Movie review: "First Man" · 1:52am Oct 18th, 2018
So, last night I went to see "First Man". It's a movie about:
(1) a man who can't deal with his own emotions, and really can't deal with other human beings when under stress;
(2) how wide Claire Foy can dilate her pupils; and
(3) how Buzz Aldrin was a completely gratuitous dick, even more so than history records.
All of which was filmed in wobble-vision, blur-o-rama, hyper-close-up, and all sorts of other cinematographic tricks that make a really damn expensive movie look really cheap. Not helped by the fact that, although Ryan Gosling really does look a lot like Neil Armstrong, he's the ONLY actor who looks a damn thing like the real-life person they're portraying. (Except for the guy playing Gunther Wendt, but he has no lines.)
Biggest disappointment: the aforementioned "Buzz Aldrin has three scenes prior to the Apollo 11 sequence, so let's use them all to make him a noxious, unlikable jerk, but never explain how he was picked for the mission." This is kind of important because, in real life, Deke Slayton offered Armstrong the choice of kicking Aldrin and having someone else, probably Jim Lovell, instead. So we get Asshole Aldrin, but never get any explanation for why Asshole Aldrin is in any way relevant.
They go to a lot of trouble to make the flight sequences realistic, which only makes the Apollo 11 sequence, with its piss-poor Moon mockup, all the more disappointing.
2/5. Rent, don't buy. (And to be honest, one of those two stars is only there because it's a movie about space.)
In b4 Flag complaints
Also can we talk about how they ignored him planting the flag, literaly the most iconic image of the whole thing, because (In Gosling's own word and the people making it) "it should be celebrated as a human achievement not an american one"?
Yeah people! Let's ignore how the space race was first and foremost a dick measuring contest between the USSR and USA! Let's ignore history because it isn't cool to show patriotism in Hollywood nowdays!
Absolutely mental.
4954680 Fuckin prophet
Thanks for the heads up, more or less already made up my mind due to all the bad press; oh well I'll watch Apollo 13 again this weekend ... not really a hardship
What we really need is a Guenter Wendt movie.
Looking forward to any way in which you channel your pique into writing The Maretian.
4954683 Well, that's just it. The film isn't about Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. The film is about how Neil Armstrong was completely unable to express his emotions to ANYBODY AT ALL. The moon sequence was, by a mile, my least liked part of the movie as a whole.
4954701 So they took one of the most amazing technical and human feats of the entire planet, something unprecedented in all of history, and made it about how one of the guys who did it controlled his emotions to an extent that we modern people consider odd.
Now I'm seeing into the future. I can see a future movie being made about the first man who traveled faster than light and lived to return, and his inner struggle with not being able to really come to grips with his hamster dying in 8th grade.
Really, Hollywood. Astronauts are/were jerks in certain ways because test pilots *don't* react emotionally to situations where doing so would kill them dead, and most of the astronauts in the beginning of the space program were test pilots, ergo... (Harrison Schmitt was one geologist on the Apollo missions who helped write a *fascinating* book on lunar geology that even non-geologists like me could understand. I wish I could remember the title. It's been about ten years since I saw it. Could be To A Rocky Moon.)
I’m pretty sure that Apolllo 13, The Wrath of Khan, and The Undiscovered Country are the only good films about space that Hollywood has ever produced.
No, Star Wars doesn’t count because it’s not a film (anthology) about space. It’s a film (anthology) about space wizards.
4954683
Spite is an amazing motivator for humanity. I wanna see a tech-race version of The Prestige, with two flawed inventors trying to outdo each other dickishly.
4954726
What? No Space Camp?
Sounds like I will be unable to watch it if it has that much shaky cam. That stuff makes me literally throw up.
4954734
You mean like Tesla and Edison?
4954748
I said two inventors.
About that tier of vitriol, though.
4954751
True. That pair is more like an inventor and a "try everything and see what works" sweatshop.
No wonder this film flopped.
The right - What about the flag
The left - But it is a heroic moment for white men who are allowed to be the leaders of the future. Also, let’s not forget that as a white man walked on the moon, people of color and women were still fighting for their rights on Earth.
4954837 4954683 4954846 I should point out, full disclosure, that the absence of the flag raising is supremely unimportant to me. The movie did cover, well enough, the presence of the US/USSR rivalry in decent emotional terms, although I would have liked a bit more lead-up to Apollo 11 on that point. (The movie jumps almost immediately from the Flying Bedstead crash to the Apollo 10 splashdown.) I don't feel any particular need to see "yay, victory lap, USA #1" again, except possibly to play up just how much trouble they had getting that flag to stay upright more than two seconds. And since this was the climax of the movie, that bit of comedy wouldn't be appropriate artistically.
But instead, they have Armstrong literally mooning around on the surface, staring into a giant bottomless pit of a crater that wasn't there in real life, being emotional, while Buzz Aldrin runs around alone doing stuff. And that drives me nuts because that absolutely, positively, did not happen. The Apollo 11 surface time was rigidly controlled down to the minute. Both Neil and Buzz had way too much to do- and one of the more common complaints among those who walked on the moon was that they were never allowed any time at all to reflect on the experience while they were there.
So, to me:
Flag = unimportant.
Neil Armstrong being openly emotional and not doing his damn job because the director and screenwriter wanted to make a movie about his inner emotional turmoil and inability to communicate it, rather than about him being an astronaut = deal-breaker.
4954859
Ah, so Less Titanic and more Pearl Harbor. Or not honoring the historical persons and events, and placing the story into them in a way of "could have been" that doesn't directly impact said events. Like Titanic at least tried to.
Pearl Harbor OTOH, well the main characters took the place of multiple historical persons, in a way insulting to them and the history involved. But then seeing the Arizonia memorial in the background of a November 1941 scene, or guide missile cruisers with Japanese bomb splashes happening around them? A clear sign of the production not giving a shit about history.
4955134 First Man wasn't that bad. Although there were a lot of omissions, most of what it showed up to the moon mission was historically accurate. But the moon landing sequence, particularly the special effects, is jarringly bad, and the climax of the movie, as I've mentioned, is complete bullshit.
I just remember that during the trailer I watched I was becoming increasingly bewildered, and asked myself, "Are they trying to make a horror movie or something with that soundtrack?" But I guess it kind of makes sense if they are just trying to convey how hard it is to do rocket science right.
4955894 There's a bit of that, because you can't tell Neil Armstrong's story without mentioning the several times he came within moments of aircraft-induced death. But I found the soundtrack to be annoying and unimaginative.
4954726
For a second I was gonna interject that you forgot The Voyage Home... But... Hehe... That' was never a "space" movie. Voyage Home was always a comedy about life on Earth!
I've already decided to wait on seeing First Man. I have two feee movie passes that expire in February. It's the only movie I even remotely feel like seeing... But I think I'll still wait. I have a nasty cold, and will wait for it to show up in the "cheap" theater (they play movies that typically are no longer playing in other theaters for very cheap)... Maybe...
I'm sure at least two things will pop up between now and February that'll actually be worth my time.
4954859
I think Hollywood just loves to subvert our expectations.
4954726 Now there's a crossover: Apollo 13: The Wrath of Khan The US makes an entire space program to strand the most dangerous criminal of all time on the moon. They should have stopped after one trip.
4954726
Though maybe we should probably put 2001: A Space Odyssey on the list too.
Finally! Someone who gets what the truly great space films are.
4954735
Honestly, Space Camp was okay, but boy oh boy it wasn't very accurate to reality. 
He said good films.
4957707
That was about robots and space babies, not space.
4957808
Meh...point.