A Great Movie of Consequence

Rating: 10/10 (3 January 2017)

I am giving this movie the highest rating possible for dramatizing the human spirit in a very positive way during a dark and difficult period, the period that I knew growing up from childhood to adulthood. I lived the era without knowing the great contributions being made by Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson until I moved to Hampton, Virginia. The sadness of the story is that it took a movie and President Barack Obama to recognize their achievements more than fifty years later. This unto itself is an absurdity, until you realize the players were completely out of character from mainstream (white) America back in the day! I give the choice of title for the movie a very high rating. To this rater, hidden numbers is more a metaphor representing the numbers of brilliant African-American women hidden in an obscure and remote building, while making daily contributions to the success of the NASA space program. Their brilliance is overlooked and never taken for granted, as though they were simply plugging in grunt numbers for a NASA team of scientists to decide what to do with these numbers.
Taraji P. Henson gives an inspiring performance as Katherine G. Johnson. She lets her light shine to portray moments of glory and triumph, just as the real-life Katherine would have done. There were one or two scenes that might have conflicted with the protocol of the era, but I understand the need for convincing some audience of how things might have been back in the day. Someone had to make decisions, so it might as well be the Boss, as portrayed by Kevin Kostner.
Overall, it was a great movie, very entertaining, and this writer did learn a thing or two about a time in history not so far away.