Watching 'Hidden Figures': and I thought I knew everything

Pat and I had our Valentines date one day early Monday evening, and it included the movie Hidden Figures.

It’s a great story, highly entertaining, and I learned a few things I didn’t know before. It was so good that I felt nervousness during the scene in which John Glenn is in danger in outer space.

I was a teenager back in the time of the story and quite interested in the U.S. space program. Of course I knew John Glenn made it back and lived to the age of 95.

The story is about “Computers.”

No, not the ones you sit in front of today and type columns like this. It’s about a group of brilliant African-American women who did for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration the work electronic computers do today.

The movie made me go to the Internet and look up the origins of the word. It was used as far back as 1640, according to one source, to identify people who computed mathematics. The first time I’d heard the word was when the electronic computer was invented for the space program.

So, just for that reason, I give the film high marks. But there are other reasons. One was learning about this corps of black women – the computers – who were vital to NASA.

Their brilliance was offset by the many instances in which discrimination against blacks and women was the purpose of the scene. It was a little too much to include the obligatory dog and police civil rights scene.

What these women had to deal with on the job and with a couple of African-American men was story enough.

Kevin Costner is the white man who sets things right as the movie goes along. He’s in charge of the men – and eventually the lead character – who work behind the scenes to rocket a man into space.

It’s Costner’s presence in the film that made me go the Internet. The last film of his that I saw was McFarland USA. It too, was, and is highly entertaining.

Costner plays a coach who develops McFarland High School into a cross country dynasty in California at the same time he develops himself as a coach.

McFarland, like Mattawa, Royal and Othello High Schools is Hispanic dominant. The movie touches on discrimination, but it’s not overdone.

McFarland became a cross country dynasty, all right, under this coach. But it didn’t happen in one year, as depicted in the movie. It took eight years.

No matter, McFarland is still very entertaining. But what I learned about that story on the Internet makes me question all Costner movies that are based on true stories.

I have no doubt these three African-American women and the entire corps were brilliant computers. They wouldn’t have had their jobs otherwise. But I wonder how overdone some of the scenes may be.

I suggest you see the movie. It is a great story, the way Hollywood does stories. I wonder only how true it is to actual events.