Entertaining, very Hollywood-ized version of history

Rating: 8/10 (15 May 2017)

When watching a movie based on true events, there are certain moments where one wonders, did that *really* happen? Then you look it up and find that, often, it did not. But that doesn't necessarily make it a bad movie.
As a movie, Hidden Figures is very entertaining. The movie follows the fortunes of NASA mathematician Katherine G Johnson and her friends as they deal with the challenges of being black women in a world run by white men.
This is very much a feel-good movie, with adversity to overcome, crusty authority figures to win over, a great mission to accomplish, and a little romance for seasoning. The movie hits hard on the awfulness of the Jim Crow south and the merit of its leads. I'd say the only problematic dramatic weakness is that Johnson's role basically runs out before the end and she becomes a bit of a bystander.
As for that question, did this really happen, well, the website informationisbeautiful.net answer is, more-or-less. The movie compresses time enormously, so that, for example, it shows a segregated NASA in 1961, three years after the agency stopped segregating facilities. Many of the events of the movie did happen to some extent, but most of them happened in the 1950s. And the real Katherine said she never felt oppressed at work, meaning the big scene of her going off about it is pure fiction.
And like most movies, the title characters are portrayed as being far more important than they were. Katherine was a prodigy who graduated college when she was 18, but she was working amongst hundreds of geniuses. The movie does a service in highlighting the forgotten contributions of black women to the space program, but Hollywood hates the idea that history is pushed forward by large teams working together more often than by lone geniuses bucking the system.
How much of a problem this is will depend on the individual. I'm disappointed by the facile Hollywood approach to history, but it rarely ruins the movie for me. I did, for example, enjoy The Imitation Game, even though it was obvious that some of it pretty much had to be nonsense.
Hidden Figures is a feel-good movie that made me feel good. So it's worth watching.