A great movie indeed however it uses the white savior trope gratuitously. The scene where Kevin Costner’s character lets Octavia Spencer’s character into the mission control room never happened in real life.
Octavia Spenser plays Dorothy Vaughan, the programmer. Katherine Johnson was played by Taraji Henson.
The movie deliberately side steps history in order to tell a story. For example the accomplishments of the three primary characters occurred during unrelated timelines. The three primary characters likely knew each other in passing but in addition to the different timelines they worked in unrelated departments on unrelated projects. Also Katherine Johnson took 3 days to confirm John Glenn’s landing coordinates within the week of launch. The movie reduced that to an hour effort holding up launch for dramatic effect. John Glenn really did ask for Johnson to personally verify the numbers though.
There are three supporting characters that are real life figures: Al Harrison played by Kevin Costner, Jim Johnson played by Mahershala Ali, and Olke Krupa who played a fictionalized version of a real engineer mostly accurately depicted as Mary Jackson’s real life supervisor. The rest of the supporting cast were largely stereotype figures.
Considering the historical reality I did not take the white characters as white saviors at all.
There are other... issues with the movie. At the end, Katherine Johnson is shown running between her office in Virginia, and Mercury mission control, which was actually in Florida. This has to do with her checking computer calculations of orbits for John Glenn's flight -- something she actually did do, but it's depicted as being done in minutes, and it actually took her more like a week. (Computers of the time were damn slow by modern standards, but they were still faster than that!) It was not a big secret that the Redstone rocket (a souped-up V2) couldn't put something as heavy as a Mercury capsule into orbit. And so forth.
The movie's a good story, but if you want actual history, read the book.
I didn’t read it as Costner being a “savior”. She had all the agency and action. She just needed someone to give her a fair shake. I should go back and read the book though because I’m curious about where they bent the story for dramatic purposes.
Yeah, that trope is regrettable. Don't forget the entirely fictitious scene where Costner's character "ended" segregated bathrooms by taking down a "whites only" sign.
