Gosling is No Neil Armstrong

Rating: 4/10 (2 February 2019)

You would think that a film about one of our nation's great pioneering heroes would be so uplifting it would leave the audience clapping. Not this one. It does do an excellent job of chronicling Neil Armstrong's brave, death-defying career. But fails to reach orbit due to one fatal flaw: Ryan Gosling.
He is terribly miscast as an almost anti-hero. I thought his monotonous sourpuss was bad enough in Bladerunner 2049. But it returns again to cast a rainy day on this film. Gosling comes off as mysteriously brooding, sullen, if not clinically depressed. Maybe spacy? But not in a good sense.
I grew up in the glorious Apollo years and saw the real Neil Armstrong on TV plenty of times. The character Gosling crafted has little resemblance. I doubt he even studied archival interviews with the first man on the moon. Armstrong was terribly shy, soft spoken, but had a wry sense of wit about him. In fairness, Armstrong's children do say his cold family interactions are correctly portrayed.
That said, the film has a good pace and dramatically captures the mind-numbing dangers and claustrophobia of early manned spaceflight. So, it's worth watching just the get an insight into the barnstorming years of NASA's space race with the Soviets.
However, the Apollo 11 moon landing at the end is terribly anti-climactic. We just see Gosling wandering around. The only flash of creativity is to have him do a 360-degree pan of the desolate Tranquility base landing site.
The controversial omission of erecting the American flag, according to director Damien Chazelle, was to focus on "loss and sacrifice and failure." Guess what Mr. Chazelle, American is built on bold pioneering efforts that always involved loss, sacrifice and failure. Nothing worth doing is ever easy. It's presumptuous of the director to take the "glass half empty" preachy tone, and therefore dismiss such an iconic image of American "can-do" technological prowess.
Unlike the film Apollo 13, this film is easily forgettable.