Stunning direction... poor characterization... mediocre production

Rating: 6/10 (4 October 2018)

I attended the premiere of the movie in Salt Lake City with my friends, whom I brought to the cinema with a promise of a great movie, staring Ryan Gosling, and they were not disappointed. Most of them liked the movie but it was not what is expected from an admired movie about Apollo mission to the Moon.
The pace of the film is reasonable. It starts at the right place, where it shows how Neil Armstrong joins NASA and it does not jump forward. Everything is on the track. It TRIES to keep a balance between showing Neil's domestic relations with his family and his achievements and struggles at work until he makes it to the moon. That is good directing and somehow good script.
The problem with the characters is that after the movie you cannot tell what kind of person each on of them are. Neil himself does not talk much and he's always down and blue, apparently because her daughter dies of cancer many years ago. What we see is that he is a silent person who does not care much about his family and is too much into his work. There is a strong presence of apathy in his reactions which is rooted in directing, screen writing and the acting altogether. It kinda ruins your notion of a successful person and not like non-perfectionist realism, but more like why that guy acts this way. Other characters are not developed any better. Neil's interaction with his wife, children or even his colleagues are always vague and ambiguous at best.
And just because it is an admired movie, don't expect a production quality like Gravity or Interstellar. There are too much camera zoom and too much camera shaking. A large portion of the movie shows thrilling moments of launching rockets or when rockets are in trouble, and all you can see is the camera shaking like crazy for too long while it is zoomed on faces or spaceship walls. That along with the loud sound of cinemas you get a small dizziness by the end of the movie.
For most of the part I focused on drawbacks, but it is still a relatively good movie that shows the chronicles and history of the most important (claimed!) space travel, with good production design.
It is worthy to watch. Go and see it. But lower your exceptions!