Movie Trailer - "Hidden Figures"

As the space race passes into history (but the all-new Space Era is on!  Thanks, Elon Musk!), and computers have long since become ubiquitous, this movie couldn't be coming at a better time.  For me.  Maybe you.

With all the thousands of people who were part of the race into orbit and then to the moon, there are so many stories, and some of them reveal corners of history that our broad-stroke approach to history does not always capture, especially in movies.

But, hey, one thing I've really come to realize is how weird and goofy our ideas are about how things must have come to be.   We make assumptions, details get left out, and our movies are rarely researched well enough or lack the scope to include stories that took place away from the kleig lights.
About ten years ago I put the pieces together that, weirdly, the word "computers" meant "people who compute".  And, in a lot of cases, when doing the math - the actual work it took to prove theorems, calculate complex equations, etc... - was done by women.  And, of course, the men who put those challenges to them took the credit.  This was true for a long, long time.

But, yeah, when computing became less a manual task and something done with machines, women were hugely influential in computer science before computers became the domain of basement lurking dorks in the 1980's.  Read up on Grace Hopper.  Woman was a boss.

I'm actually reading NASA Flight Commander Gene Krantz's book Failure is Not an Option, and - not only is it a fascinating book and I highly recommend it - but he briefly mentions the women who were not in the Control Room, but in the back spaces doing the computing by hand and then with the systems NASA put in place.  I'm unsure if one of the names he drops is Katherine Johnson (I read that passage about three days before I saw the trailer above), but I'd heard of Johnson somewhere odd, like Tumblr.  And, man, it just seems like this sort of story should get more attention.  Like, say, a big Hollywood movie starring Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer.

What's not to like?  NASA.  Name actors.  Science and math romanticized!  Space.  John Glenn!  People achieving against the odds!

Sure, this is Oscar Bait, but this is the kind of Oscar Bait I actually want to see.