Glacially-paced, muddled film

Rating: 4/10 (14 October 2018)

"First Man," the highly anticipated (partial) bio-pic about Neil Armstrong, the commander of NASA's Apollo 11 mission and the first man (thus the title) to walk on the moon, is a muddled mess.
Director Damien Chazelle's film-making choices, from shaky, way-too-close cinema verite close-ups and long, long silences (OK, OK, we know Neil Armstrong was a Silent Sam type) to banging, shaking, roaring and rattling blackout shots where the viewer can't understand what's going on, to lack of exposition (about precisely that -- what's going on), to Armstrong's constantly angry wife, are not only disorienting, but unpleasantly distracting.
This film can't hold a candle to superior films like "The Right Stuff," "Apollo 13," or the excellent made-for-cable HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon."
Neil Armstrong deserved much better than this.