The "Flag Controversy" Was Pre-Planned by the Filmmakers

Rating: 1/10 (4 January 2019)

The fact there was no American flag planting seemed to have come from The Right, ever the villain, but it was actually a way of the filmmakers getting it out of the way before the film opened. Not that it helped, but audiences probably didn't understand why Left Wing Hollywood would want to make a movie about Neil Armstrong in the first place...
The entire concept made little to no sense to begin with... before the flag thing, and Ryan Gosling's quote about... whatever it is he said that strategically coincided with the other thing that gives Hollywood a chance to blame their scapegoat villains on this movie crashing... And it was strange (or not so strange actually) how quickly Gosling AND the Armstrong family had their defense all over the news: at almost the same exact time...
That aside, the film itself is a disaster. In trying to make the viewer feel they're "spam in the can" as stated in a great astronaut movie, The Right Stuff, there was simply no breathing room. Meanwhile, on the ground, the annoying shaky camera continued, but the acting was very cliche and performed, especially by Neil's annoying wife.
First Man was doomed to fail, and next time you see a movie that tells audiences "This movie WILL fail," believe it or not, it's a ploy to work FOR the movie itself. When it does bomb, they can say, "It wasn't as bad as we thought." But in this case, like SOLO which took the same preemtive damage control approach, it was bad, and worse.
Funny thing... politics are usually involved. Lately, it's news that Holmes & Watson bombed. The media just adores that it did badly. But Vice, which made the same amount of money and didn't make the top five despite imdb promoting it to death, seems to have slipped under the radar. "Nothing to look at... move along."