High quality, immersive drama with historical background

Rating: 9/10 (12 October 2018)

My personal opinion is that Gosling should get an Oscar for his role. He strongly embodied Armstrong's humble character and behaviour. His emotions are visible through his actions even though he hides them from plain sight and behaves like a humble introverted engineer.
I wouldn't call the film breathtaking because that word is prostituted nowdays and mostly describes something this film has taken a giant step away from. It's not a Hollywood blockbuster with DUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNN sounds and seizure camera designed to hide disgustingly bad CGI.
Also, it doesn't show the physical grandeur of space. We've all seen those things and they've kind of became cliché.
This is a film where launches are shown from inside the cockpit, with rumbling and metal plate clacking, screeching. It's very immersive and semiclaustrophobic at times.
It has lots of peaceful moments that have deep meaning. It lets certain things to sink in.
It's not "oh man, I'm on top of the world, I'm so awesome!".
Far from that, and I'm so grateful to the team to make a film like this. Neil would be proud of it as his family says they are.
All those annoying political squealings about "the flag not being shown" are blatant LIES, as expected.
The very moment of placing the flag was not shown, and the flag itself was visible, both small flags throughout the movie and the one on the Moon.
But that's not even important and would detract the viewer from the tone of the movie.
This is not a film about political power or "us Americans" or even "us humans".
This is a VERY personal film about Neil and his coping with the loss of his daughter and colleagues, but the accent is on the daughter Karen.
If the squealers thought this was a film about "great USA conquering of the Moon", they don't need to watch it because it's not. It's a film which does a great job showing how one man reached a pinnacle of his career while grieving.
Lunar EVA scene is not long as I expected it to be. There are hardly any technicalities shoved in our faces because the way it was filmed tells a story about a man. There's no "explaining things to the audience by characters speaking things they normally wouldn't". If you know what certain thing is/does, you'll recognize it.
While Aldrin is jumping around (he's portrayed as a kind of goofball without many social breaks), Neil is standing there, his face not shown. We see a gold plated visor staring into desolation of lunar surface which is the metaphor for a man hiding his feelings, confronted with nothingness which is actually his feelings looking back at him. In a brief moment of personal goodbye to his late daughter, he lifts the visor and we can see him crying. Very powerful, subtle storytelling.
Neil's wife Janet (played by Foy) is, contrary to same lying squealers, NOT portrayed as "typical hysterical woman who takes a dump on man's accomplishment". At the contrary, her role and performance are very realistic. She's not unreasonable and ungrateful like certain film wives have been portrayed over the decades.
Now something on the subject of special effects.
Film photography is such that, at first, I had a feeling it's made to resemble Neil's memories, but the effect stays throughout the movie. It's the grain and just slighly weird white balance that looks close to the high quality color film rolls. And there's some camera movements that reproduce manual mechanism of old cameras which I always liked.
Scenes on the Moon are different. They're pristine, they resemble the quality of Apollo film magazines taken by Hasselblad cameras. The Sun is blindingly white place in the perfectly black sky.
Scenes in orbit, especially during Agena mission of Gemini, resemble color films of the time.
The silence of vacuum is respected nearly 100% of the time. Great deal of scenes in orbit are taken with the vantage point of camera on the hull of the ships, just like in Interstellar. Also, models seem to be real objects, very much like in Interstellar, which is very nice.
If you want to watch a quality drama with historical backbone, go ahead, you won't be disappointed.