What do you think about "First Man" a naw biopic movie about Neil Armstrong?

[Pawelk198604]

It would be officially released in Poland in October 19.

 

When I first time peeked on trailer, I thought it's some new sci-fi, until i realized that tech is not very much sci-fi  

 

Does the movie is good?

 

PS Neil Armstrong is my childhood hero along with Yuri Gagarin  even though I like watching Pete Conrad Apollo 12 landing video  than Apollo 11, not know why    

Edited October 17, 2018 by Pawelk198604

[tater]

14 minutes ago, Pawelk198604 said:

Does the movie is good?

Is the movie good?

Yeah, I saw it over the weekend. There is only one real spoiler, so I won't discuss that. Overall, I thought it was a good movie. Not a great movie, but worth watching.

The movie is about Neil, not about Apollo per se. It takes a sort of dark path with the death of his young daughter, and shows Neil as a quiet, brooding figure who is driven to move his goal forward. He comes across rather cold in the movie, which I don't think is very accurate. Buzz comes across as a bit of a jerk, which might be accurate, he was a difficult person by all accounts at that time.

Technically? The sets for the X-15, Gemini, and Apollo are awesome, though the latter 2 interiors are grossly too weathered. I think they forgot that the ones sitting in museums are USED spacecraft, and that when the astronauts boarded them, they were brand new. There are some other, minor technical errors (contact light call bugged me, you'll see), but it was generally good in that regard. They got space right (black).

Other issues? The music was often too loud, particularly on the Moon landing. I think in general the use of shaky cam was OK for X-15, and for the 7 g ascent of Gemini, but for the LEM they could have created better drama with the landing than they did.

 

[KG3]

I didn't like the movie much.  It seemed like it was filmed entirely with a shaky hand held camera.  Also the director tries to get you to connect emotionally with Neil, his wife and other characters by using extreme close up shots of their faces.  Long lingering close up shots of faces, with a jittery hand held camera.  I felt like I spent 2/3 of the movie staring into the nostrils and inscrutable forlorn eyes of Ryan Gosling.  I think that the director would have put the camera directly into his sinus cavity if he could!  It did really nothing to help the story and just made me mad after a while.  But that's what I get for sitting in the second row of the theater.       

[Nikolai]

It was more somber than I expected.  First Man appears to be trying to argue that a family tragedy that occurs early in the film is what provides his motivation to take on one of the hardest jobs ever offered.

And obviously, I can't rule that out completely, but that idea that he's driven enough to tackle being an astronaut seems to be at odds with how it portrays Neil Armstrong -- almost robotically going through the motions at times (especially when he's at work), angrily isolating himself from family and friends.  While Neil was a quiet person, this anger and self-imposed, somber solitude seems to be at serious odds with the footage and pictures we have of the man, where he doesn't seem at all reluctant to offer a genuine smile from time to time.

I think the filmmakers wanted to highlight the isolation of astronauts generally -- to the point of

Spoiler

killing the Apollo 1 astronauts all alone with a dull thud, when the actual event blew the hatch out and seriously burned people in the White Room who tried to help

.  And there's value in that -- you certainly get a feel for what it might have been like to fly machines that were basically a powerful engine with as little else as possible.  But on the whole, I think it leads to a certain emotional imbalance in the film.  It's well worth watching, and some of the shots and attention to detail are striking, but I don't think you get the dramatic emotional highs and lows that keep me coming back to movies like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff.

Edited October 18, 2018 by Nikolai
Clarified what themes seem to be in conflict (I thought it was left ambiguous in my original post)

[tater]

I agree with both the other reviews above 100%, though I liked it more than @KG3 did.

[KerbMav]

Does it have enough "big shots" to warrant viewing it on a big screen?

[tater]

1 hour ago, KerbMav said:

Does it have enough "big shots" to warrant viewing it on a big screen?

I saw it in IMAX, and I'm not sure it would have made the least difference.It really lacked for those sorts of shots, sadly.

[Steel]

5 hours ago, KerbMav said:

Does it have enough "big shots" to warrant viewing it on a big screen?

Yeah as @tater said, it's not really a film that celebrates his achievements with big shots and a grand soundtrack, it's a much more intimate film than that.

[Kilmeister]

I was really looking forward to this movie. So much so that I went to see it at a Thursday preview in IMAX.  Sadly though, I didn't enjoy it very much.  I knew going in that it was going to focus more on Neil and less on Apollo, but I didn't realize how narrow that focus was going to be.  Just about every other astronaut and key figure, besides Ed White and Elliot See, are only referred to by their first name if at all. The movie focuses entirely on Neil and his family life and the struggles he goes through there.  That in itself wouldn't bother me, but there are a few times in the movie where the director takes a few too many artistic liberties with the depiction of some events in order to frame the narrative he's trying to construct.

The look of everything is very nice though. It was cool seeing old historical video cleaned up and remastered, and sometimes just recreated in modern Hi-definition. But even that ran into a few pitfalls. For example, the contact light call that @tater mentioned was enough to take me out of the moment watching the film. That and the insane rotational velocity depicted during the Gemini 8 emergency was a bit much, but again that was done with drama in mind and not accuracy. The Apollo 1 incident also had some editing and visual choices done in the name of focusing on the narrative.

So overall I think it's a fine film for which most of us here are probably not the ideal target audience.  People who watch it who don't know as much about the subject will probably enjoy it much more than I did, and hopefully inspire some to look into it further.

[Superfluous J]

I thought at the end, when the Eagle was sinking into the Sea of Tranquility, Buzz could have tried a couple more times to hop on the door to the lander before giving up and just sinking.

[CharmSado]

Great and inspiring movie about Neil. I will definitely teach my kids about him. Even in the face of depression he kept himself up and still went on to achieve the greatest feat of all time.

[tater]

9 hours ago, Kilmeister said:

That and the insane rotational velocity depicted during the Gemini 8 emergency was a bit much, but again that was done with drama in mind and not accuracy. The Apollo 1 incident also had some editing and visual choices done in the name of focusing on the narrative.

Gemini 8 was tumbling at 1 rotation per second before it was over.

That’s pretty extreme.

[Kilmeister]

Yes it is... but the movie depicted it much more extreme.

[tater]

7 hours ago, Kilmeister said:

Yes it is... but the movie depicted it much more extreme.

Than a full rotation every second? How many Hz did you recall it rotating at in the movie?

I'd have to actually time it to tell you if it was too fast, I didn't turn on my stopwatch during the film to do that.

[Spark Plug]

I caught a short behind the scenes feature of this film on "Hollywood On Set," and an inconsequential observation popped into my head. La La Land had been showing earlier that night and it looked to me like Ryan Gosling's slightly lazy eye was corrected in post for that film, but maybe they didn't do it for First Man. I have never watched the former film in full, but has anyone else caught that?