Recalling the hidden story of the technical women who helped USA get to the moon.

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2020)

My wife and I first watched this at home on BluRay from our local library in May 2017. I just rewatched it in March 2020, mulling the eventual impacts of COVID-19 now upon us. The picture and sound are first-rate and the several "making of" extras are interesting. Even with some inaccuracies and Hollywood liberties in story telling this is a must-see movie.
Most of us in modern times think of small machines, maybe one sitting on our lap, when we hear the word "Computer." But in the 1960s as the USA geared up for space exploration electronic computers were not in wide use yet. "Computers" were the people who were very good with math and who would use mechanical calculators and pencils to make the long, difficult calculations. This story is about several black women who took jobs as Computers at Langley in Virginia as the technical team, a group of white men in white shirts and dark ties, tried to figure out how to get a man into orbit and retrieve him. The mathematics for all that was yet undiscovered.
Enter the main character, Taraji P. Henson as Katherine G. Johnson, who as a young girl demonstrated a genius for mathematics. She began working as a Computer, the men viewed it as a clerical job beneath them. But Katherine was not satisfied with just doing as she was assigned, she was inquisitive, she eventually provided the ideas and the math approach to calculating how to do it all. She only died recently (Feb. 2020) at the age of 103. Perhaps, we don't really know, if she had not been part of that team we might not have won the race to the moon.
The movie also deals with racial discrimination in general in the 1960s. My wife and I were both teenagers during the 1960s, we remember well such things as "colored" bathrooms and "colored" entrances to businesses, as my wife says today "It is embarrassing to see how it was."
Two other key black characters are Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan who became the chief programmer for the new IBM that eventually put most of the human computers out of work. And Janelle MonÃ¡e as Mary Jackson who successfully petitioned a judge to allow her to take night college classes at an all-white school so that she could get her Engineer certification and work as an Aeronautical Engineer for NASA.
Also good is Kevin Costner as Al Harrison who is the overall director of the effort at Langley, Kirsten Dunst as the office supervisor Vivian Mitchell who answered certain questions with "That's just the way it is." Plus Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford, the lead mission scientist who seemed to resent Katherine's role of checking everyone's math work, even his, but he eventually gave her the respect she was due.
Good movie of an important time and important activity in the long, gradual process to overcome the racial prejudice that seems indelibly ingrained in our society.