Hidden Figures (2016) on Netflix
PG20162h 7mBiographyDramaHistory
Katherine Goble, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson compute NASA's numbers by hand in 1961 in a segregated unit. Katherine joins the Space Task Group, where engineer Paul Stafford dismisses her.
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- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
At NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in 1961, three African-American women work as human computers, doing the hand calculations behind the effort to send an American into orbit. Katherine Goble, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson are kept in a segregated unit. Dorothy carries out a supervisor's duties, but Vivian Mitchell refuses to promote her. Mary serves on the heat shield team and wants to be an engineer, though the schools that award the needed degree are closed to colored students. Katherine, trained in analytic geometry, is assigned to Al Harrison's Space Task Group, where head engineer Paul Stafford treats her coldly and hands her reports with whole sections blacked out.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hidden Figures (2016)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- It was Mary Jackson, not Katherine Goble Johnson, who had difficulty finding a colored bathroom, in a 1953 incident on a temporary assignment in an unfamiliar area of Langley; Johnson was initially unaware the bathrooms were segregated and used the whites-only ones for years before anyone complained.
- The Space Task Group was led by Robert Gilruth, not the fictional Al Harrison, who was created to simplify a more complex management structure; the scene where Harrison smashes the Colored Ladies Room sign never happened, as Goble Johnson refused to walk the extra distance and, in her words, "just went to the white one."
- Mary Jackson did not have to get a court order to attend night classes at the whites-only high school; she asked the city of Hampton for an exception and it was granted, though the school turned out to be run down and dilapidated.
- Dorothy Vaughan was promoted to supervisor of West Computing much earlier than the film suggests, in 1949, becoming the first Black supervisor at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; in 1958, when NACA became NASA, segregated facilities including the West Computing office were abolished.
- Screenwriter Theodore Melfi defended adding scenes of white characters doing the right thing, asking "who cares who does the right thing, as long as the right thing is achieved?", but Dexter Thomas of Vice News criticized the additions as creating the white savior trope.
- Following the 2017 Lego Ideas Contest, The Lego Group announced a fan-designed Women of NASA figurine set of five female scientists, engineers and astronauts; Katherine Johnson was among the minifigures planned for inclusion, but the finished set did not include her.
SPOILER
John Glenn's flight was not terminated early, as stated in the movie's closing subtitles: the MA-6 mission was planned for three orbits and landed at the expected time.SPOILER
The Mercury Control Center was located at Cape Canaveral in Florida, not at the Langley Research Center in Virginia, where the film places it.
