Indeed. The production values and performances are excellent, but historically, extremely compressed (as such movies tend to be), with some very questionable liberties taken. Events separated by years appear to happen all at once.
I wondered about that when I was watching it. The Katherine Johnson character, in the movie, had a huge epiphany that "saved" the space program: use Newton's method to find roots of polynomials! I groaned out loud when I saw that - I'm sure that the actual NASA engineers were very definitely familiar with high-school calculus (in fact, that's probably what most of the human computers were doing most of the time). I'm sure that she actually did make contributions that were profound - so why not just show those? Most of the audience wouldn't have noticed the difference and you wouldn't have to make it look like she did the equivalent of coming into a stock trading company and saying "Have you considered buying low and selling high?"
Plus there are several similar books about early female computers in astronomy, Manhattan project, and electronic computers. Many interesting stories. I dont know if more movies are planned. A small bit about this in the Turion bioptic The Imagination Game.
wl|7 years ago
Finnucane|7 years ago
commandlinefan|7 years ago
I wondered about that when I was watching it. The Katherine Johnson character, in the movie, had a huge epiphany that "saved" the space program: use Newton's method to find roots of polynomials! I groaned out loud when I saw that - I'm sure that the actual NASA engineers were very definitely familiar with high-school calculus (in fact, that's probably what most of the human computers were doing most of the time). I'm sure that she actually did make contributions that were profound - so why not just show those? Most of the audience wouldn't have noticed the difference and you wouldn't have to make it look like she did the equivalent of coming into a stock trading company and saying "Have you considered buying low and selling high?"
peter303|7 years ago
micah94|7 years ago