The humane story, rather than "The Human Story".

Rating: 7/10 (18 October 2018)

Curb your expectations accordingly.
Before I dissect my minute qualms, let me preface now that "First Man" is a quality movie - and that said - I'm not going to concentrate on any of its virtues here. Because I do have some rather glaring reservations;
Aside from the always welcome addition of Kyle Chandler, I kinda feel most of the film is miscast. Ryan Gosling is one of his generations finest leading actors, but here he is quite blank and doesn't remind me of the real Neil Armstrong at all. In fact, none of the astronaut characterizations seemed like their true-life counterparts. Although I am hard pressed to site better replacements, so perhaps it's more a fault in the writing and direction of those characters.
Another element I take issue with is the constant roaming hand-held camera stuff - especially in the Armstrong home. It was a distractingly curious choice at times, because it gives the actual cameraman a very intrusive participating presence in some of those intimate scenes (for me at least) - echoing the worst tendencies of recent Terrence Malick. Damien Chazelle apparently wanted to underplay everything, yet he overplayed the verite camera work trying so desperately to feel authentic yet calling attention to its artifice through its behind the lens searching, probing, and lurking.
The music score had interesting instrumentations and some impactful moments of tenseness, but to my mind was all too often too subdued and simply tonal wallpaper - and there was never any sense of idealism, which just seems disingenuous as representetive of a story about driven people inspired to do audaciously bold things. It's very obvious they deliberately chose to eschew trumpets and drumlines to avoid the cliche - to once again underplay the events - but I think it's at the cost of undermining the significance of such a momentous accomplishment and undercutting the aspirational emotions involved by being a little too revisionist toward the true stirring spirit of that literally flag-planting era (which was certainly jingoistic in propulsion).
I understand Chazelle is intentionally demystfying the iconism which has become mythicly cliche, and that's a smart place to start from, but at some point in telling a story it will demand when it wants to be fetishized for the purpose of granting perspective on the broader impact. Here we're never really treated to a cinematic rendering of just how profoundly the nation and the world was affected by placing our own footprints onto that big glowing orb in the night sky that has beguiled and beckoned mankind's oneiric romanticisms for our entire tenure as conscious entities on this earth. So even though I appreciated the intimate subtext it told within the pretext, in the respect of the wider context "First Man" fell short for me.
"Apollo 13" is still the best film about a NASA mission. I prefer HBO's excellent mini-series "From The Earth To The Moon" as well. "The Right Stuff" is also superior.
"First Man" is worth a watch, but not likely a rewatch any time soon.