Saw it yesterday, enjoyed it a lot. I thought it was a great feel-good movie, as well as being an important story that needed to be told, and a sometimes painful reminder of discrimination that existed and still exist.
What did you all think?
Have not seen it, but wanted to point out that the Kindle version of the book is on sale for $1.99 today (Sunday 1/8), in case anyone is interested.
Did they show them doing any calculations on screen? Could you tell if the calculations were accurate?
Soooooo much chalkboard math. No freaking clue. I do not math. Loved the movie tho and very glad it’s doing well for its opening weekend.
Saw it today and liked it a lot. The racism really pissed me off, though. Shameful and stupid.
One of the things I really loved was the side plot where Dorothy sensed that the new machine was going to make her team obsolete so she taught them all Fortran. Smart and clever!
There were a lot of blackboard scenes but it all went by pretty fast. No “real-time” scene where viewers could actually follow the math being done.
p.s. For me, the most distracting inaccuracy was not the math or any technical detail, but how little the actor who played John Glenn looked like the real person.
Excellent movie.
The look for Glenn was less bothersome than how young he was. Glenn was 40 I think at the time, that guy is, what late 20s?
I highly recommend it to everyone. All the more amazing because the unbelievable things these women did in the movie are really pretty much what the real women did (reading up the artistic licenses were fairly mild).
Anyone know why all the computers were female? Was it that men with that mathematical aptitude went onto become engineers and the path for women was more closed?
(I cannot confirm that the math was right but if they did not have experts making sure it was I’d be shocked.)
Yeah, pretty much.
The movie’s power emerges from how small and everyday and unceasing the slights and indignities were. It went around from office to school to road to bathrooms and hung a huge sign on them saying, “You say you don’t know what white privilege is? Stick your head in this.” Now that will make some people in 2017 angry and those people probably will never see the movie. Or they’ll just say that times have changed. If you’re one of them: You’re wrong.
What’s odd is that the movie itself has numerous flaws. It’s Hollywoodized to the nth degree, there is no plot, and the feel good arc is exactly like the last 50 feel good movies you’ve seen. For Pete’s sake, they get the one number that everybody in the audience can figure out wrong. At the end it mentions that Katherine Goble’s second marriage to Jim Johnson has lasted 57 years. But they are shown being married in 1962. That’s 54 years. (57 is right. They actually got married in 1959, so she was married to him before the movie starts and wasn’t a lonely single mom. Hollywoodization.)
The performances make it work - that and the fact that the film has a basic humanity that overcomes the cliches and falsifications. It’s realer than any thousand superhero movies could ever be.
I think that, and also because women were cheaper to hire (i.e. paid less). It wasn’t just Langley - here’s info about JPL’s computers.
Wikipedia entry on “human computer” says astronomers in the 18th century started hiring women to do computations. But it’s really Edward Pickering (director of the Harvard Observatory in the late 19th century) who is best known for assembling such a team - the Harvard Computers or “Pickering’s Harem.”
Thank you for this tip, I just bought it and I’ve already started to read it. I love this movie so much and will be seeing it again. An entertaining and informative movie about SMART people, how great is that?
It wasn’t just computers, but women in general were hired for technical jobs that were considered too tedious for the male “real scientists”. Another example would be stellar classifications in astronomy: It was women such as Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, and Annie Jump Cannon who stared at thousands of spectrographs and classified each one. And in the process often made bigger scientific advances than the men they were working for.
And I really hope that those blackboard scenes were accurate. I think it’s a big boon to STEM education for Hollywood to show people actually doing math, not just a vague “being scientists”. And they have, in general, improved a lot on that in recent years.
I’m sure that those scenes were accurate. And the only ones. What you saw for most of the movie was a large room of white-shirted extras sitting at desks and contributing absolutely nothing. In fact, Katherine and only Katherine does any active science at any time. There’s more and better science in an average episode of Big Bang Theory.
The absolute silliest example:
John Glenn is about to be launched when a discrepancy is found in the landing co-ordinates between yesterday’s and today’s IBM computer runs. He refuses to go up unless “the smart girl” double-checks the numbers. The launch is being held up for this. Katherine has been removed from the team because the (electronic) computer is faster than the (human) computers. So someone literally runs the printouts a half mile over to the colored computers building. She checks them in record time. Remember, every minute counts. So do they pick up a phone and say “yes, they check”? Of course not. They run back the half mile (slowly - she’s a heavyset middle-aged woman in heels) to say that in person solely so that Katherine, who doesn’t have clearance, can get the door shut in her face. And then… But you know what happens. This is Hollywood.
You’d think the movie is about science. It isn’t. It’s about discrimination. The background happens to be science, but it could have been absolutely anything and this movie would have worked just as well.
It exists to make you cry. That’s a good thing and it’s good at it. I’d recommend everyone go see it. But it’s not a movie about science.
He’s 28 now. My wife said the actor didn’t look at all like John Glenn because he was cute, and John Glenn wasn’t. :dubious:
I agree they should have just picked up the phone but, Taraji P. Henson is “heavyset”?? In what universe?
Note that Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson is still alive at 98. Take a look at her Wikipedia entry. Many of the things that happened in the movie actually happened well before the Mercury astronauts were launched. Glenn did ask for Johnson to check the figures:
Here’s a webpage with a lot of information on the differences between the movie and what actually happened:
And here she is receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom 2015 along with some kind words from the POTUS. (She’s first in the list so no need to que the video.)
[QUOTE=Chronos]
It wasn’t just computers, but women in general were hired for technical jobs that were considered too tedious for the male “real scientists”. Another example would be stellar classifications in astronomy: It was women such as Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, and Annie Jump Cannon who stared at thousands of spectrographs and classified each one. And in the process often made bigger scientific advances than the men they were working for.
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Which is the subject of Dava Sobel’s new book.
I agree with this for one big reason: They glossed over it a bit but there was also a white computer group. Who didn’t seem to do anything exceptional (according to the movie). The colored computers seemed to report to the white computer supervisor (temporarily as they made it a point to show that Dorothy should have been the colored supervisor but they wouldn’t promote her and she seemed to report to Vivian (Kirsten Dunst).
Anyway, this would seem to imply that the colored women were smarter than the white women, but that’s just because the story’s been hollywoodized (to emphasize the discrimination).
Other replys have cited links showing that women were commonly hired for cheap to do tedious jobs like computer while men got to be engineers. What I find extremely fascinating when looking at that through modern day eyeballs is the whole “math is hard” thing that modern women seem to be raised with (and fight). If anything, this shows that women are completely capable of doing hard analytical sciences. I don’t know how we lost that.
I’ve just started the book Hidden Figures and the author makes a point to mention that there were white female computers at NASA, hundreds, maybe over a thousand. But Hidden Figures is the story of these 3 women, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s like complaining that Richard. Feynman wasn’t mentioned in The Theory of Everything. The story was about Stephen Hawking, not Hawking and other physicists. It never occurred to me that the black women were the ONLY computers at NASA. They just had a building of their own. It may not be enough for some people, but I think when Dorothy tells the highway trooper that there are “quite a few women working in the space program” that indicates there are many more.
I don’t see how showing some of the discrimination the black computers (and blacks in general) faced is “emphasising” it, and I sure don’t see how showing discrimination is “Hollywoodizing” (generally accepted as a derogatory term) the story, except that the reality was probably much much worse.