Countdown [Review: Hidden Figures]

“Hidden Figures” tells the story of three mathematicians who became crucial to the US space programme, and who faced down sexists and racists in the segregated America of the 1960s along the way. The three lead characters, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, all strived to escape the limitations of what to all intents and purposes was a dystopian society, so “Hidden Figures” is Science Fiction – it just happens to be true as well.

This film could have been as bleak or serious as its’ subject matter. However the obstacles faced by Katherine Johnson (Taraji Henson, superb in “Person of Interest”) and her fellow “computers” would not be out of place in a Kafka play or a Douglas Adams novel. Appropriately the film is light and humorous in places, although there’s plenty of black humour too. It works - it's easy to ridicule and show up the behaviour of the bigots, played by Jim Parsons and Kirsten Dunst, while the lighter moments show Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson as human. They were never woad-painted freedom fighters, rather they fought and won their battles with their brains, sticking it to the Man from the inside, and by using humour the film does the same.