First Man

This is simultaneously the story of the process leading up to the moon landings and a very personal portrait of a man who’s extremely cut off from his own emotions. Neil Armstrong was never the most demonstrative or funloving of astronauts (although, fun fact that is dropped in this movie, he apparently wrote a musical! They don’t let us hear any of the songs, though), and this is reflected in Ryan Gosling’s super-detached, stoic performance - through multiple years and multiple missions filled with setbacks and life-threatening danger. 

While this is a story that has been told a few times, it’s not been told from quite this personal a viewpoint before. This has its pluses and its minuses – this is very much not the “rah rah USA” approach to the space program that we’ve frequently seen before, with the result that it never quite has the same pleasures people come to expect from these kinda movies. There’s a lot of tension every time anybody goes into space in this film – despite us knowing that Neil Armstrong lives through this, the feeling of the peril of spacetravel is palpable. It’s a distinctly non-joyful and non-triumphal film, which is, I suspect, not entirely what people are looking for in a film about the space program – but for all that, it achieves what it sets out to do remarkably well.