Dealing with segregation does not necessarily make a good movie

Rating: 4/10 (23 February 2017)

For his second feature film, Theodore Melfi tries this time to deal with a more serious topic: the role of black women in the American society in early 60's. This is how we meet Katherine Goble, a gifted woman, working as a "computer" in the Langley Research Center and two of her colleagues and friends Mary Jackson, yearning for a engineer position and Dorothy Vaughan an unofficial supervisor. All along the movie, we will see how women had to work hard to establish theirselves and gain recognition in the male-dominated engineering world.
This is for the plot, now let's go deeper into this movie. Actually, there is nothing fundamentally wrong in this movie, everything is just OK. But making a film about segregation and misogyny does not make necessarily a good movie. And here is the evidence. During the two hours of this movie we will witness all forms of discrimination but nothing more that we've seen dozens of times. Unlike some other movies, such as Fences for example, where these sensitive topics were dealt with subtlety we are here just talking about discrimination to give substance to the movie.
That aside, the story behind the movie aims to show the work of NASA engineers and computers during the 60's star wars between Americans and Russians. Once again, in order to wow the spectators, characters just throw us mathematical formulas and spatial jargon all along the movie. But when you have a better look on it you can just see trivia or nonsense formulas. It is a common way in movies to try to impress spectators with non sense jargon, and this movie is not an exception.
Eventually, there are all the same some good things with this movie. It allows us to have a better understanding about these hidden figures who were at the root of American space conquest and it is also a way to acknowledge the value of their work. Besides the acting and the filmmaking are good enough.
To conclude, even though the screen writing remains interesting I think that this story would have been a better documentary than a movie.