Disappointing

Rating: 6/10 (21 October 2018)

Coming off of one of the most colorful and exuberant films of the last decade with La La Land, Damien Chazelle made a grim, colorless, and just plain dull film with First Man. It's not that the trailers ever wowed me or got me super excited, but I was certainly looking forward to seeing his follow up to one of my favorite films of all time. And heck, he even brought La La Land alum Ryan Gosling along with him. The problem with First Man has nothing to do with the whole American Flag controversy that people are complaining about, nor the tone really. It's more so the fact that this script is without life or energy. It trudges along from an amazing visual sequence to the next and the pacing is just tough to get through. It's also unfortunate that the characters are not likable at all and I found it difficult to connect to Gosling's performance as Neil Armstrong. I admittedly learned a lot and the story is undeniably fascinating, but I definitely could have used a more broad scope to the movie, instead of just Armstrong and the U.S. I get that's not the story they were telling, but I felt there was something missing.
6.6/10