First Man 2018
I generally like anything about the space program. The movie The Right Stuff is a favorite of mine. First Man has gotten mostly positive reviews but it seems like some people weren’t that crazy about it. There’s not much else out right now so it seemed like a safe choice. While maybe there haven’t been that many space program movies, it is still hard to avoid cliches and Apollo 13 has already covered a lot of this, making a dismal failure seem like a success of American ingenuity. It is ironic then that a movie about the most famous of all spaceflights would be considered by some to be a downer. Most of the flaws of the movie come down to the main character, Neil Armstrong, a strong quiet type instead of someone brimming with confidence and can-do attitude. His superpower is the ability to make the right decisions incredibly quickly under extreme pressure. Therefore by his nature he is quietly competent, which doesn’t make for a great movie. Even in his personal life he was reserved, so not only does the audience have a hard time getting to know him, even his wife seemed to have a hard time with it. Still, the basics of the story are all here as Armstrong goes from civilian test pilot to Gemini astronaut to Apollo astronaut and eventually the first man on the moon. We get to see some of the incidents that had to have impressed NASA management. We also see a lot of his home life as his wife tries to understand him and tries to deal with having an astronaut husband and the very real risks of him dying at any time on top of some family tragedy dealt with early in the movie. So it is kind of slow and downbeat. The direction features a lot of shaky cam which is okay maybe inside a space capsule being rocked by Saturn V engines, but it shows up other places as well. And there are a lot of cliches. So maybe it isn’t a great movie, but it is a good one, worth watching just to remember what a challenge the moonshot really was.
Written: 28 Oct 2018