Henson’s character is the strong, independent, glass ceiling-shattering figure the film wants to prop up, and we see this in the depiction of her as both a pivotal piece in the NASA mathematics division and as a single mother.Īlmost everywhere where the three lead characters are not being shown as actual characters, however, the script just spouts dialogue full of useless platitudes. Henson) home life, where her character is properly expanded upon, we get a genuine character study worth exploring. One would expect, then, that the attention to the eponymous characters would make up for this superficiality in historicism. But as much as the film attempts to highlight a negative period in American History, it only accomplishes this at the most fundamental level. If this is the goal of the film, then that is all well and good. Hidden Figures is the type of sanitized film that middle school teachers show their students during Black History Month. But this story is not given the dignity of a script that can move beyond the predictable beats.
This true story is one of breaking barriers and overcoming adversity, one of strong black women who fought back against their oppressive government by succeeding within it.
There isn’t anything particularly productive about making light in this way. The film is designed around the punchline of laughing at historical transgressions, the thesis statement of “a Negro woman doing X! How ludicrous!”Our trio of protagonists respond quite calmly to these hurdles with winking one-liners, as if they realize that history will do right by them in the end. Morality films such as these often fall into this pitfall, where characters are hyper aware of their situation as if they themselves are looking back as we are. It is this retrograde rose-tinting of history that plagues Hidden Figures. A potential food shortage, an incident with a tiny interloper, and an unfortunate accident all push the family towards the one predictably inevitable event in a movie called Hidden… discovery.There is something cautionary about a film that opens with a scene that outlines a superficial context by having every line of dialogue out of the characters’ mouths point to the obvious mores of the day, to the point where a character has to exclaim what year it is to highlight the already obvious irony of their immediate situation. In spite of their best efforts, the tension continues to mount. With personalizing touches like these, The Duffer Brothers weave a (more or less) successful vision of a stable, loving family trying to keep things together under extraordinary circumstances. “Stop calling me Zoe-Zoe! I’m not a baby anymore,” becomes a familiar refrain, in fact.
While Zoe’s mother Claire comforts her daughter who’s plagued by nightmares about The Breathers, she’s also working on coming to terms with the idea that her little girl is growing up. The father/daughter relationship between him and Zoe takes center stage and Skarsgård puts his heart into it. It’s during this claustrophobic-yet-kinda-cozy period that Alexander Skarsgård truly shines as the devoted father, Ray. And, by the time we meet our characters Ray, Claire, and their eight year old daughter, Zoe, they’ve been hiding underground for 301 days doing everything they can to avoid being found by “The Breathers.”Īs a well-crafted “slow burn”-style horror/thriller, the first half of the film concerns itself with getting to know the characters, observing the family dynamic, and seeing what life is like for them in their bomb shelter home. This virus “changes” anyone that it affects. Hidden - not to be confused with the Kyle MacLachlan/alien parasite fun-fest, The Hidden (1987) - centers around a small family who’ve escaped to the safety of an old fallout shelter while their once sleepy town of Kingsville, North Carolina is ravaged by some kind of viral outbreak. Prior to the Stranger Things explosion of 2016, however… I’m guessing most of us were chillin’ under that Duffer-less rock.Įverybody got their start somewhere, though! And for the Duffers it was a couple of short films followed by their debut feature-length project released in 2015, Hidden. With three seasons down and at least one more on the way for their monumentally popular 80s throwback Netflix series, Stranger Things (2016-), you’d have to have been living under a rock for the last few years to not have heard about The Duffer Brothers.
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