Hidden Figures

There are quite a few Oscar nominated films about the civil rights era. There are also many about the space race. And there are even more about the importance of feminism, in one way or another. Until Hidden Figures, I cannot think of another great film capturing the importance of all three at the same time. Putting strong, smart women in a setting tensed by the space race and strained by segregation pulls this film in many directions, yet a delicate balance is achieved.

Based on a true story, Hidden Figures focuses on three African-American women working for NASA in the early 1960s. Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) is an extraordinary computer (she does the math) and is assigned to work on the trajectories of upcoming Mercury launches.  Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)  is also a computer but obviously has the mind to become a brilliant engineer, if only she could attend the all white classes. And Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) does the work of a supervisor without the pay, teaches herself how to work with the new IBM computer being installed that will eventually put her entire department out of work. She ultimately becomes the reason the IBM can function and brings her team of computers to work on it with her.  Hollywood weaves their stories together in a very compelling, entertaining and heartwarming fashion, splashing in bits of their home lives.

The film is more engaging and entertaining than many space race films of the past. Most of the tension does not happen in space but on the ground within the walls of NASA before launch coordinates have even been calculated. Strain between Katherine and her white, male co workers, takes a toll on her work, and her bladder. It’s sad and comic as Katherine must hike an embarrassing half mile to the closest colored ladies room every day, in heels and carrying her work with her. It’s a small victory when the tables are turned and minutes to launch, a low level young man is sent running Katherine’s same route to find her with the other black computers when she is needed most.

Best of all, our leads, Henson, Spencer and Monáe, are just as wonderful together as they are individually.  Henson portrays Katherine as a bit of a meek geek at first, but can keep up in a room full of white men and teach them a thing or two. Monáe’s Mary has just as much spunk as she does brains. Her scenes alongside an engineer Holocaust survivor, and her appeal to be the first black woman to take classes only for whites are poignant and memorable. And Spencer’s Dorothy is an unstoppable force, butting heads with white upper management and stealthily fixing issues with the IBM that leave the white boys scratching their heads. The trio’s opening scene together, trying to fix their car, is a hit that strikes the perfect chord to resonate throughout the entire film.

With nominations for Best Picture, best adapted screenplay and supporting actress (Octavia Spencer’s second nomination), Hidden Figures has made their way into the film history books nearly as well as the film’s subjects have. Honestly, I had never heard of either of these three extraordinary women before seeking out Hidden Figures. Maybe I read a quick headline when Obama presented Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but I did not know her story until now. The creators of this film have done a the world a great service bringing their stories to the masses. They are no longer hidden.

With a healthy PG rating, Hidden Figures is a wonderful film that can be fit for the whole family. Parents, if you are willing to to discuss the civil rights era, take your children to see Hidden Figures. If your child has any interest in NASA, the tech world or becoming an engineer, take them to see this. Just as importantly, if you child does not think math or school is important, you need to take them to see Hidden Figures. So many people have so much potential to do great things in this word, but only if they are given the chance.

“Every time we get a chance to get ahead they move the finish line. Every time.”

The Martian

The other day, I overheard a family talking about how NASA is looking for the next generation of astronauts.  I live in Huntsville, Alabama, birthplace of the Saturn V and home to lots of rocket scientists, so this conversation didn’t surprise me.  The father asked his tweens, “Do you think you could figure out how to live on Mars?”  I didn’t catch his kids’ replies.  The night before I had watched The Martian and wondered if the next generation of astronauts would look to characters like Mark Watney to see if they had the right stuff.

In Ridley Scott’s The Martian, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is left behind on Mars when his crew makes an emergency evacuation.  The crew, NASA and the whole world believes he is dead.  Realizing how stacked the odds are against him, Watney moves forward trying make enough food to survive on and find a way to contact NASA.  When NASA realizes that Watney is still alive, they get to work trying to make contact and the whole world unites trying to bring him home.  

Damon’s performance as the stranded Watney is entertaining, thrilling and educational.  He leads the film well, doing his lonely time surviving on the red planet.  While I imagine being alone on a planet to be a form of quiet meditation and crushing loneliness, Mark keeps it light, especially when the various cameras recording his every move for data.  He informs us what he is doing and why, which helps the story progress, usually with notes of light sarcasm.  I wonder if NASA rejects astronauts if they are too serious or melancholy for their own good and selects those that can cope through making jokes.  

When things go wrong for Watney, they are devastating blows, and Damon portrays those well too.  His first scene back at the habitat alone is an impromptu surgery to remove shrapnel from his abdomen.  It can be painful to watch.  When an accident takes out the crops his life was depending on, and makes the habitat dangerously unstable, the psychological blow to Watney is plain to see.  It’s a wonder this man doesn’t crack under the pressure and constant set backs.  

Back on Earth, we see the team at NASA working to help Watney.  Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels) is the director of NASA, who seems to cast this aura of doom and gloom with his authority.  Around him are notable underlings played by Kristin Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Bean who try to remain optimistic and make great strides in rescuing Watney.  I enjoyed Donald Glover’s small role as an eccentric astrophysicist who comes up with a brilliant Hail Mary sort of plan.   

Including Damon’s nomination for best actor, The Martian is nominated for seven Academy Awards.  The other awards include best adapted screenplay, production design, sound mixing, sound editing, visual effects and best picture.  I feel that Damon is simply too lighthearted in this role to win over juggernauts like DiCaprio or Redmayne, but I doubt The Martian will leave Oscar night empty handed.  

Overall, I believe that The Martian is a wonderful film worthy of its Oscar nominations.  It reminds me of Apollo 13 with a lighter approach.  If anyone out there really wants to part of the next generation of astronauts, I would highly recommend they see The Martian (and Apollo 13, The Right Stuff and Gravity just to name a few).  It’s mind boggling to think about all the intense life or death problems real astronauts need to be able to solve quickly and with very little to work with.  Well done astronauts of the past, future and fiction.  

“Mars will come to fear my botany powers.”

The Right Stuff

One day, about six years ago now, I got a little bored waiting for a class to start and wondered the corridors of Grissom Hall.  When you’re a student at Purdue, everyone gushes about Neil Armstrong, Amelia Earhart and even Orville Redenbacher but Gus Grissom seems to be just a dusty figure on the back shelf.  In this hall there were plaques, pictures and other memorabilia to remember one of our most important graduates yet I wondered what rock I’d been under not realizing Gus and I were united by our school.  I knew my space exploration history alright: Gus being one of the fist astronauts to orbit the Earth, yadda yadda yadda, let’s get to the moon landing already.  For some reason it wasn’t until bored little Freshman me wondered around until I really realized that if it hadn’t been for Gus and his six other Project Mercury astronauts there would be no reason to remember Neil Armstrong.  Suddenly, I had a new favorite alumni.

The Right Stuff encompasses all that was great about the space race and the beginnings of NASA: the spirit of adventure, thrill of flight, the men who dared to pushed the envelope beyond basic flight and rocketed into the unknown of space.  To get all this into a film, it has to be three hours long.  It starts in 1947, where test pilots are dropping like flies in attempts to break the sound barrier ends in 1963 with the end of Project Mercury, you can’t cram that amazing time period of so much advancement in flight and the entire space race into just two hours.  So before you strap in, have an extra bag of popcorn handy.  Though it is long, it’s worth the time.

The dangers and sacrifices of flight are one of the first things we see in the film.  Wives get a dreaded visitor, there’s a burial in a lonely desert graveyard for the pilots and they become a picture on a barroom wall.  Every man flying over that desert knows they could be next, yet they continue to push the envelope.  Eventually, it’s Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) who breaks the sound barrier, the first major achievement in the film.  After that, it seems Chuck keeps racing to stay the fastest man alive.

There’s also Fred Ward as Gus Grissom, Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper, Ed Harris as John Glenn and Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard.  Unless you already know all your astronauts it can be hard to keep them all straight for three hours.

When the Russians launch Sputnik, (Russian achievements are quick shaky scenes of a rocket launching and a man laughing behind the fumes, looking like an evil Russian wizard or something sinister), suddenly America has to scramble around to catch up.  They decide to try to be the first country to send a man into space.  When choosing the first astronauts, they first think about sending acrobats and daredevils, but thankfully come to their senses and seek out test pilots.

This is when the fun astronaut training begins and we see all the strange tests scientists put the prospective astronauts through, from blowing in a tube to keep a ball floating, to more odd and intense tests you may have never imagined.  All these tests go to determine the seven original astronauts chosen for Project Mercury.  Then the film goes into the attempts of launching rockets, the humiliation the astronauts face when NASA decides to first send a chimp and finally into sending men into space.

It’s a long haul to finally get out of the atmosphere, but it’s all worth it and you’re never bored.

The music is wonderful.  I’ve never heard Holst’s Planet Suite put to better use.  I’ve always found it uplifting and an audio representation of adventure and passion.  But it sounds like achieving such a brilliant score wasn’t so easy for composer John Barry when director Philip Kaufman tried to describe how he wanted the score as “sounding like you’re walking in the desert and you see a cactus, and you put your foot on it, but it just starts growing up through your foot.”  By that description, the soundtrack could have been pretty trippy.  Somehow Barry wrote a beautiful score around Holst’s Planets and incorporated a piece from The White Dawn and a few other classical favorites of Kaufman’s to send us to the stars and back.

If you have any interest in space exploration, the early history of NASA, of flight or you’ve ever dreamed of being an astronaut, this movie is for you.  Even if you’re not an astro nut, the drama is captivating enough to keep nearly every kind of movie goer interested.  There’s no technical jargon to make you feel stupid and you’ll probably learn a thing or two.

“Monkeys? You think a monkey knows he’s sittin’ on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys they know that, see? Well, I’ll tell you something, it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that’s on TV. Ol’ Gus, he did all right.”

Apollo 13

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 launched with the mission of landing on the moon.  The three men onboard Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred W. Haise, had trained their whole careers for this.  Everything was running according to plan when an oxygen tank ruptured.  Not knowing the full extent of the damage, but realizing how much oxygen had been lost, the mission to the moon was aborted.  For the next four days, the world watched as NASA worked around the clock to bring their men back to Earth.

The film does not deviate much from the history.  Not every little hiccup NASA encountered with Apollo 13 is in the film (it would’ve been way too long), but the major issues are present.  To fictionalize the story and make it more Hollywood, there is some focus on the men’s families left on Earth.  It’s all perfectly believable and shows the viewer what 1970 looked like.  Lovell’s teenage daughter being upset about The Beatles breaking up always made me smile.  It also reminds us that as NASA was frantically trying to help their men, all their loved ones could do was wait by a radio or television.

The dangers of space travel are a burden for the entire family.  One of the most heartfelt scenes is where Lovell (Hanks) is explaining to his young son how his mission is going work.  The boy asks about what happened with a previous mission, where two astronauts where killed.  With Mrs. Lovell listening at the door, Jim explains to his son that the door wouldn’t open and concludes with, but they fixed those problems.  When the boy is first informed that “something broke on his daddy’s ship” he immediately asks, “Was it the door?”

The family aspect may be what the average viewer is most interested in, but the real meat of the story is exactly what is happening on Apollo 13.  The danger is onboard 13 but the drama happens in mission control.  When Lovell and his men radio with a problem, it is their job to solve it and time is a matter of life and death.

This is the most intense case of “engineering to the rescue” I’ve ever seen, and I know way too many engineers from my time at Purdue.  The astronauts double check their calculations with mission control, men on Earth need to invent something that the men in space can build before their air becomes poisonous and every second counts.  The first few big problems solved and averted are intense and leave all viewers taking a deep breath of relief, but as more situations are piled on and on and the engineering is cranked up it becomes muddled.  Viewers without a scientific degree may find some things going right over their head, or even worse: be bored.

The big climax boarders on cliché.  The music rises and falls, we see all the family members faces, mission control is standing and the world holds their breath for way too long.  The viewer may check their watch at this point and as soon as they roll their eyes and stand up to go make a sandwich the climax is released.

That being said, I still enjoy Apollo 13.  It is my favorite film by Ron Howard.  There’s no excessive slow motion (anti-gravity is cool though), nothing is over-the-top and everything is firmly rooted in reality.  It’s a prestigious honor to direct the first film made with the cooperation of NASA and the story of Apollo 13 is not one to just throw together.  Howard treats it with the same meticulous care shown by every step in mission control.

Looking back, I’m not sure how Apollo 13 lost the visual effects award to Babe.  Yes, those talking animals are done perfectly, but did they miss the whole launch sequence?  It was done so well that NASA actually asked to use it for their own videos.  Just check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf5yLuyCTag

Apollo 13 is a film that everyone should see.  It may be a little too much science for some, but the story is enough to keep everyone involved.  The best part is the spirit of courage and heart for exploration that must be in every astronaut is present.  So many people dream of space travel and look to pioneers like Neil Armstrong, why not Jim Lovell?

“So long, Earth. Catch you on the flip side.”