I thought I might like to see it, until I found out that Damian what’s-his-name also wrote and directed “La La Land” and “Whiplash”, two movies that I’m sure glad I didn’t pay good money to see in the theater, because I shut both of them off within 15 or 20 minutes.
The bio “First Man” lasted, for me, not many more pages. From what I saw, that was one boring book.
Here’s CNN’s review of the movie, and a brief interview with the director (but it’s more about La La Land than First Man): https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/11/entertainment/first-man-review/index.html
Saw it last night and really enjoyed it. I felt the flight scenes with grinding metal sounds and shaking very tension-filled. For a movie where I knew exactly how each scene was going to end, I was still an absolute stress case by the end. Seeing it in a place with a good sound system is important.
The comment about family dynamics is right, it plays a big part. I don’t feel it overshadowed the space part, but it is a major part of the movie if you aren’t into that kind of thing.
I laughed at a scene where the astronauts are in a classroom after time on a simulator, and every one has vomit stains on their shirts.
I was fourteen when Armstrong stepped out onto the moon. I was so keyed up that the images my eyes took in could not be processed by my brain. Never took my eyes from the screen but I could not see it.
I saw it and didn’t hate it but didn’t love it. It was way too long. It needed at least a half hour cut. The family stuff was not as interesting as the movie thought it was.
What I did like is how much of the space exploration and life offs were from the POV of the people in the cockpits. That was interesting.
Yeah, they really did a good job of conveying the feeling of claustrophobia to the audience; it fest like the astronauts were being sealed in a tomb at times. I liked the way they shot the scenes of the Armstrongs’ domestic life; it was almost like watching really high quality home movies of my grandparents. Honestly I never knew Neil had a daughter who died of cancer before. Did that bit where he left her bracelet on the Moon really happen, or was it made up for the film?
I really liked this movie, and this was quite a big reason why. The sense of risk and pushing the boundaries was really visceral. And keeping the perspective close to the actual astronaut experience helped connect the audience to that. Essentially they used the astronauts as a proxy for the audience in a way that made me feel the fear involved in these giant leaps, and made their professionalism and coolness under tension even more remarkable.
I think the criticism over Buzz’s depiction, etc. is largely overblown. He came across as a little brash, but not to a ridiculous or even obnoxious degree.
It is apparently artistic license taken to an uncorroborated inference drawn by biographer Hansen that he had taken it with him in his personal items allowance, though apparently Armstrong never either confirmed or denied it to him and in interviews with the family they claimed to not know for a fact if he had taken any family mementos with him or not. And it is known other moonwalkers *did *leave small memorials behind or took materials of special significance (e.g. Aldrin’s Communion kit).
Astronaut Al Worden in turn has said that Armstrong is portrayed as more aloof than he really was, so one can find it likely the writers and director may have chosen to play up Buzz’s personality in order to draw even more attention to Armstrong’s low-key character.
I’ve seen that, recently. It’s on display in the Narthex of his former church, a Presbyterian church in Webster TX.
Looking forward to it! Did they get permission to use the original moon landing sets for authenticity?
/duck
If Buzz hears you saying that, you’d better duck!
Buzz throws a mean right cross!
I generally liked the film but didn’t like how unemotional he and his wife were. I know there was a lot of emotional repression in the 1960’s, but I think they took it too far. Especially at the end - she could have at least appeared pleased to see him still alive. Instead I got the impression she was just thinking “oh, you’re still here. Ok, I guess”.
I just told a friend that I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to make a depressing movie about the moon landing. It was clearly well done, but it is not a happy movie.
Saw the film with the family, somewhat intense for the kids, but they got through it. (Indirectly showing deaths caused them confusion.)
I liked that the movie was primarily about Armstrong, and not the space race. There’s plenty of other sources about going to the moon; it’s great to have a biopic about the astronaut himself.
I don’t have any problem about the depiction of Aldrin–he was a cocky blowhard, and that’s a complement because he was that great. I’d love to see a similar film focused on his personal life.
I recently read Gene Cernan’s memoir, Last Man on the Moon, and Cernan is not complimentary about Buzz Aldrin. He says Buzz “worked himself into a frenzy with his campaign to be the first man to walk on the moon.” Cernan found his arguments “both offensive and ridiculous”. He says that being the second man on the lunar surface was to Aldrin a defeat, and “would send him into a spiral of depression”.
Cernan is defensive about his own spacewalk for Gemini 9, which did not go well, as NASA had vastly underestimated the difficulty of working in space. (That chapter is entitled “The Spacewalk from Hell”.) He says that by the time Buzz Aldrin walked during Gemini 12, many of the problems had been worked out and the workload had been reduced to something realistic. “Quite frankly, we said he was only working a ‘monkey board’”. Aldrin would “openly claim in later years that he had personally solved all the problems of EVA, and that his spacewalk went smoothly because he was better prepared than the rest of us.”
Humility is not an Aldrin trait often displayed.
I believe that it is pretty well know that Armstrong was a very stoic man. Many people I know disliked him as a person, without ever having met him, for this reason alone. I felt that the character being portrayed on screen was an amalgam of archetypes - “determined man”, “does it by himself man”, “has no time or patience for others mistakes man”, “keeps his emotions in man”… etc. I think that may encapsulate Armstrong very well.
I thought the portrayal of Aldrin was good as well, outspoken, little filter, no-nonsense delivery of what he believes to be the truth. As I understood part of the argument (not depicted in the movie) about first one out, was that as Pilot, it would be his job, as the Pilot of the Gemini missions and the Command Module was the one to do the EVA work.
I wonder, in long hindsight, and with no possibility of knowing the truth, that with Grissom’s death in Apollo 1 (who would definitely been Slayton’s choice for first on the moon) Armstrong became the choice because he was the ‘best’ of the non-military pilots. Better to have a civilian as first on the moon, rather than a Military person. Crew rotation not withstanding, as Slayton would have changed stuff around as needed.
As to the movie itself, I found the flight scenes to be a little bit over-noisy. I did like how they made the rocket rides disorienting by playing around with the rotation of the picture, making cut-offs and re-starts more jarring for the viewer. I’m not sure I’d ride to space in anything that made that many creaky noises - clanks, pressure whooshes, whines, ticks, OK - Creaks? not so much.
Wasn’t Armstrong Navy?
Something else I wanted to mention: was the movie pronouncing “Gemini” wrong or have I and everyone else I have ever heard say it been saying it wrong? (Movie: “Jem-ih-Nee”. Everywhere else: “Jem-uh-nai”