Watchable space movie that falls shorts on the very aspects it's tried to innovate on.

Rating: Null/10 (13 October 2018)

To a space enthusiast like me, you could just show 2 hrs of Apollo mission footage and I would consider that money and time well spent, which is why this movie managed to be kinda satisfying DESPITE all the efforts of the writer / director to make this exciting human achievement dark and depressing.
There are many ways of injecting drama and emotion in a space movie, by showing the terror, the uncertainty, the camaraderie, or even a nuanced look at astronomers' relationships / friendships, but First Man chooses to just show unsympathetic glimpses of Neil Armstrong's life that are neither comprehensive enough to be biographical nor have the emotional heft to be engaging.
1. Characterization:
Neil Armstrong's family is perpetually depressed, he is always aloof and detached, has no screen chemistry with wife, who is icy, tight-lipped and always seems to be on the verge of tears / exhaustion. Watching their conversations make you feel like one trapped in a 2+ hour road trip with a passive-aggressive couple. We are to believe all this is because they lost their daughter to cancer 6 yrs ago at the age of 2. Whether it be scenes of him staring wistfully at the moon for the umpteenth time, or sulking most times he's shown in the vicinity of his family, it becomes progressively hard to care about the guy who needs a lecture from his wife before he'd talk to his sons on what could very well be his last night ever with them.
2. Lighting and Camera:
Their house is never well-lit and feels like an interrogation chamber half the time. Most of these scenes are grainy and shot handheld with a shaky camera, often getting into the faces of the characters which lends a dizzy, disconcerting feeling to already uncomfortable scenes. This perma-zoom means Claire Foy's freckled arms probably had more screen time and took more screen space than the moon's surface. The camera work and color grading make you feel like you're watching a horror film / tragedy rather than one of mankind's greatest triumphs. OTOH, the cockpit scenes and space scenes are quite well executed and realistic, but be prepared for a lot of shaking, vibrating and spinning. That being said, this is no Gravity / Interstellar in that department.
This film has two slightly funny scenes, but such is the pall of all-pervasive gloom in the film that even those didn't manage to elicit more than careful chuckles from the audience.
Thankfully, if you have any love for the space program, the movie offers plenty to watch. Lots of mission-related scenes, launch sequences, some technical terminology, and the moon landing scenes are brilliantly shot, managing to make you emotional in an otherwise sterile movie. The background score and sound editing are top notch and really put you in the situation, and Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong is passable. Claire Foy is quite underutilized as his wife and most of the other numerous characters are largely forgettable.