A Well Meaning Film With Some Controversial Creative Decisions

Rating: 7/10 (20 October 2018)

There are two creative decisions I want to talk about with respect to this movie. The first of which I thought was mostly effective, yet slightly off-putting, and the second was mostly ineffective.
The first is that due to the large timeline these events took place over and complexity of the true story, Damien Chazelle chose the death of Neil's Daughter to be the emotional core of the story. This allowed him to bring together many seemingly unrelated events in a somewhat coherent way without sacrificing historical accuracy. This emotional framework also provided a way to filter other interesting events in Neil's life as there were just too many. The only off-putting effect of this, was the story would jump abruptly feeling somewhat disjointed. However, I do think this is preferable to altering history, changing people's roles, and performing other modifications to create a compelling narrative.
The unfortunate creative choice by Damien Chazelle, was to try and put the audience in the astronauts shoes. I should note that this this is actually an effective technique if performed correctly, as it was during some scenes like the first person view during the first step on the moon. Where I personally think it failed was the shaky cam during the high intensity scenes. I think Damien thought this was a good idea as it simultaneously put the audience in Neil's shoes and allowed the scenes themselves to be shot at a lesser cost. This certainly alleviated the need for zero g shots and outside spaceship shots. The problem however, is that while it did communicate the intensity of the situations, it did not communicative effectively the competency of the astronauts nor what was actually happening. Many of these scenes had the audience inwardly thinking, "Oh, that dial is increasing, that isn't good, right?" or "Oh, Neil flipped a switch, I think everything is okay again?". Compare this to other effective shaky cam scenes in other movies like Saving Private Ryan. In that movie on the beach, while the camera was shaking, the main character still had a very clear objective and the audience was aware of exactly what was happening. I think it would have been much better to clearly see what the astronauts were actually doing even if we do not understand it to demonstrate their competency. If my memory serves me correctly, they actually did this a bit with the final decent to the moon which I thought was shot very well. There are a couple other ways these scenes could be approached but what they did certainly was not the most effective.
In the end, I am still very glad that I went. I really appreciated the beautiful set recreations, getting an insight into astronaut training, and also learning about the pain that this influential person went through. I think in a few thousand years, his will be one of the few names that will be remembered, so I do think learning about this event is important. As a bonus, the conclusion was excellent.