Why it's worth seeing Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures, a late 2016 release that got lost in the shuffle of so many fine movies on themes of racism, black lives, and black history, tells the important and little known history of black women working on the NASA space-launch initiatives in the Virginia facility in the 1950s and 60s; the movie is "based on true events" and also adapted from a nonfiction book of the same title - props to the author of the book [Morgot Lee Shetterly] for truly uncovering this great story. By "based on" I take it to mean that, though the three central women characters are all based on real people who broke through many barriers of law and of hatred to contribute to the space program, the narrative brings the women together as three buddies and orchestrates their domestic lives in ways that are probably no historically accurate - though that doesn't matter. We see in the working conditions at NASA the horrible racism and sexism that these women had to encounter just to do their jobs - and these women were among the smartest and most talented and bravest, and by the way NASA was probably among the best employers in the South: NASA needed talent and was willing to hire black women if they could do the job. Over the course of the movie, we see the women gradually win respect, recognition, and, to a degree, equal treatment. This is all to the good, but I have to say that the screenplay itself and even the art direction and costuming were so programmatic, so predictable, so devoid of surprise or genuine emotion (with perhaps the exception of one scene, when the supervisor, Kevin Costner, takes a sledgehammer to the "colored rest room" sign) that movie feels as if it could have been written by the IBM computer that's at the center of the plot. The movie is so obvious and at times heavy handed - this will be good for you to see and to know, and we're all so much better and more enlightened today! - it's like the greens one of the dads insists that the little kids eat with their cookout dinner.