Movie Poster

And it's not because we wear skirts. It's because we wear glasses.

# Review

This movie is the dramatization of the book with the same name; it's a story about how Black female computers at NASA overcame both racism and misogyny to usher America into the Space Age.

While I really enjoyed the story of the three courageous women, I felt that the book was lacking in many areas; the movie, I thought was brilliant and it addressed many of the shortfalls of the book, such as the lack of individuality of the three protagonists. The film features many of my favourite actors and actresses, including the hilarious Octavia Spencer, Jim Parsons as a racist nerd, and Mahershala Ali as a serious and solemn colonel. In particular, I found Taraji P. Henson's powerful portrayal of Katherine Johnson very compelling, especially her explosive monologue regarding segregation on the NASA campus.

As someone studying computer science, I particularly enjoyed the engineering details added in the movie, such as the introduction of Fortran and the different mentions of mathematical processes, such as Gram-Schmidt. In particular, the story of how non-human computers acted as a double-edged sword (how it improved the speed of computations at the expense of job-loss for human computers) really resonated with me; I believe with the powers of AI and robotics, the same will happen at a much larger scale in many more industries in the near future. I believe that it's crucial that people follow the example of the West Area Computers in the movie to re-educate themselves and to embrace the new technological changes.

I felt parts of the movie were whitewashed, which made it kind of corny and some struggles of the main characters were reduced, but overall I felt that the film captured the essence of the three women's story which the book could not.

# Conclusion

The film did the story justice.

# Overall rating: 8.2

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