Review of Hidden Figures (2016) by Dana F — 09 Jul 2017

What a breath of fresh air to see a movie that focuses on powerful and capable black women... I can't believe that it took so long for this story to get made into a movie. This film shines a light on the inherent inequality of "separate but equal".

It focuses on the small things, the day-today logistics of trying to live equally in an unequal world, and is all the more powerful for it. The characters are fighting systemic racism rather than overt racism, and that battle is even more daunting a fight.

It'll piss you off, for sure. The acting is outstanding across the board, the story is very well-written, but the directing for me was just ho-hum. Yeah, it's an amazing story, and one that it is high time was told, but it could have been told with more pizzazz and originality.

If it weren't for its incredible subject, the film itself is pretty standard movie fare. The writing is the best thing about it - it's well paced and includes a good deal of humor, which is always welcome with such serious subject matter.

Best of all, it is not emotionally manipulative like I expected it to be. However, even though there is no mustache-twirling evil racist villain, it does fall back on the "good white people" and "bad white people" characterizations, and even the "good" white people are totally-self serving.

I'm sure not everybody in the 60s fell so neatly into one of those two categories. Regardless, it's shocking to realize that this stuff happened only 50-off years ago. That's not very long, and we still have a long way to go.