I just finished watching First Man. I thought the space and rocket scenes were fantastic while the shaky camera was very annoying.
The rest of it was a very mixed bag for me. It's just an odd movie, isn't it? It's hard to say exactly why this is a Neil Armstrong biopic and not a film about the Apollo missions instead, for instance. It's not very insightful when it comes to his life, and 98 percent of the interesting research and testing leading up to the Moon mission didn't involve him at all, which means that you lose all sense of both scale and detail because the camera keeps following this fairly peripheral figure.
Buzz Aldrin (among others) was more important and made a big contribution to orbital mechanics aside from being a skilled astronaut, but he's only in the film for like ten minutes, only has ten lines, and he's painted as a complete arse which, as far as I'm aware, is a complete fabrication, made mostly to make the cold Armstrong look more sympathetic. They also sampled a few lines from a poem by Gil Scott-Heron about how white people are going to the Moon while black people starve and die in segregated cities, but there's no further exploration of the racial social angle at all. Which makes you wonder why they even brought it up to begin with. It seems like they weren't entirely sure what this film was about, or why.
There's this inane need for a hero character to focus on in most Hollywood narratives, and I think it detracts from the broader and better story here. They had to invent a personal motivation for Armstrong by painting him as traumatized by the passing of his daughter for instance, and it ends with a silly climax where Armstrong steps onto the Moon, and, having finally isolated himself from the rest of the world (because we're being literal now), drops his dead daughter's bracelet into a crater and walks away. This of course never happened. The Moon scenes were perfect from a technical point of view (I loved the completely silent landing that was followed by real, low-res tv footage from 1969 showing the real Armstrong climbing down the ladder on the LEM) but I felt that the script reduces them to a comment on Armstrong's apparent soul-sickness.
Once he's back to earth he gets visited by his wife while he's in quarantine, and they both look at eachother without smiling or speaking, and then they sit down on opposite sides behind a glass window and look like they're mourning, and you can imagine the nonexistent narrator going: "She knew that part of him had been left behind up there." I thought it was a confusing end to a confused film.
