Comment

Jun 05, 2019ADragonInTheLibrary rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
I was actually kind of disappointed here. At a glance, this is a great movie that highlights a forgotten story that deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten. The cast performs admirably and the movie does a decent job of making early-NASA's behind-the-scenes digestible for the casual viewer. As an adaptation of a book however, this movie is overly saccharine and fails to accurately portray how things truly existed at NACA and NASA. Further it grossly oversimplifies the people involved; the degree to which racism and sexism effected the women involved comes across significantly less in the book. Miss Jackson asserts that there were a lot of decent people at NACA and NASA, and while there was tension, a lot of that was overshadowed by the mission at hand. The movie adds scenes that fundamentally alter the mood and attitude of the people involved, and I feel that this is detrimental to the overall story, and a classic case of Hollywood adding drama for the sake of drama (and money). This is also not to mention the fact that Mary Jackson herself had been there for about a decade as a supervisor before the space race properly began. Virtually everyone involved realized there were bigger issues at stake, like the Cold War, national pride, economics, and the need to fill positions with qualified people. You get the tiniest taste of this, but frankly, the movie portrays it in a very unsatisfactory way. If you liked the movie, I'm glad. I hope you will pick up the book and realize how much more to the story there is, because I do not feel like the movie went far enough in accurately telling the story as Margot Lee put it down.