Review | Hidden Figures | February 21

Hidden Figures is packed with political sensitivities, human rights, gender equality, race relations and the international space race.  Smother all those serious matters with a generous heaping of emotions and you have a hit movie. It has all the bases covered.

It’s the 1960s. JFK is president of the USA, which is vying with the Soviet Union to be the first to send a human into space.

NASA hires three brilliant mathematicians, Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson, as “computers”.

They are human computers assigned to provide the calculations required to work out trajectories that will launch and return to Earth spacecraft with humans on board.

Bearing in mind that it was the early 1960s, it is equally astounding that all three are not only women, but black.

The film stars Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer, Taraji P Henson and R&B singer Janelle Monae as the three trail blazers.

Their significance in NASA’s space program and brilliance as mathematicians and computer programmers is ground-breaking. This was the era before machine computers.

All three are proud, strong-willed and assured individuals with a sense of personality that lights the screen.

Hidden Figures is distinctly American in its sense of pride and patriotism. 

It highlights the urgency of President Kennedy’s desire for American astronauts to be the first to land on the moon. 

His sense of urgency was not based solely on scientific achievement but to assert the United States’ global dominance.

Al Harrison, the head of NASA’s Space Task Group has a head full of numbers and demands from his genius engineers that those numbers translate into a spacecraft’s launch, flight path, and re-entry. 

Harrison doesn’t see skin colour or gender. He sees problems and people with the brainpower to solve them.

That is one of his shortcomings because he doesn’t notice how issues surrounding skin colour and gender affect which toilet a person can use or whether their worth as a person is determined by their inability to drink coffee from the same urn as the other scientists and engineers.

He only sees a human computer.

He is, however, instrumental in breaking down racial and gender barriers at NASA.

At times, the film preaches too much about the inequities that existed in 1960s society in the USA, but we shouldn’t assume that film audiences are aware of the history behind race relations in the pre-Civil Rights era in the USA and Cold War international political animosities.

Hidden Figures is going to be popular with audiences. It is entertaining and a reminder that the rights we take as commonplace were fought and won by people determined to stand for their rights and sense of self-esteem regardless of race, gender and social standing.