He had mustered out of active duty after the Korean War and after completing his degree became a NACA and then NASA civil employee test pilot. Left the reserves in 1960.
He was initially picked for the ARPA DoD based spaceflight project but after that was abandoned then made it into the second NASA class.
I wondered the same thing when i was watching. The answer is inconclusive.
NASA said the official pronunciation was “-nee” back in the day, but it varied within NASA. It seems like they’re retroactively standardized it to “-nee”. For the movie, they picked one to avoid further confusion.
It’s Gemi-KNEE, then. 
Growing up in the 1960s and being a fan of the Apollo missions, I always pronounced it Gemi-NIGH. Maybe it’s because the TV announcers pronounced it that way, but I can’t remember if they did or not. Or maybe it’s because my astro sign is Gemini.
Okay, thanks. Maybe that’s why the poster considers him a civilian. Or maybe the movie portrays him that way. I haven’t seen it yet.
Well said, and I agree. All in all, I would’ve preferred more space stuff and less marital angst.
Yes! The final scene was a huge anticlimax and an emotional dead zone. Several people in the theater actually *laughed *at it.
Claire Foy was terrific as the wife but, although he did a pretty good job in the role, I could never really get over how little Gosling looks like Armstrong.
What got me was how little sense of wonder there was to the movie. The scenes on the Moon also felt much too brief after all that buildup. It would’ve been nice to show Neil and Buzz doing some science up there, for instance.
Was it really that loud and distracting in the LEM during the descent? I knew there were some computer-error messages but it was quite a cacophony.
One of the trailers showed Armstrong looking very upset as he stood outside a house on fire. That scene wasn’t in the movie. Anyone know what it was supposed to be?
Yes, that was a nice bit.
Overall, though, a disappointing movie, I’d say. Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff were better (as was the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon).
Is it worth seeing this movie in IMAX? Or on just a regular screen? I haven’t seen it yet.
Part of the point of the movie was to demythologize the notion of the “steely-eyed missile man”. NASA played up the astronaut corps as shining American heroes but the reality is that many of them had a lot of emotional problems following (and for some during) the Apollo program. Armstrong has long been regarded as being a quiet, self-assured test pilot with little emotional flair, which is superficially true, but the obsessive effort required to succeed in the astronaut corps and detachment at home ultimately resulted in his divorce in 1994 and some degree of estrangement from his children. Everybody knows the basic story of the Apollo moon landing; few people really understand the human toll it took to get there, not just on the astronauts but on engineers, technicians, and their families who suffered for the degree of focus it took to succeed.
People like to imagine that space exploration is wonderous and magical, and indeed, the unqiue view of the Earth and walking on a different world may be so, but much of space exploration is mundane, tedious, and even disgusting. Being stuck in a minivan sized capsule means you hear every burp and smell every fart, and most of the astronauts suffered nausea from weighlessness and other problems. There is, of course, the infamous “loose turd” incident on Apollo 10, and in general it is just like any other trip you might take with a bunch of guys for 10 days stuck in an RV or a hunting cabin save that you can’t step out and take some air.
Aside from some sample collection and dropping the hammer and feather, Armstrong and Aldrin did no real science on the Moon. Only later missions even made a pretense at doing more than superficial science, and only the last mission, Apollo 17, had an actual geologist (Harrison Schmitt) on crew. The lunar program was never about doing science but about a demonstration of technological prowess and national pride.
The landing of the LEM with the multiple alarms and errors from the Primary Guidance, Navigation and Control System (PGNCS) was, as far as I can tell, a pretty accurate representation of the descent, which was indeed fraught with concern that the system was not acting nominally due to an unknown hardware issue resulting in spurious loss of cycles for computing due to the rendezvous radar being left in standby mode (but actually making requests of PGNCS). It was a tense time and Aldrin admitted that if he had been in command he would have aborted the landing attempt. Armstrong had enough experience with landing without primary guidance that he felt it was still feasible, although I don’t think he intended to bring them down with far less than the minimum reserve.
If you didn’t care for how little Ryan Gosling looked like Neil Armstrong, how did you care for the lack of resemblence between Tom Hanks and Jim Lovell, who really looks like a tall Kevin Costner? I will say that I spotted very few continuity errors and anachronisms in First Man, although the lack of delay in communications at Lunar distance annoyed me, as did the streaking on the windows which should be clear as the Aft Boost Protective cover would have covered them during atmospheric ascent; they also couldn’t have seen out the windows during launch, and the grubbiness of the capsule at launch was unrealistic, although they tended to become saturated with effluvium during even a few days of mission. Also, the LLTV failure was not quite as depicted but they obviously wanted Armstrong to land with the buring LLTV in frame. In general, it was a pretty realistic depiction of what the Gemini and Apollo missions were actually like. Contrast that with the numerous factual and technical errors and anachronisms in Apollo 13 and the histeronic overacting of of Kathleen Quinlan as Lovell’s wife, and I don’t think there is really a comparison in how realistic the two films are. The Right Stuff, while an entertaining movie, has so many anachronisms and errors that have been extensively documented that it really should be regarded as an “inspired by” rather than accurate depiction of the Mercury program.
As for the film and performances, I really enjoyed nearly everything about it from the grainy, cinéma vérité cinematography to the understated performances. I would hazard a guess that Claire Foy is up for a Best Supporting Actress nomination for a performance that never goes over the top but expresses the fear and angst in realizing that her husband may not come home from any day “in the office” and that if he dies during the Apollo 11 mission, there may be a national day of mourning for his loss but she will be living as a single mother for the rest of her life. I also enjoyed Corey Stoll’s assholish take on Buzz Aldrin, especially the, “I’m just saying what everyone is thinking,” arrogance which really personifies Aldrin in contrast to the understated Armstrong.
Stranger
I saw it on IMAX. For half of the movie it didn’t matter. For the other half, the IMAX experience was spectacular. Spend the extra bucks for IMAX.
Thanks for those thoughts, Stranger.
Here’s a nice *60 Minutes *interview with Neil Armstrong in 2005: - YouTube
And an interview with Ryan Gosling on preparing for the role, and how the film was shot (see 8:10-8:40 in particular): "More shaking!": Ryan Gosling on playing Neil Armstrong for First Man - YouTube
Roger that, and thanks.
It was never about doing MOON science. It was very much about doing science and engineering for things like rocketry, computerization, radio, life systems, materials science etc.
Again, “…about a demonstration of technological prowess and national pride.” There was relatively little new science—even of materials science and propulsion engineering—for the Apollo program. The most significant advances were in computer memory and the Apollo Unified S-Band System, neither of which was really basic science. Most other systems and materials were adapted from existing technologies as there just wasn’t time to develop and mature completely new materials in the designated timeframe, and the objective wasn’t to advance any particular area of science or engineering but just to beat the Soviets to the Moon, given the failures to beat them into Earth orbital space.
Stranger
Neil deGrasse Tyson has a StarTalk podcast episode where he and his in-studio co-conspirators (Mike Massimino, astronaut and Chuck Nice, schmuck) talk briefly about the movie and the early days of the Apollo missions. The show contains interviews Neil Armstrong and Gene Kranz and is fascinating to hear. My reaction to the Gene Kranz section was pretty much the same as Chuck Nice’s. I heartily recommend giving it a listen.
It was that. It was also instrumental in advancing a ton of related fields, perhaps in engineering more often than traditional “new” science. That’s not to say it was the raison d’être, but it did have real benefit.
To a certain extent, but probably the biggest real benefit was making engineering and spaceflight seem engaging and exciting to people who were not traditionally fans of science fiction and space opera, and by establishing NASA as a civilian organization charged with space exploration and planetary science created a centralized organization funding science and astronomy for peaceful purposes rather than as piecemeal ancillaries to military departments like the Naval Observatory or the Air Force crewed spaceflight program and became the premier space program that essentially every other European and Japanese space programs were modeled after.
The planetary science missions of NASA like Ranger were originally intended largely to support crewed missions and have generally received only secondary and often indifferent public interest and Congressional funding, but while the crewed program has always consumed the bulk of the budget either in vehicle and space station development or operations, it is the planetary exploration and space astronomy missions that have yielded the most interesting space science. But arguably the most valuable and practical applications have been Earth surveillance missions run jointly with NOAA allowing for accurate weather prediction and climate date.
Stranger
The wife and i saw it on Saturday. We thought it pretty good.
Here’s Slate on fact vs. fiction in the movie: First Man fact vs. fiction: What’s true in the Neil Armstrong movie.
*By all accounts, the portrayal of Aldrin (Corey Stoll) as something of a loudmouth who speaks before he thinks is accurate. Writing in the Space Review, an observer of Aldrin’s speech to the 2017 Humans to Mars Summit (yes, there is such a thing) reported, “By now, anybody who has been in the space field or attended a few space conferences knows … that he is the space equivalent of Grandpa Simpson: once he starts talking, he won’t stop, and he doesn’t care if nobody is listening, or if he’s interrupting the conversation, or if he is inconveniencing others.” *
Yep, that’s Buzz Aldrin.
Stranger
Did you see it in IMAX or regular? The wife and I are planning to see it this weekend. Probably IMAX, based on an upthread recommendation. I think we’ll like it, almost no matter what, because she and I grew up in that decade and we were fans of the Apollo missions. I hope we like it, anyway.
For those who’d like to compare, here’s how the Apollo 11 landing was shown in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon (with Tony Goldwyn as Armstrong, Bryan Cranston as Aldrin, and Cary Elwes as Collins): Powered Descent - YouTube
All I can see is how terrible late-'Nineties CGI looks now and wonder why Bryan Cranston looks exactly the same twenty years ago as he does today. Also, the cabin of the Eagle looks large enough to host World Series of Poker event.
Stranger
