Over-long, over-hyped, over-rated

Rating: 4/10 (16 October 2018)

The only real distinction of First Man may be that it's the first over-hyped and over-rated film of next year's Oscar crop. It's a film that is dismally defeated by its own subject matter at every turn. First it wants to be an illuminating, insightful study of Neil Armstrong. But on the evidence of everything it offers, Armstrong was simply not that interesting. If the most startling discovery about your hero is that he was sad about his infant daughter's death, then you're already in deep trouble. Nor is it hugely surprising that a guy who is dedicated to preparing for a mission to the moon isn't exactly a well-rounded, socially adept human being. But many a fascinating film has been built around a cerebral, emotionally-distant, socially awkward character, right? True enough, but it takes an actor with a much greater skill set than Ryan Gosling to make such a character interesting. First Man is essentially two hours of Gosling mooching around trying to find some way of making Armstrong's interior life compelling. That he fails isn't entirely due to his own shortcomings as an actor, but to a screenplay that does little more than rely on his good looks and the "glamour" of the space race to make Armstrong interesting. But the second big fail of First Man is that it doesn't offer us anything particularly new or interesting about the moon mission. Chazelle's strategy is to eschew the cliches of space movies - the focus on technology and the astronaut's eye view - and stay close on his heroes through interminable sequences in juddering space capsules. There's nothing new about this, other than it being the main, sometimes sole focus. Unfortunately, it becomes tedious long before we get to Apollo 11's trek to the moon. Even the ultimate moon sequence offers little that we don't already know from the grainy footage of the real event that everyone has seen hundreds of times. In short, the term "epic fail" could have been invented to describe First Man.