The right stuff

Rating: 3/10 (6 February 2017)

Hidden Figures is a starchy film based on true facts of the role three black women who were mathematicians played in getting the first American, John Glenn into space.
Taraji P Henson plays Katherine Johnson, brilliant at calculations regarding flight trajectories. Octavia Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan who quickly learns to program the new IBM computers, yet she is not allowed to borrow advanced books from the local library and Janelle Monae plays Mary Jackson who strives to be accepted at an accredited all white college so she can become an aerospace engineer.
The women just encounter indifference at NASA given various tasks but thing come to a head when Katherine is promoted to work with a core group of scientists and mathematicians who want to send the first man to space until they are beaten to it by the Soviets. They work under fair but firm disciplinarian Al Harrison (Kevin Costner.)
However even amongst this elite group she encounters prejudice, she is not regarded to be up to the task, belittled and even ignored. She even has to use her own separate kettle as the main one is for whites only and of course she has walk half a mile to use the blacks only toilet which is in another section of NASA.
So here is an example of why I found this film to be infuriatingly hokey. Harrison would constantly come out of his office and asks for Katherine but she is never there and no one answers him where she is. The reason for her whereabouts is that she has gone to the blacks only toilet. This seemingly goes on for months until one day Harrison summons Katherine and asks her why she is never at her post and she lets loose of how she cannot use the toilet in the building and her colleagues watch in silence.
The whole thing was just so bluntly done. So Harrison never noticed the blacks only kettle in the office or that the only black person in the team might encounter prejudice or wait weeks to find out why she needs to pop out for so long and also did not admonish other staff for being so insensitive or team leaders such as Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) for being prejudiced.
Despite being entertaining and even inspirational I just thought Hidden Figures was so poorly written and structured. The cast made the most out of the material though.