Discuss Hidden Figures

I thought the film was a gripping true story that has been forgotten in time with great performances and direction. My full review here - https://thefilmmeister.com/2017/03/12/hidden-figures-review/

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Out of all the oscar nominations, I really enjoyed this one the most. I loved the main characters. I had no idea that there was still segregation in the 60s.

For me, this is 3rd below 'Hacksaw Ridge' and my favourite being 'Hell or High Water'. But all three very worthy films.

I agree, amazing movie!

I finally saw this and as I can wish to be on board with the majority, I cannot. I found it to be highly overrated. It felt too much like a Lifetime/Hallmark movie. It was heavily cliched and overly manipulative to the point where I saw its beats coming from a mile away. The acting was spot on but the script and direction...not so much.

I might be one of the few who hated the movie because I read the book this movie is based on and to say that the filmmakers missed the mark is a major understatement.

"When it's between The Legend and Reality, print The Legend." (A garbled paraphrase from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.) Then there's "Watching a movie being mad out of the book you wrote is like seeing a prize bull reduced to beef bullion cubes." Hollyweird has it's own logic, and one of them is "show, don't tell." I'm about to take a look at a filmed-in-Aghanistan tale, "Osama" (2003), where a family made up of three generations of women turn the youngest into a "shop boy" for survival. It may not be "Before I Fall," but I'm sure that it's not a "Lifetime/Hallmark movie" by a long shot.

I'm not really one for biopics as anything other than pure entertainment because of their willingness to exaggerate and manufacture events for emotional impact (something that is true of almost every 'based on true events' film & biopic I can ever remember watching). Plus the willingness of a film to deviate from a book is often maddening (not that I had read this one) and can set me against them when they do deviate.

However, this was a very polished effort aiming at a mainstream audience. It's a film in the backdrop of the rather uninspiring setting of a country trying to be the second yawn country to put a human in space with no wriggle room or tension around John Glenn's fate. That is a very difficult setting in which to make a high grossing film and it further handicapped its box office chances with a lack of garishly coloured latex, martial arts or sex scenes.

I particularly enjoyed the depiction of rocket science calculations pre-computer hardware (which I'd never even thought about being a thing, I'd blindly assumed computers would be a necessity for such things).

Despite my misgivings about the genre in general I'll give it a 7/10, and it was pushing towards an 8 but for the decision to spend time on a love interest rather than hand some more time over to the computer supervisor and engineer characters.

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