Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines 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” (20th Century Fox)
(image source /IMDB)
Based on a book by the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly,
this is a must see. I have the book on my desk to read next week.
This is a fantastic movie, one of my favourites so far this
year. There are two stories, the compelling story about a group of
African American women who were the human computers at Langley. These ladies,
as part of a huge team of scientists, manually did all the calculations for America’s
space race. This of course was before computers. The secondary story is of
course the space race. This movie is a character led adventure, with fantastic acting, with 5 main characters;
(image source HERE)
Dorothy Vaughan (played by Octavia Spencer)
was a supervisor of the “Coloureds”; an office full of female African American
human computers although she wasn’t getting paid a supervisors salary. When she
realised that the new IBM computers would eventually do them all out of a job
she taught herself FORTRAN computer programming and prepared all the ladies in
her office for the new jobs. When NASA made the decision to move over to the
IBM machines, Vaughan and her army were the only people who could do the job. I
love when she steals a book from the “Whites” section of the library on
computer coding because the “Coloureds” area didn’t have any. It was a lovely
dignified moment of defiance and one fighting for equality. In reality she
actually headed the programming section of the Analysis and Computation
Division (ACD) at Langley
Mary Jackson (played by Janelle Monáe) was a
human computer and later an aerospace engineer. She took advanced engineering
classes and in 1958 became NASA's first black female engineer. I really loved
her story, quietly defying the regime, went to court to win the right to take
evening classes and become an engineer. Whilst there was a lot of violence on
both sides during the Civil Rights Movement, again, I love how her story was
one of quiet perseverance and a peaceful victory,(again), that’s how it’s
portrayed in the film, in reality it was probably a little bit different.
Katherine Johnson, a mother of three children
who lost her husband & had to find work to support her family. She was a gifted
child and her father moved the family 120 miles to facilitate her education.
She was a teacher and then whilst working with NASA was known for accuracy in
computerized celestial navigation. A magical moment in
the movie was when John Glenn was only happy to go into space when Katherine
had double checked the calculations the computers had made. She calculated the trajectories, launch
windows, and emergency back-up return paths for many flights
from Project Mercury, including the early NASA
missions and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon.
A very funny moment in the movie – her running across the
campus to use a segregated toilet – never actually happened but it did
represent the racism and segregation at Langley. It also of course gives Al the
opportunity to demolish a segregation sign over the toilets and gave him the
magical line “we all pee the same colour”.
(image courtesy 20th Century Fox)
Al Harrison is a fictional composite character
of three different directors at NASA Langley. I really like his character,
developed for both the movie & book and shaped by Kevin Costner himself.
There is only one problem, the character is a little bit disnified, by that I mean it seems a little too easy to have a
character - an intelligent scientist - that is ignorant of segregation and the
Civil Rights Movement going on around him because the “science” transcended it
all. In the movie his goal of getting to the moon was all that mattered and
everything else was ignored – although Katherine Johnson does back-up this idea, she said they were given a project to work on and that was their sole focus.
(image courtesy 20th Century Fox)
And finally, Paul Stafford another fictional character created
to represent certain racist and sexist attitudes that existed during the 1950’s.
Stafford’s character is very interesting but quite one dimensional. He
represents the type of man working in America during the Civil Rights movement.
He didn’t value the input that either women or African Americans could make.
There was a great moment in the movie when Katherine wants to attend a meeting
and he tells her there is “no protocol for women attending”. Whilst the
character of Stafford is fictitious, this actually happened but as there was no
law to stop her, she was allowed to attend. This represents the dismissive
attitude that men had to women. The other moments in the movie when Stafford
thwarts Katherine Johnson are also mainly fictional but I really liked the end
of the movie when he does start respecting her. In reality, Katherine was well
respected at Langley and most of the male scientists viewed her as a peer (and
some probably realised she was far better than them).
However, it’s not white men like Harrison or Stafford that
changed things. It’s still amazing
people like Mary Jackson who become a manager of both the Federal Women’s
Program, in the NASA Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, and of the Affirmative
Action Program that really paved the way. In this role, she worked to influence
both the hiring and promotion of women in NASA's science, engineering, and
mathematics careers.
As with any movie that has been made based on real life
events, some editing and fictionalisation must occur. In real-time the
timescale is over 30 years with 300 staff. This would make a very long film
with many boring sequences of boring characters. That’s why we get composite
characters and snap-shots of particular events.
Whist the movie is most certainly aimed at the family market
(PG Cert) and has a Disnified happy ending we know of course that it was a
happy ending. John Glen got home safely. There were some magical moments of
defiance against the natural order of racisms. Al Harrison bashing down the segregation
sign for the ladies toilets, Dorothy Vaughan stealing a book from the library and
Mary Jackson winning her case in court allowing her to attend college and
qualify as NASA’s first black female engineer.
In reality of course we know the Civil Rights movement had many violent
episodes with much hate and vitriol but I like to think that even though some
people were fighting for their rights in that way, I hope there were also
people breaking down barriers (and signs) in their own way, quietly, intelligently
and showing dignity and strength. Perhaps that’s just the Disney feel from the
movie clouding my judgement but I hope not. Because, this film is in stark
contrast to the reality of the violence and hatred experienced during the Civil
Rights Movement, (the next night I watched Detroit) it loses a planet for this.
However, it’s still a great movie so I give it 9 out of 10 planets.
Live Long and Prosper
John The Captain Ryan.
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