Well-meaning film undermined by inaccuracies

Rating: 7/10 (13 September 2017)

The stories of the roles women played in the U.S. space program make for good counter-points to works such as "The Right Stuff", which focused on the astronauts and the mission controllers (overwhelmingly male). "Hidden Figures" presents the stories of three coloured' women (to employ a contemporary term used throughout the film) who worked for NASA at the dawn of the 'space-age'. Each of the three represented significant firsts for African American women in the space program: Mary Jackson became as an NASA engineer, Katherine Goble/Johnson as a high-level mathematician co-authoring research reports and Dorothy Vaughan as a supervisor (and later computer programmer). The women achieved these milestones through persistence, competence and drive and their stories deserve to be told and celebrated. Unfortunately, the movie chooses to make up facts and alter the time-line, presumably to make the story more dramatic. The whole '1/2 mile trip to the coloured toilet' is fiction, NASA had desegregated before the story takes place, and after the second or third trip, the scenes began to strike me as demeaning. The scene where Dorothy Vaughan, having read an introduction to Fortran, walks into the room containing the non-functioning IBM mainframe and immediately spots the problem (not plugged in?) is ridiculous. No one expects movies to be history lectures and telling complex stories in a couple of hours requires a lot of streamlining and consolidation (e.g. Kevin Costner's character is a composite of a number of senior NASA team-members), but making up significant events simply because they look good on screen undercuts the credibility of the story and is unpardonable in a movie that wants to be taken seriously (Harrison didn't exist, and if a metaphorical crowbar was taken to the "colored" bathroom sign, it was welded by Goble/Johnson). All of this is unfortunate, as the movie is (IMO) generally entertaining and presents a story worth telling. I was quite enjoying it until the IBM scene, which seemed so unlikely that I googled up the 'accuracy' of the film, and hit endless critical 'fact checking' sites (many neutral but some with an agenda). Like the dire "Red Tails" (2012), the filmmakers should have had more faith in their material (and their audience).