Again we were persuaded to go to the cinema by our son. I had heard good reports of this film and it didn't disappoint. I am pretty sure that after last year's Oscars, which were all white people films about white people, the industry would have been encouraged to make some films about black people. This was a bio-pic about some real women who worked at NASA. They were pioneers, truly, the first women to have beaten the odds and got to positions of responsibility in their workplace. But my God, it was hard for them, and the white people of America should hang their heads in shame.
I thought I knew about segregation - black people had to sit at the back of the bus, for example, - but I didn't know they weren't able to borrow the same books from the library as white people. This shocked me more than anything else - in fact I couldn't take in the implication at first. It is this. White people didn't want to touch the books if black people had touched them. It is so horrible. They didn't want black people to touch their coffee pots either. (This is illogical because they all had black maids who could touch everything in their kitchens and why am I trying to understand the logic to something so horrible and stupid?)
Then white people made it so hard for black people to get a good education. It was illegal for a black woman to go to university and become an engineer. Illegal. Americans have never really been sane. That's what I took away from the whole story. They only wanted to get to the moon, really, to show the Russians that they could do that. That they had great mathematicians, too. That they had heroic young men, too.
For some reason, one really bad misrepresentation of pre-computer engineering mathematics was that, in this film, no one used a slide rule. There seemed to be log tables but the slide rule - gone. Rubbed out of history for no good reason.
There is quite a lot of suspense to the movie - it's written to a formula, to some extent, but it's very good.
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