You've got to be into the subject

Rating: 6/10 (10 February 2019)

I'm torn. What do you say about a well made, well directed, and well acted movie that bored the tar out of you? That was bad? It WASN'T bad! That it was unrealistic? But.....it WASN'T unrealistic! What one has when it is rendered down to the basic elements is that if a person is interested in the spacerace or into Ryan Gosling, it's a good one to see. Gosling never seems to disappoint and here is yet another example. He makes it look effortless, and he is so handsome again I just want to hire a Batman villain to invent something to swap faces with him! Let's see you mop up at the box office with MY face Gosling! I digress. Claire Foy nails the understated calm of her screen persona as does really the rest of the cast. The special effects were on point, and i will say that a couple of the action scenes, for example the opening one, were truly riveting. There's another scene wherein Armstrong and another astronaut (I wont say who) are in trouble and need a solution, and I had to pinch myself lest I start believing I was there in person! But this is where I start struggling to dish out accolades. Not because there are no more deserved, but because despite all the above I found myself fast-forwarding. I didn't get invested in this movie like I did in Apollo 13, the movie to which everyone on earth to a person knew that this movie would be compared. Or Damon's movie the Martian, where the leading man's vulnerability and believable self deprecating humor were so endearing. So that's I guess why this one isn't resonating as the others did, and I don't think anyone can really blame anyone for that. As I said before: you've really got to be "into" the subject matter because despite getting good grades in direction, plot, screenplay, cinematography, and acting, it just lacked that extra something. And that's why I opened with the question that I did.