts for a reserved and often lightly humorous touch. This is partly due to the absurdity of the institutionalized racism and sexism, and also down to the warmth and affection the film holds for its characters and that they have for each other. The African American community that Dorothy, Mary and Katherine belong to includes their families and a supportive church congregation, and a potential suitor for the widowed Katherine in the form of Colonel Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali, “ The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 ”). The film’s careful depiction of communal scenes, such as church luncheons and gatherings around TV sets to watch President Kennedy’s speeches or, crucially, space launches, illustrates the broader social context of the three protagonists, their home lives as well as their work lives, and the ways in which one influences the other. The three women are shown to be attentive mothers and loving wives, and the minor presence of Mary and Dorothy’s husbands helps to emphasize the importance of these women’s stories and their relationships with each other.

Scenes featuring the protagonists are charming and amusing in terms of the banter between the three women, and have some incongruous images such as the well-dressed Dorothy inspecting the underside of a car. Perhaps the very incongruity of this image is indicative of this reviewer’s own prejudice, as I am used to seeing men in overalls performing this task. Similarly, there is a scene when a white character in shirt and tie (literally) takes a crowbar to a sign of segregation, an image more commonly associated with black characters in more working class attire. So the film not only challenges the prejudices of the time, but also those of the viewer as, if we are frank and honest, prejudice and oppression due to gender and race remain prevalent and pervasive even today.

The greatest strength of Hidden Figures is that the three heroines (in both senses of the word) make their challenge through the strength and application of their intelligence and knowledge. Katherine proves herself more than the equal of her male counterparts, performing complex equations both on paper and, in two bravura sequences, chalkboards that has the surrounding men gazing in fascination. Mary may take inspiration from Karl Zielinski (Olek Krupa, “ Burn After Reading ”), a Polish Jew in the engineering team, but she acquits herself admirably in court and draws attention to the significance of those who are the first to break social barriers. Most subtly and impressively, Dorothy teaches herself computing language as NASA brings in an enormous IBM to perform the necessary calculations, which proves beyond the skills of the existing team.

The transition from human to technological computing illustrates the march of history, which these women also represent as they force change and make progress, both for themselves, their gender and their race. The recognition that they receive from white male co-workers, including Harrison and astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell, “ The Expendables 3 ”), is not only well-deserved but triumphant and may prompt the viewer to applaud and punch the air, while the anxious watching of space missions at Mission Control is nerve-wrackingly reminiscent of “Apollo 13.” The poster for Hidden Figures echoes that of “The Right Stuff,” and for storytelling that interweaves the personal and the historical, creates an evocative sense of time and place and features winning performances from all concerned, Melfi’s film most certainly offers stuff that is right.

Tagged: engineer , novel adaptation , space , true story , women

Dr. Vincent M. Gaine is a film and television researcher. His first book, Existentialism and Social Engagement in the Films of Michael Mann was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2011. His work on film and media has been published in Cinema Journal and The Journal of Technology , Theology and Religion , as well as edited collections including The 21st Century Superhero and The Directory of World Cinema .

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DVD & Streaming

Hidden Figures

Content caution.

In Theaters

January 6, 2017
Taraji P. Henson as Katherine G. Johnson; Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan; Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson; Kevin Costner as Al Harrison; Kirsten Dunst as Vivian Mitchell; Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford; Mahershala Ali as Col. Jim Johnson; Aldis Hodge as Levi Jackson; Glen Powell as John Glenn

Home Release Date

April 11, 2017
Theodore Melfi

Distributor

20th Century Fox

Movie Review

Rockets just don’t get to the moon by themselves. No, it takes men! Men to build them, men to fly them, men to plot their complicated trajectories! White men! Men with ties , preferably skinny ones! (The ties, not the men.)

Or so the thinking went back in 1961, back when America’s Mercury space program was just getting off the ground.

Sure, there were folks besides men hard at work within the bowels of NASA’s brain trust, located at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. And when the car carrying three NASA employees breaks down along the side of the road—black, female employees—they set right the Virginia policeman who stops to help them.

“I had no idea they hired …”

“There are quite a few women working in the space program,” says Dorothy Vaughan, giving him an ever-so-veiled stink eye.

But even though NASA seems to be building a new, rocket-powered future, its nuts-and-bolts operations are still a product of 1961. Langley’s still in a Southern, segregated state. Dorothy and her fellow black, female carpoolers, Mary Jackson and Katherine Goble, work at Langley’s West Campus, where the “colored people” are kept. They and others do important work: They’re the computers before the computer age, women who calculate and crunch the numbers that are so critical to the space program’s future. But these computers are kept apart from the rest. They have their own bathrooms, their own cafeterias, their own coffee machines. Integration is not, it would seem, part of NASA’s future any more than it is Virginia’s.

Sometimes, however, talent and determination have a way of making their own futures. America’s fledgling space program—which is locked in a battle with the U.S.S.R. that its surely losing—can use all the brilliant minds it can find. And some of those minds might just be working out of the West Campus, using the bathrooms labeled “Colored Women Only.”

Positive Elements

We’ve seen all manner of dramas addressing America’s long history of racial inequity, from 2014’s underrated Selma to 2016’s controversial and bloody Birth of a Nation . Hidden Figures tackles the same themes. But these women—whose characters as depicted here are based on three very real NASA employees—don’t take up arms or march in protests. Instead, they fight the status quo within the very system that’s pressing them down, pushing back with their skill, talent and flat-out determination.

Hidden Figures is, perhaps, Katherine’s story most of all. She’s called to work in Langley’s formidable nerve center because of her prodigious talent for math. But even though she can outthink most—if not all—of the men in this NASA think tank, she still finds herself sprinting a half a mile to the West Campus in order to use the designated bathroom and making her own coffee in a pot labeled “Colored.”

As she works through these conditions with grace and spirit, though, things begin to change. People see her work and marvel at it. She presses for recognition and, in slow steps, begins to receive it. It’s gratifying to know that that real Katherine—still living and a spry 98, by the way—was an integral part of NASA until her retirement in 1986, working on everything from the Apollo program to the space shuttle. A building at Langley, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, was named in her honor just last year.

There are others who help these women along the way. Al Harrison, head of the division working to calculate how to get the Mercury astronauts into space, seems almost oblivious to race. His only concern is getting the best minds to work on a common problem. When he learns that Katherine has to run between conferences to simply use the restroom, he integrates the restrooms by pulling down the “colored” sign with a crowbar.

“No more white restrooms,” he says. “No more colored restrooms. Just toilets.”

Elsewhere, scientist Karl Zielinski encourages Mary to get an engineering degree. When Mary protests that she’s a “negro woman,” he counters, “I’m a Polish Jew whose parents died in a Nazi prison camp. I think we can say we are living the impossible.”

John Glenn, one of Mercury’s astronauts, goes out of his way to meet and thank Katherine, Mary, Dorothy and other minority “computers” for their work. And when a real, automated computer spits out contradictory information right before a launch, Glenn demands that Katherine check those numbers personally—trusting her and only her to come up with the right figures. “It’s a little hard to trust something you can’t look in the eyes,” he explains.

We should also note that Dorothy and Katherine are parents as well, with Katherine raising three children on her own after her husband’s death. Both clearly care a great deal for their kids, even if they’re not home as often as they’d like to be.

Spiritual Elements

Christianity means something to the three women at the center of this story. All three go to the same church, and the pastor praises their work from the pulpit. Katherine and her family say a blessing before dinner. And when she tells her kids that she misses their father “as much as anyone,” they tell her they know he’s “with the angels.”

Good news is sometimes punctuated with a quick praise to the Almighty. When Mary gets a plum assignment, for instance, she grabs the assignment sheet and says, “Thank you, Jesus!” When a police officer volunteers to escort them to work, Mary accepts with alacrity. The fact that three black women are “chasing” a policeman through rural Virginia, she says, is a “God-ordained miracle.”

When Mr. Harrison calls for renewed dedication from the scientists in his charge, he says, “Let’s have an amen , d–mit.”

Sexual Content

Widowed Katherine attracts the notice of a suitor, Col. Jim Johnson. The two begin having dinner together at Katherine’s house. One night while they do dishes, Jim announces that it’s about time they kissed. They do, fairly passionately. Later, at another family dinner, Jim proposes. In a postscript to the film, we learn they’ve been married for 56 years.

Mary is also married, and she and her husband kiss (with Mary protesting to hubby Levi that he’s going to make her late for class if they’re not careful). That doesn’t keep her from eyeing Mercury’s astronauts when they visit Langley. “How can you possibly ogle these white men?” Katherine scolds. Mary tells her that she has every right to look.

Someone quips about how learning to dance can lead to winning a man’s affection.

Violent Content

We see old footage of rockets blowing up, and we hear news reports of a bomb being thrown into a freedom bus. Something goes wrong during a critical space mission, and there’s some concern the manned capsule will burn up on re-entry.

Al Harrison violently rips off a bathroom sign, sending it crashing to the ground. In a test, heat shields from a dummy space capsule fly off, banging into a shatter-proof window.

Crude or Profane Language

Nearly 15 uses of “d–n.” “H—” is also uttered about half a dozen times, and God’s and Jesus’ name are both misused—the latter emphatically—once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Dorothy, Mary and Katherine hang out at Dorothy’s house one afternoon, and Dorothy serves up an alcoholic beverage of some sort. Mary says she could use a good drink; she enjoys it a bit too much. She says she feels as good as she’s ever been, and Dorothy counters, “You’re as drunk as you’ve ever been.”

Other Negative Elements

Dorothy goes to the library to check out a book or two on computer programming—the “future,” as she says. But when she shows up, she’s told that those books aren’t in “her” section (meaning, of course, the books for blacks). But later on the bus (where she and her two accompanying children are sitting, of course, in the back), she pulls out a book she apparently took from the library without checking it out. When her son calls her on it, she rationalizes, “Son, I pay taxes. And taxes paid for everything in that library. You can’t take something you’ve already paid for.”

We see Katherine’s ankles and skirt underneath a bathroom stall as she does work there. When Al rips down the bathroom sign, he says, “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color.”

And, obviously, racism—both overt and covert—is an essential elements of the storyline.

When Mary begins talking about her ambitions of becoming an engineer, her husband, Levi, thinks she’s delusional.

“Freedom is never granted to the oppressed,” he blusters. “It’s got to be demanded. Taken.”

“There’s more than one way to achieve something,” she says.

And, sometimes, indeed there is.

Hidden Figures is an inspirational exercise in understated activism. The women here do not ignore the racism that colors their lives. But they resist it not with violence or protest but with skill and persistence. Yes, they ask for the rights that are rightfully theirs. But they do so with a sense of grace, humility and patience. They don’t trust the system. But they find away to work within it to achieve their goals. And they change a lot of minds along the way.

One afternoon, Dorothy and her supervisor, Mrs. Mitchell, run into each other in the bathroom—a meeting that would’ve been impossible before Al Harrison ripped down that sign.

“You know, Dorothy,” Mrs. Mitchell says, “Despite what you think, I have nothing against y’all.”

“I know,” Dorothy says with a gentle smile. “I know you probably believe that.” And she walks out.

It’s a moment of searing self-realization, perhaps. For when the two meet again, Mrs. Mitchell hands her a new assignment: an overdue promotion that Dorothy had been fighting for throughout the movie.

Dorothy’s surprised, but keeps it under wraps. “Thank you for the information, Mrs. Mitchell,” she says.

“You’re quite welcome … Mrs. Vaughn.”

It’s a beautifully understated sign of respect, that switch from Dorothy to Mrs. Vaughn , more important than the promotion itself. It’s a measure of newfound equality. And in a way, for all its subtlety, it feels like the movie’s greatest moment of triumph.

Hidden Figures inspires as it entertains. It acknowledges racial divisions while insisting that there’s more than one way to fix them. And while it can be crass, its heart is good.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Hidden Figures (United States, 2016)

Hidden Figures is an old-fashioned inspirational tale about the undertrodden overcoming. Based on real people, real times, and real events, the film uses the never-say-die attitudes of three women to provide a window into the racism and sexism that permeated all facets of American culture during the middle of the 20th century. Although “softer” than many other recent movies about this subject (the PG rating creates stringent limits on how edgy things can get), Hidden Figures is nevertheless able to illustrate the exclusivity of the white male corporate power base and show how three unlikely black women were able to punch through the envelope.

Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary are three best friends who work as “computors” in NASA’s pre-electronic era. The racially segregated computors are women who perform the menial computations that allow the male engineers and scientists to plot orbits and determine safety margins for rocket launches. Katherine and Mary are selected for assignments to work directly with the men while Dorothy remains behind to run the black computor room, despite lacking the title and pay raise that should go along with her job. Working on a team designing heat shielding for capsules, Mary determines that she has an aptitude for engineering and, despite obstacles based on both her sex and race, she pushes forward with a single-minded determination that requires a court challenge of segregation laws. Meanwhile, Katherine’s skills as a mathematician get her noticed by Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), the director of the Space Task Group, who gives her increasingly important tasks as the Friendship 7 (Glenn’s Earth orbit) mission approaches.

Hidden Figures does what it can to convey the lack of workplace equality without resorting to the use of racial epithets or physical violence, neither of which would be allowed in a PG-rated movie. The film’s most pointed statement is presented with a flair of absurdist comedy as it shows the long, time-consuming trek Katherine must endure any time she needs to use the bathroom since the only lavatory in the laboratory is a “whites only” facility. So, rain or shine, she must go all the way to the computors’ building to find a place where she is allowed to go. Harrison’s reaction when he learns of this is a reminder that some in the 1960s were able to see past skin color.

Historical fudges aside, Hidden Figures provides an example of determination and talent triumphing over an unfair and repressive system - something that, although grounded by the time period in which the story unfolds, has relevance beyond the decade or the century in which it transpires.

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How Accurate Is Hidden Figures?

"Hidden Figures" is one of the most successful studio dramas of the past decade. The story of African American NASA mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson and their contributions to the U.S. space program swept through America like a storm, grossing over $169 million domestically (via Box Office Mojo ), nabbing a rare A+ Cinemascore and riding a wave of pop culture enthusiasm all the way to three Academy Award nominations , including one for Best Picture.

One of the major factors in the movie's enormous success was the fact that it introduced the public to an unsung part of 20th-century history. Millions of Americans were unaware that three Black women had not only carved out a space for themselves at NASA at the height of racial segregation in the U.S. but were actually key players in the arduous struggle to get man to space. The flair and reverence with which "Hidden Figures" presents the achievements of Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson helped make the movie an irresistible crowd-pleaser.

But how much of the history depicted in it is actually true to life? Inevitably, there was some embellishment in the process of adapting the source material, the eponymous non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly. But even so, the protagonists of "Hidden Figures" were really that extraordinary in real life.

The reality of the space program was a lot more collective-based

Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson in office

Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson were, indeed, brilliant mathematicians who made invaluable contributions to the U.S. space program. Via NASA , Vaughan was the first Black supervisor at the advisory committee that would later become NASA and a crucial advocate for the rights of the program's women "computors"; Jackson became the agency's first Black female engineer; and Johnson 's incredible calculation skills played a key part in the planning of Project Mercury and Apollo 11, among other missions. They all belong to the long, storied tradition of female scientists who do not get nearly enough credit for their historical importance.

But, while the women were indeed trailblazers for the crucial contributions they put in at a time of racial and sexual discrimination, the reality of the space program, as described in Shetterly's book, was a lot more collective than the film's bent towards the characters' individual heroics might suggest. Vaughan mastered the IBM 7090 computer as part of a large team as opposed to figuring it all out on her own, and there's no record in the book of Johnson being singled out for any "testing" of her math skills by Pentagon officers. All records indicate that she was simply treated as a peer by her colleagues, no more or less important than any other scientist on hand.

The screenplay takes some artistic liberties

Katherine and her peers gaze upon a chalkboard

Although the overall arc of the space-race plot of "Hidden Figures" is pretty accurate, several liberties were taken. For one thing, as depicted in Shetterly's book, Johnson ( Taraji P. Henson ), Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Jackson ( Janelle Monáe ), although friendly, were not quite BFFs as they are in the film, and did not commute together; in fact, Johnson carpooled with Eunice Smith, another Black mathematician who worked at NASA at the time, according to That Was Not in the Book .

Per the NASA website , the characters of Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst), and Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) are all composites, meant to represent attitudes of the time — and, in Harrison's case, the NASA hierarchy at large — rather than any specific historical figures.

The timeline is also a little off; by 1961, the year the film is set, Johnson had already transferred to the Space Task Group along with the rest of the Flight Research Division, Vaughan was already a supervisor , and Jackson was, by that time, an engineer . Johnson's marriage to Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali) also occurred much earlier.

Finally, the film's climax is significantly exaggerated for impact: John Glenn did request that Johnson manually calculate his orbital trajectory to make sure it was correct, but she did it over several days, not in a few seconds right before the launch; that would have been humanly impossible (via collectSPACE ). And she did not watch the launch from the control room, but from her office, on television.

Racial segregation at NASA looked a bit different

Vivian Mitchell and Dorothy Vaughan at bathroom

Racial segregation was still very much a major problem in the U.S. in 1961, but the specifics in "Hidden Figures" are a bit off. Although the West Area Computing unit of Langley did exist, it was abolished along with all other segregated facilities when the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) became NASA in 1958. At the time the movie is set, NASA and all of its divisions were already integrated.

That didn't mean discrimination no longer existed, of course — especially considering segregation laws were still in place in Virginia at the time. Shetterly's book does mention Mary Jackson's frustration at having to look for a colored bathroom during her time at Langley, and it is true that, up until 1958, the Langley Research Center was heavily segregated despite the significant presence of Black staff. But Katherine Johnson herself never bothered to look for a colored bathroom and just used whichever one was closest. In fact, she has gone on record saying she did not personally feel discriminated against at NASA (via History vs Hollywood ).

Still, Mary Jackson did have to file a petition with the City of Hampton to be able to attend classes at the whites-only Hampton High School, and, even though the process was not as taxing as in the movie — she was granted special permission and did not have to go to court — Jackson often vented about her distress at the absurdity of segregation to her mentor Kazimierz Czarnecki, upon whom the character of Karl Zielinski is based.

The movie has been accused of fabricating white savior moments

Al Harrison destroys the colored bathroom sign

For the most part, the historical liberties in "Hidden Figures" are justified by the movie's mission to serve as an entertaining, family-friendly primer on these women and their importance. Even if NASA was officially integrated by 1961, for instance, segregation still informed the conditions of Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson's lives and the challenges they had to face in their careers. But one fabricated element of "Hidden Figures" did draw heavy criticism: its recourse to the "white savior" trope.

Specifically, a climactic scene — in which fictional Space Task Group head Al Harrison, horrified upon learning the extent of the discrimination faced by Johnson, destroys the "Colored ladies' room" sign with a crowbar and proclaims the end of segregation at NASA — was lambasted by publications such as Vice , which took it to task for "portraying Johnson as being saved by a benevolent white character." After all, Johnson took care of the "bathroom problem" herself, by outright refusing to set foot in the colored restroom; she most certainly didn't wait around until a white superior ended segregation with his own hands.

The scene in which Harrison kindly invites Johnson into the control room during the launch was similarly controversial, not just because that didn't happen, but because, per Vice, it was another example of an "alteration [that] only serves to soothe the conscience of white people." Director and co-writer Theodore Melfi, who is white, defended those scenes, stating "There needs to be white people who do the right thing." Which indeed there were, at NASA and elsewhere — just not exactly those "right things."

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Film Review: ‘Hidden Figures’ Tells an Important but Over-Simplified Story

February 22, 2021 by Grace Wood

The “Hidden Figures” film poster depicts Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer portraying their respective roles as Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, who worked at NASA during the 1960s. “Hidden Figures” grossed for $326 million worldwide. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

“Hidden Figures” (2017) tells the true story of three brilliant Black female mathematicians — Katherine Johnson ( Taraji P. Henson ), Dorothy Vaughan ( Octavia Spencer ) and Mary Jackson ( Janelle Monáe ) — who use their intellect to supersede both segregation and sexism at NAS A and propel the United States in the Space Race that dominated the 1960s. “Hidden Figures” is a telling and motivating movie for anyone to watch in honor of Black History Month .

The film, directed by Theodore Melfi , is loosely based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s novel by the same name. “Hidden Figures” features several other prominent actors in supporting roles, including Kevin Costner as Al Harrison, Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford, Kirsten Dunst as Vivian Mitchell and Mahershala Ali as Colonel Jim Johnson.

While “Hidden Figures” introduces many important themes regarding racial injustice and gender inequality, it is apparent that Melfi’s goal was to tell a heartwarming story rather than a historically accurate one. Due to the creative liberties Melfi takes with the plot of “Hidden Figures,” it is hard to establish what Johnson’s actual experience at NASA was like versus what Melfi thought would make for an inspiring film.

“Hidden Figures” highlights the story of Katherine Johnson, a girl from West Virginia whose teachers identify as a genius from an early age. After graduating from West Virginia State College at 18, Johnson becomes one of the first three Black students selected to study math in a graduate program at West Virginia University .

Johnson goes on to work at the Langley Research Center for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which later became NASA, in Virginia in their West Area Computing Unit , an all-women segregated group who, as human computers, complete intricate mathematical calculations by hand. Here, Johnson works alongside Vaughan and Jackson. While all three women aspire to achieve higher-level positions within NACA, the barrier of racism prohibits them from being promoted.

After recognizing Johnson’s immense talent for analytic geometry, her white supervisor, Mitchell, promotes her to join Al Harrison’s Space Task Group . The group is under immense pressure from the US government to put a man in space.

As the first Black woman to join the Space Task Group, Johnson experiences abject racism and discrimination despite her critical contributions. In the film, her coworkers refuse to share the communal coffeemaker with her, and due to segregation, Johnson must walk over half a mile to use the closest restroom for women of color.

In real life, however, Johnson has been quoted as saying that during her time at NASA, she just used the “whites only” restroom anyway. Additionally, NASA was officially desegregated in 1958 (the film takes place in 1961). While Melfi may have included this part of the story to shed light on the reality of segregation in other areas of the country at the time, the addition of this story line strays from what Johnson actually experienced at NASA.

After successfully calculating the numbers needed to launch the astronaut John Glenn ( Glen Powell ) into space, Johnson is told she will no longer be needed in the Space Task Group. On the day of Glenn’s launch, the IBM computer makes an error only Johnson can solve; Harrison frantically calls her at the eleventh hour, and her last-minute calculations ensure that Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission launches and lands safely. While it is true that Johnson made hasty calculations to help the Friendship 7 get off the ground, in real life, Johnson was not actually invited into the control room to watch the launch like she did in the film.

The end of the film provides a glimpse into what the real Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson went on to accomplish. Johnson made vital calculations for the Apollo 11 and Space Shuttle missions, Vaughan continued to serve as NASA’s first Black supervisor and Jackson became NASA’s first Black woman engineer. In 2015, President Obama awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In terms of subject matter and casting choices, “Hidden Figures” is excellent. The film sheds light on issues the Black community faces that are especially relevant today, including workplace discrimination and the experience of having accomplishments diminished in favor of their white counterparts. Additionally, Henson’s performance is exceptional and punctuates the film with moments of believable conviction and emotion.

The score to this film is upbeat and lively, and it serves the plot well. By blending older tracks from Ray Charles , Miles Davis and The Miracles with fresh additions from Pharrell Williams , Mary J. Blige and Alicia Keys , the music provides timely emotional context to important scenes.

Despite its many successes, “Hidden Figures” still falls short. It feels like Melfi was so dedicated to the feel-good nature of the storyline that some important struggles the main characters faces are quickly introduced and then readily glossed over, which doesn’t allow the audience to fully absorb the gravity of the racism and sexism that women like Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson experienced. A throwaway scene at the beginning of the film alluding to police brutality encapsulates this sentiment.

In some instances, Harrison’s character alludes to a white savior complex . After Harrison confronts Johnson about her long bathroom breaks, she reveals to him the reason she takes so long is because of the distance she has to travel to the women of color’s restroom. This leads Harrison to literally smash down the ‘Colored Ladies Room’ sign in the film, declaring “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color.” However, this scene — along with the scene where Harrison allows Johnson into the control room to watch the Friendship 7 launch — never actually happened in real life. In fact, Al Harrison is not even a real character.

Interestingly, Harrison’s character both diminishes and conflates Katherine Johnson’s experiences as a member of the Space Task Group. Melfi’s attempt to present such a clear-cut narrative, in which the white man creates a racist environment and then alleviates it, takes away from the complicated real-life experiences of Black women at NASA.

While “Hidden Figures” makes meaningful strides by telling an important and historically overlooked story, adhering with increased diligence to the experiences of the women who lived them would’ve made for a better, more well-rounded film.

“Hidden Figures” is available on Amazon Prime Video , Disney+ and Hulu .

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An Olympics Scene Draws Scorn. Did It Really Parody ‘The Last Supper’?

Some church leaders and politicians have condemned the performance from the opening ceremony for mocking Christianity. Art historians are divided.

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A screen depicting a person painted in blue near fruit. Behind is a rainy Paris street with part of the Eiffel Tower and Olympic rings visible.

By Yan Zhuang

A performance during the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony on Friday has drawn criticism from church leaders and conservative politicians for a perceived likeness to Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of a biblical scene in “The Last Supper,” with some calling it a “mockery” of Christianity.

The event’s planners and organizers have denied that the sequence was inspired by “The Last Supper,” or that it intended to mock or offend.

In the performance broadcast during the ceremony, a woman wearing a silver, halo-like headdress stood at the center of a long table, with drag queens posing on either side of her. Later, at the same table, a giant cloche lifted, revealing a man, nearly naked and painted blue, on a dinner plate surrounded by fruit. He broke into a song as, behind him, the drag queens danced.

The tableaux drew condemnation among people who saw the images as a parody of “The Last Supper,” the New Testament scene depicted in da Vinci’s painting by the same name. The French Bishops’ Conference, which represents the country’s Catholic bishops, said in a statement that the opening ceremony included “scenes of mockery and derision of Christianity,” and an influential American Catholic, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota, called it a “gross mockery.”

The performance at the opening ceremony, which took place on and along the Seine on Friday, also prompted a Mississippi-based telecommunications provider, C Spire, to announce that it would pull its advertisements from Olympics broadcasts. Speaker Mike Johnson described the scene as “shocking and insulting to Christian people.”

The opening ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, said at the Games’ daily news conference on Saturday that the event was not meant to “be subversive, or shock people, or mock people.” On Sunday, Anne Descamps, the Paris 2024 spokeswoman, said at the daily news conference, “If people have taken any offense, we are, of course, really, really sorry.”

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Hidden Figures movie review & film summary (2016)
The dialogue between the three women establishes their easy rapport with one another, and introduces their personalities. Vaughan is no-nonsense, Jackson is a wise ass with impeccable comic timing and Johnson is the clever optimist. They are similarly educated, though each has their own skill set the film will explore.
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As K. Austin Collins notes at The Ringer, Hidden Figures "might be one of the few Hollywood movies about the civil rights era to imagine that black lives in the '60s, particularly black women ...
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Directed by Theodore Melfi. Biography, Drama, History. PG. 2h 7m. By A.O. Scott. Dec. 22, 2016. "Hidden Figures" takes us back to 1961, when racial segregation and workplace sexism were widely ...
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Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/27/24 Full Review Nathan V Hidden Figures is a good movie because of its : cinematography, acting , and script. For example when Katherine explained ...
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December 10, 2016 9:01pm. As shiny and bright as the Chevy Bel Air that Octavia Spencer's character drives — and knows how to repair — Hidden Figures is a spunky, upbeat spin on a moment of ...
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Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2024. "Hidden Figures" is a polished Hollywood movie through and through, but the power and importance of its story along with the three central ...
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Film Review: 'Hidden Figures'. Feel-good drama reveals the largely untold way in which race factored into the U.S.-Soviet space race. By Peter Debruge. Photo Courtesy of 20th Century Fox ...
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Dec. 22, 2016 11:35 AM PT. Like the calculating women whose lives it celebrates, "Hidden Figures" knows what it's doing. A Grade-A Hollywood crowd-pleaser that happily celebrates its ...
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Hidden Figures is a movie that is easy to consume, engaging, intelligent and really deserves to be seen. Verdict. ... Hidden Figures Review. 9. Review scoring. amazing.
Hidden Figures (2016)
Hidden Figures: Directed by Theodore Melfi. With Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner. Three female African-American mathematicians play a pivotal role in astronaut John Glenn's launch into orbit. Meanwhile, they also have to deal with racial and gender discrimination at work.
Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures is a nice movie. At its head is a trio of good performances from Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae. But it is in essence a feature-length version of an inspiring social media image macro, or perhaps a Google Doodle.
Hidden Figures Movie Review
Based on the nonfiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly, HIDDEN FIGURES is the true story of three African-American women who worked for NASA in the 1950s and '60s.They served as "human computers," doing complex mathematics and engineering tasks to help launch the manned spaceflight program -- particularly, sending astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) into orbit.
"Hidden Figures" Is a Subtle and Powerful Work of Counter-History
The omission is no accident; it's set up by dramatic contrast with the angry insistence of Mary's husband, Levi (Aldis Hodge), a civil-rights activist, that she not bother pursuing a job as an ...
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'Hidden Figures' is both an inspirational tribute to NASA's female African-American engineers and its trio of actresses, raves Peter Travers.
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MOVIE GRID. Hidden Figures. Three and a half stars. 2 hours, 7 minutes. Plot: Three mathematicians (Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe) overcome racial and gender inequality to ...
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As such, Hidden Figures is the rare true story-based historical drama that succeeds at being as inspirational and feel-good as it aspires to be. Hidden Figures ' three leads - Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer, Oscar-nominee Taraji P. Henson and award-winning musician/actor Janelle Monáe - further elevate the film with their respective performances ...
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The poster for Hidden Figures echoes that of "The Right Stuff," and for storytelling that interweaves the personal and the historical, creates an evocative sense of time and place and features winning performances from all concerned, Melfi's film most certainly offers stuff that is right. Critical Movie Critic Rating:
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Positive Elements. We've seen all manner of dramas addressing America's long history of racial inequity, from 2014's underrated Selma to 2016's controversial and bloody Birth of a Nation.Hidden Figures tackles the same themes. But these women—whose characters as depicted here are based on three very real NASA employees—don't take up arms or march in protests.
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A movie review by James Berardinelli. Hidden Figures is an old-fashioned inspirational tale about the undertrodden overcoming. Based on real people, real times, and real events, the film uses the never-say-die attitudes of three women to provide a window into the racism and sexism that permeated all facets of American culture during the middle ...
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Although the overall arc of the space-race plot of "Hidden Figures" is pretty accurate, several liberties were taken. For one thing, as depicted in Shetterly's book, Johnson ( Taraji P. Henson ...
Film Review: 'Hidden Figures' Tells an Important but Over-Simplified
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Math In The Movie 'Hidden Figures'
The Figures in Hidden Figures …show more content… Math and numbers played a huge role in the movie and the events that inspired them. In the movie, three African American female calculators for NASA used math to fight daily for the equality they deserved and to help send astronauts safely to space and back. The math in the movie literally ...
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