entertaining movie but the story is nonsense

Rating: 6/10 (2 February 2017)

The acting was great and overall the movie was entertaining but the story is nonsense. When is Hollywood going to make movies that include everyone in this society without 'discrimination' being the focal point? When will they make movies without singling out white people as racists? There's nothing groundbreaking here. It's the typical story of white people oppressing blacks and how the characters rise above it all; another cliché and stereotype perpetuated year after year after year. Now they're portraying nasa as a racist organization. I didn't work at langley or live in virginia at that time but I seriously doubt much of the story is accurate. My first job out of college was working for the fed in the late 70s and there was no such nonsense. I met a lot of knuckleheads when I did a stint at an aerospace company but during the rest of my career in IT there was never any discrimination against women or minorities. It's not that I didn't see it; it didn't exist. I find it hard to believe that engineers, mathematicians and scientists at nasa would behave that way. My first job with the fed, I was introduced to two computer programmers (one black, one white) that worked on Univac I which was the first commercial computer. I was at the beginning of my career and they were at the end so I looked at them as dinosaurs and obsolete. Later I began to appreciate their careers. When they started back in the 50s, there were probably less than 1000 computer programmers in the whole world and now there are millions and I'm only counting the hard coders, not script kiddies or web coders. But, you couldn't make a movie about either one because frankly their working lives were boring. Nope, no drama in the workplace. And anyway, in IT and technology in general, no one usually cares about who's first or what happened, just what happens next. But 'colored' coffee pots is just made up Hollywood nonsense and perpetuates the stereotypes and divisions in the US. The movie is not a documentary but it's not about nasa either. It's just a story about racial prejudice and overcoming discrimination. However, I can't get over all the technical errors and mumbo jumbo the writers came up with. Usually producers hire technical consultants but in more recent years it seems Hollywood doesn't care what people might take away from a movie. They don't care if actors are saying dumb lines because they figure the audience is too stupid to notice. I find it insulting to pay $12 for a movie and then have to sit thru gibberish. Plus the story was written for five year olds. I'll bet my life savings that nasa didn't hold up the launch so they could check calculations. That's just silly. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who believe what they see in the movies so I have to mention two things. 1) you can't bypass a starter motor and never, never try to start a car the way it was shown in the movie. It's very dangerous. 2) computers in that day did not solve math equations or derive new math. They just did your basic arithmetic. The work the character was doing in the movie could never be replaced by a computer of that day. Computers today, I'm not sure.