Bad movie about a great event

Rating: 2/10 (3 November 2018)

The jury of the public is the final say. The critics can try to carry a film over the finish line, but it never works. The truth of a film's quality is how the paying public reacts to it.
First Man is a film about the greatest achievement of the 20th century. When one chooses to make a film about real people and real events, it is important to not only get the most critical details of those actions correct, without omitting the most poignant, but also to determine how to translate those events into an entertaining narrative.
The most prevalent theme of the paying public is that this film suffers from terrible cinematography, and it does. The second most prevalent theme is that it renders the subject matter boring, and it does.
What the producers of this film failed miserably to understand is that people who operate complex systems like aircraft and space craft have to compartment their life issues and focus on the job, or else they get distracted and risk killing themselves and others. They don't do this because they are uncaring or unable to connect to others, but out of a realization that if they fail to do it, they cause mishaps that get people killed and cause many others heartache.
Neil Armstrong was a Navy pilot who faced significant risks. Military jet aircraft of that era were notoriously unreliable, and the mishap rates were twenty times worse than they are today.
The producers decided that Armstrong's ability to compartment his life and do his job meant he was wooden. That was a terribly unfair treatment of the actual man. Armstrong was not the first man who had trouble figuring out how to tell his children that daddy may not come home! That didn't make him unfeeling. Worse, they tried to build a two and a half hour film around a central character who was presented as boring and one-dimensional.
Good historians take their picks to open up the pad locks guarding the truth, to find the elements that are often hidden away from the public. Neil Armstrong was a quiet and unassuming man, but inwardly was a human being of the same emotions and values as most people. He just knew how to put on his "public face" and perform the job without distractions when the time called for it. Vice work to find that inner man and present him, the producers instead decided to portray someone as unable to connect with his own family and outside world.
Those who worked most closely with Armstrong, who are still alive, such as his co-pilot Buzz Aldrin, plus Chuck Yeager, have said that this movie presented a Neil Armstrong that did not match the man they knew! The compelling nuggets of Armstrong as a feeling human being were out there, but these producers didn't seek out the people who knew about them!
Many reviewers who saw the film in restricted premiers tried to convey these negatives, but those reviews were silenced all too often. Presented to the public instead were a series of very positive reviews, and the bad ones were hidden away.
The public reacted by bestowing $16 million on this film in its opening week. In the two weeks after, the film grossed just $23.8 million. The fourth week is projected to go further downhill.
What happened is that word of mouth started to overwhelm the positive critics' reviews. The public, especially those who would have normally flocked to support this movie, turned away from it. Due to this, the film is not projected to even meet its $60 million budget mark. That is the definition of a box office flop, and no amount of orchestrated plaudits from the film industry can alter that truth.
It wasn't merely the highly questionable cinematography or the overarching one-dimensional character presentations. This movie also struck a false chord with potential viewers long before it's worldwide premier.
The third most frequent lament is that the producers omitted the flag planting scene on the moon's surface, and instead just showed the flag there as a background shot. That was a needless self-inflicted wound.
Hollywood needs to take a hard look at itself and ask itself some tough questions. There are millions of potential customers out there who have slowly taken themselves out of the movie market. There are many reasons for this, but the most central reason is a series of bad movies, many trying to send political messages.
Samuel Goldwyn, who led the Golden Age of Hollywood, famously said, "Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union."
In the same vein of The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, this movie First Man could have been, and should have been, a box office winner. I hope Hollywood learns again to put entertainment first, and get the messaging out of the effort. It has already driven away too many customers, and this film has done that result even more harm.