Welldone bipic

Rating: 8/10 (13 November 2018)

All the main events of the Gemini and Apollo programs are (or should be) well know. We know how the story unfolded. What we don't know is how it was ived by the people who made it happen. This movie shows us that.
Armstrong was apparently one of those close-mouthed types unable to show grief or other "weak" emotions. But it's OK to show elation at winning, in his case by succeeding at difficult and very dangerous tasks. Armstrong's daughter died of a brain tumour. Anyone who's lost a child can identify with his grief, and anyone who's lost someone close knows that grief strikes repeatedly and without warning. The movie is based on a bio by James Hansen. I don't know how true to life Hansen' book is, but the movie convinced me. It's an odd thing, that although the moon program happened in the 1960s, the NASA world was firmly stuck in the 1950s.
So the movie's a good psycho-sociological study of NASA and the men who had the right stuff. It's also a hymn to work. The core of the story is the work of getting to the moon, and the personal and community sacrifices that this task entailed. I recall watching the landing on a large TV screen in the dorm in which I was staying while taking a summer course. But I didn't recall much of that while watching this movie. It was all about Armstrong, the NASA team, the moon shot, and the families. The music was occasionally intrusive, and some scenes teetered on the edge of sentimentality. The launches were impressively noisy and jittery: the astronauts are flying on top of a slowly exploding bomb. A movie worth watching.