Terrence Malick directs "First Man"

Rating: 2/10 (3 February 2019)

Terrence Malick directs "First Man" so prepare yourself for a long artsy drawn out movie. Oh, it wasn't Terrence Malick? Sure felt like it.
No, it was Damien Chazelle who turned a relative mundane boring story about a school drummer into the edge of the seat exciting cinema, but here he turned an exciting historical event into mundane boring cinema.
You know when you have a to watch a movie in stages because you are bored after 15 minutes so you force yourself to try to finish it over weeks.
Damien Chazelle could have learned from GRAVITY and made a much more exciting film including the family drama. Instead he probably got carte blanche after the success of Whiplash and La La Land and got carried away with a self indulgent bore fest.
The problem with making a film you know how it ends is that whenever you try to create high suspense and tension the audience isn't really going with it because we know it's gonna be alright, as we know what's coming. And an even bigger problem is Chazelle spent way too much time on those scenes that were irrelevant to the overall story.
A perfect example is the same thing VALKYRIE suffered from, which is they made a movie about historical events but we all knew before seeing it what was going to happen (Hitler didn't get assassinated) so the filmmaker should have focused on a different approach, like James Cameron did with Titanic. There, it was a movie about a historical event, BUT Cameron didn't focus the story on that, instead he made it a love story torn apart by the event.
Amazingly we know Chazelle CAN make an exciting film, like WHIPLASH, but he let the world down with this.
There were really few other problems with it. Collins and Aldrin were totally made into insignificant characters. Like really insignificant. Then the "first man" should have been about the moon landing, but we only get about a few minutes of that. There was one emotional part about his little girl, which in fact the movie could have focused on, but didn't.
All the foregoing is assuming they went to the moon of course, which is another discussion for another day.
One finally note, what's the constant hiring of foreigners to play Americans in Hollywood? The 3 leads were all non-Americans.
This was an EPIC let down...