A film worth watching, a story very much worth telling

Rating: 7/10 (5 January 2017)

This is a good movie that tells a really great story, performed by three very fine actresses. Meaning no disrespect, I would say that it is something like a cross between the old Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn *Desk Set* and the more recent *Imitation Game*. It tells the story of three VERY hard-working and intelligent women who, at the cost of giving up much of their personal lives, managed to accomplish great things.
It's a lot more than that, actually. It's the story of three individuals - women, in this case - who, when faced with being rendered obsolete at work because of changes in technology, refused to just accept "the inevitable" and complain about it. Instead they put in a great deal of time and effort to retrain and refashion themselves - and others - so that they can "stay ahead of the curve." To say that these three women could well serve as models for everyone in the workforce, whatever their race or sex, would not be an overstatement.
Like *The Imitation Game*, it faces the problem of creating an interesting movie about individuals who work with numbers and computers in complicated ways that most of us do not understand. The script might have done a better job of making us appreciate that these are exceptional women, not just by telling us that, as it does at the end, but by finding ways of showing us that. It spends a lot of time showing us their domestic lives; it could have spent more time showing us their intellectual lives, showing us how these women were intellectually exceptional. The opening scene shows us that Dorothy Vaughan can fix a car engine, but that doesn't prepare us for her ability to master Fortran on her own. When, in the closing credits, we learn that the real Ms. Vaughan was a remarkable computer wiz, we're really not prepared for that.
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For what it's worth, I found the blurb provided by the distributor, 20th Century Fox, to be very misleading. Here it is, with my comments in parentheses:
"As the United States raced against Russia to put a man in space, NASA found untapped talent in a group of African-American female mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history. (Well, these women did do wonderful things, but they were not "the brains" behind the space program. That's a severe exaggeration.)
Based on the unbelievably true life stories of three of these women (The story is not by any means "unbelievable" - much less "unbelievably true." Why is it unbelievable that these women, despite many obstacles, could achieve such impressive things?)
known as "human computers", (no, they were not known as "human computers." They were known as "computers," people who computed.)
we follow these women as they quickly rose the ranks of NASA alongside many of history's greatest minds (Ah, no! That is the very substance of the whole movie, which the pr guy who wrote this must not have seen. These women, despite their very real talents, did NOT rise quickly. They kept being told that because they were women, and black, that they could NOT rise the way the white men they worked for did.)
specifically tasked with calculating the momentous launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, and guaranteeing his safe return. Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines (True, but they only start to do so at the very end of the movie.)
while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented them in U.S. history as true American heroes." (And here, of course, is the biggest "mistake" of them all. These women are completely unknown today. Unjustly so, certainly, which is why it is good to have this movie. But up until now, they have had NO place in American history.)