Hidden figures manages to be more than an inspiring

Hidden Figures manages to be
more than an inspiring history lesson with wonderful performances.
Katherine (played by a radiant Taraji P. Henson) is the film’s ostensible central character,
but her story is interwoven with those of Mary (Janelle Monáe) and Dorothy (Octavia Spencer).
Mary went on to became NASA’s first black female engineer and Dorothy was a mathematician
who became NASA’s first African American manager.
Hidden Figures begins in 1961. Katherine, Mary, and Dorothy are part of NASA’s pool of
human “computers”, these are employees, usually women, charged with doing calculations
before the use of digital computers. Due to Virginia’s segregation laws, African American female
computers have to work in a separate “colored” building at the Langley Research Center.
Because of her expertise in analytic geometry, Katherine is assigned to a special task group
trying to get Glenn into orbit. She arrives at her new job to find she’s the sole brown face in the
room.

HIDDEN FIGURES ANALYSIS 3
Katherine is closest to the excitement, but Hidden Figures goes beyond Katherine and
examines all three women’s lives and the struggles they go through being women of color in a
white, male-dominated industry. Mary must navigate layers of racist bureaucratic hurdles in her
quest to become an engineer. Dorothy is fighting for a long overdue promotion, while the arrival
of an IBM machine threatens to put her team of computers out of work. The women consistently