Apollo 13 & From the Earth to the Moon this is most definitely not. Both Ron Howard's masterpiece & Tom Hanks' epic miniseries were portrayals of complex humans driving America's space program, while Director Damien Chazelle and writer Josh Singer seem to think that Neil Armstrong and the rest of the men at NASA were all one-dimensional automotons. Somebody forgot to remind these filmmakers that when you are dramatizing well-known historical events where the end result isn't in doubt, the drama & suspense need to come from the characters themselves. Instead, we get Ryan Gosling's Armstrong showing no emotion and never displaying any sense of ambition. After a personal tragedy at the start of the film he is distant and cold to everyone around him, including his wife and children. He drifts through the story, moving from scene to scene without any apparent purpose or emotional drive. He's going through the motions and doesn't seem phased when he's ultimately chosen for the Apollo 11 mission. This emptiness, which is echoed by everyone around him (apparently there was never any laughter or lightheartedness at NASA), creates a void at the center of the film that saps all of the energy and joy from the climactic scenes on the Moon. Why should we care about this momentous occasion when the main character clearly doesn't? It's fitting that we don't see Armstrong's face for almost all of the Moon sequence, since we never see his insides during his journey up to that point. By the end I was so angry with Armstrong as a person - and at NASA for letting someone who appeared to be a borderline sociopath anywhere near a rocket - that this felt like the origin story of a villain instead of an examination of a family at the center of one of humanity's greatest triumphs. But that's not even the worst of it. Chazelle & Gosling's story and performance choices do an incredible disservice to the brilliant VFX and sound editing that give at least a little life to what is otherwise an interminably boring character study of an absurdly uninteresting man. First Man is a tragedy of wasted potential.
Review by Mike ShawVIP EP 2BlockedParent2023-06-01T05:58:04Z
Apollo 13 & From the Earth to the Moon this is most definitely not. Both Ron Howard's masterpiece & Tom Hanks' epic miniseries were portrayals of complex humans driving America's space program, while Director Damien Chazelle and writer Josh Singer seem to think that Neil Armstrong and the rest of the men at NASA were all one-dimensional automotons. Somebody forgot to remind these filmmakers that when you are dramatizing well-known historical events where the end result isn't in doubt, the drama & suspense need to come from the characters themselves. Instead, we get Ryan Gosling's Armstrong showing no emotion and never displaying any sense of ambition. After a personal tragedy at the start of the film he is distant and cold to everyone around him, including his wife and children. He drifts through the story, moving from scene to scene without any apparent purpose or emotional drive. He's going through the motions and doesn't seem phased when he's ultimately chosen for the Apollo 11 mission. This emptiness, which is echoed by everyone around him (apparently there was never any laughter or lightheartedness at NASA), creates a void at the center of the film that saps all of the energy and joy from the climactic scenes on the Moon. Why should we care about this momentous occasion when the main character clearly doesn't? It's fitting that we don't see Armstrong's face for almost all of the Moon sequence, since we never see his insides during his journey up to that point. By the end I was so angry with Armstrong as a person - and at NASA for letting someone who appeared to be a borderline sociopath anywhere near a rocket - that this felt like the origin story of a villain instead of an examination of a family at the center of one of humanity's greatest triumphs. But that's not even the worst of it. Chazelle & Gosling's story and performance choices do an incredible disservice to the brilliant VFX and sound editing that give at least a little life to what is otherwise an interminably boring character study of an absurdly uninteresting man. First Man is a tragedy of wasted potential.