Hidden Figures
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Short description
Hidden Figures follows three African-American women working at NASA in the early 1960s, as the United States races the Soviet Union to put a man in orbit. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson bring mathematical and engineering expertise to a space program that has little interest in recognizing them, and their work becomes central to the flight of astronaut John Glenn. The film sets their professional struggle inside the wider context of the civil rights movement, with each woman facing racial and gender barriers that complicate the demands of her job.
Theodore Melfi directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Allison Schroeder. It was his second feature, arriving between St. Vincent in 2014 and The Starling in 2021. Taraji P. Henson plays Katherine Johnson, Octavia Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan and Janelle Monáe plays Mary Jackson, with Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons in supporting roles. The production, backed by Chernin Entertainment, Fox 2000 Pictures and Levantine Films, cost about 25 million dollars and returned roughly 236 million dollars worldwide, a substantial multiple of its budget.
Audiences rate the film highly, with 7.8 out of 10 on IMDb across some 287,000 votes and 8 out of 10 on TMDB. A critics' score of 7.7 out of 10 from 323 reviews places it close to those audience figures, indicating broad agreement rather than a sharp divide between reviewers and the public.
What's left behind the scenes
- The second film in which Mahershala Ali and Taraji P. Henson's characters experience a strong attraction to each other. The first such film was David Fincher's drama "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008).
- In the episode where Jim Parsons' character addresses NASA engineers about the need to calculate the spacecraft's entry trajectory, Mark Armstrong is present. Actor Ken Strunk specifically invited the son of Neil Armstrong (1930-2012), commander of the Apollo 11 lunar expedition and the first man to step on the Moon, to the set.
- In the NASA facilities where mathematical calculations were performed, cool colors—white, shades of gray, silver—prevailed. This contrasts sharply with the warm colors of Al Harrison's office, played by Kevin Costner, and the homes of the main characters.
- At the 7-minute mark, we see a world map with the North Pole in the center. The map shows contemporary national borders, not those of 1961 (when the film is set). Specifically, all the republics of the USSR are already shown as separated, as are the republics of Yugoslavia; Germany is unified, but Sudan is already divided into Sudan and South Sudan, as is Czechoslovakia.
- When Octavia Spencer's character shows the host her 1957 Chevrolet, the gearshift is always in the "Park" position.
- The issue of separate restrooms for white and Black people never arose for Katherine Johnson, which cannot be said about Mary Jackson. It was after Jackson's angry outburst on this topic that she was transferred to a group working with the wind tunnel. As for Johnson, she deliberately refused to use restrooms specifically designated for Black people.
- In reality, the relationship between the engineers and the African American women who performed mathematical calculations for NASA was more even than depicted in the film.
- When Taraji P. Henson agreed to play the lead role in the film and began preparing for filming, she met with 98-year-old Katherine Johnson. The actress learned that her character graduated from high school at the age of 14 and received a college degree at the age of 18. When Johnson was shown the finished and edited film, she said she liked it and then asked who came up with the idea to make a film about her.
- In one episode, Katherine Johnson's colleagues demand that she use a separate coffee pot. Everyone in the film drinks Chock full o'Nuts coffee. It is interesting to note that in 1957, this corporation became one of the first in New York with a Black vice president. He was Jackie Robinson (1919-1972), the legendary baseball player who had already ended his sports career. Moreover, Robinson was the first to break down segregation barriers in professional baseball.
- Some of the control panels shown in Mission Control were originally created for Ron Howard's historical drama "Apollo 13" (1995). They were also used in other films, for example, in both parts of Francis Lawrence's dystopian series "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay" (2014 and 2015).
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