Review of First Man (2018) by Popcorn55 — 13 Oct 2018

Good opening with the X-15 -- first time we've seen anything about the legendary X-15 in a major movie in decades. Still the most radical aircraft that ever flew: its story deserves a whole movie of its own. But I digress. This film is a pretty good treatment of the historical events, but it has a kind of matter-of-fact tone to it, a strange lack of drama or suspense. It does successfully evoke the respect and wonder we associated with those events at the time, but has three specific flaws: First,the music, which never really connects, and is most often an intrusive, distracting background; the greatest moments of the film are when the music stops in favor of respectful silence.

Second, the sound effects: the sound director seems to have thrown together random chaotic stacks of software sound effects for the rocket-flight scenes -- as if they didn't know exactly what to do, so piled as many canned booms, shrieks, wind rushes, and howls as possible on top of each other hoping it would all somehow add up to awesome -- but it doesn't. It sounds fake... off key. Like the sound guys never listened to an actual rocket launch, even on film, or youtube? Do your research guys, work a little harder.

Third, all the flight scenes recycle this same, lame sequence of shots over and over: 1. shaky vibrating shot out the window (we can't see a thing); 2. shaky close-up of Neil's eyes, staring straight ahead; 3. shaky vibrating shot of the control panel (we can't see a thing). REPEAT three or four times. WTF? First it's an instant cliche. Second we can't see anything -- it's an undecipherable visual mishmash (which would be OK once or twice to convey the confusion the pilot has to deal with -- but we GOT it already the first time, jeez).

Meanwhile, there's a lot of cutting to family life back home, and this stuff is pretty slow and excessive. Lot of shots of the couple staring at each other wistfully in silence. But what exactly is being communicated? Between them, or to us? We end up not even knowing what is going on. There's no takeaway. The screenwriter needed to step it up here, and write some actual dialogue forcrissakes.

I hope this film doesn't win any serious awards, because it doesn't really deserve them. Yes, worth the ticket price, for sure, but if you want a truly inspiring historical space flight epic done right, rent "The Right Stuff", a far better film that audiences cheered in the 80s.