A bright spot for our times.

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2017)

What a breath of fresh air in these dark times! Hidden Figures is an amazing, uplifting, inspiring story focusing on the successes of three African-American women whose mathematical and computer-science skills directly helped NASA launch astronauts into space (and back) and eventually to the moon.
The bulk of the events depicted are from 1961 at the Langley Research Center and Project Mercury. If you had asked me "When did NASA desegregate?" I would have been stumped, because I never knew NASA was segregated. The movie gives a palpable sense of the raw frustration and pain caused by senseless discrimination, and it does so so simply by facing us with the harsh reality and indignity of having to walk over a mile each day just to use the bathroom. The women entrusted to make critical astronomical calculations couldn't even be trusted to share the same space for a minute or two in what is one of the most common, natural, and inherent aspects of humanity.
And it's a double-whammy: they're black, and they're women. Hidden Figures is just as much, if not more so, about sexism and exposing the baseless belief that women either should not or cannot excel at science. There's a great satisfaction when the Director of the Space Task Group literally sledge-hammers the bathroom signs down, ending a practice that never should have started.
Do yourself a favor and catch Hidden Figures on the big screen, see it with a big crowd, and feel a sense of humanity trickling back in.