First Man

First Man

Do you believe that the world is flat or that we staged the moon landing?  If so, First Man might not be a movie you would like to see.

First Man follows Neil Armstrong’s struggles with NASA to become the first man to step foot on the moon.  The movie follows Neil from a young flight test engineer all the way to becoming an astronaut and leading the Apollo mission to the moon.    The casting of First Man is absolutely superb.  Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Kyle Changer, and Patrick Fugit all give stellar performances.

I feel that the direction of this movie completely missed the mark.  Director Damien Chazelle had far too many close up and hand held camera shots that took away from the tone.  The opening scene alone was hard to follow due to all the back and forth close ups.  My main issue with this movie is that it didn’t know what story it wanted to tell.  Was this a space race with Russa movie?  Yes but not really.  Was this a movie showing the struggles of Neil becoming the first man on the moon?  Yes but not really.  The major underlining theme of this movie was the relationship with Neil and his wife, yet that gets completely lost with all the other narrative throughout the movie.

The cast alone makes this movie worth seeing, but I now see why this movie was left out of contention for best picture at the Oscars.