If you Thought 2001 Was slow and Solemn

Rating: 7/10 (13 October 2018)

And Keir Dullea was wooden, get ready for almost two and a half hours of close-ups of Ryan Gosling's eyeballs. I remember watching 2001 when it was released, and the Moon landing when it happened, but movies like Hidden Figures and The Right Stuff give much richer portraits of the time and the people involved. And who can forget Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager striding away from the crash scene--a much more powerful image than the one depicted here. Yeager, by the way, gets almost no notice here. As with other recent historical movies like The Post, this film would benefit from subtitles identifying some of the true giants who flit almost un-noted through the story.
Granted, I loved Claire Foy as QE II, but for my money this is her movie, and she's the emotional center. Maybe she should have married that boring dentist after all.
Star Wars gave us space operas full of beat-up junky old crates, and First Man has something of the same feel, with cramped claustrophobic capsules and drab GI offices. Not unlike the new Blade Runner, but Gosling isn't Harrison Ford, and he isn't Sam Shepard either.
On a final note, this movie opened nationally just as Gus Grissom's widow finally passed away some fifty years after his heroic death. Folks who get their knickers in a twist about insufficient displays of Americanism in this movie might reflect on how our Great Nation treated the widows and orphans the Space Race cost us.