Not as good as I'd hoped

Rating: 7/10 (27 January 2019)

With a subject like the Cold War-era space program as a starting point, First Man has a lot of promise. When it focuses on literally the first person to set foot on the moon, the possibilities are even greater.
Maybe that's why I feel let down by this. There's plenty of dramatic tension between characters, but it didn't seem to have the right mix of character, plot and emotion in the best places to put it over the top.
One big minus for me was the pacing. Despite paying close attention, my wife and I were asking one another who characters were, how they related to one another, etc. And since several years pass throughout the film, some characters change (e.g., a woman is pregnant in one scene, and isn't pregnant a few scenes later). This can be disorienting sometimes, and threw me out of the stories out of the story several times. This drops the rating significantly for me.