A disappointment

Rating: 6/10 (2 November 2018)

It seems these days every great director wants to have a Kubrick moment. This usually translates to a space movie, and eventually to a couple of great cinematic moments of ultimate beauty, coupled with hallucinatory scenes where the viewer is lost in colors, visual effects and is meant to feel the "grandeur of the last frontier".
Unlike Nolan, Chazelle picks a different approach: in "the first man" he tries to tell the story of Neil Armstrong, whole combining it with his own 2001: A space Odyssey.
Though the movie is aptly shot, it is misdirected: it misses all the important moments of this man's life and accomplishments, replacing narrative cohesion with long takes, pace with artistic vision and, ultimately, life with art.
At the same time, the direction, music and editing, although undoubtedly the product of great artists, are also marked with bad choices: the overuse of the hand held camera drifts away from the goal of putting us "in Armstrong's shoes" and ends up not only destroying several scenes but also causing a certain dizziness. It also weakens the great cinematic moments of space travel, as the transition from constant camera movement to more camera movement seems only like natural progression.
Lastly, the closure "mechanism" chosen feels not only very mainstream but also somewhat unnecessary.
Overall, this is a long, somewhat slow, slightly incoherent, rather inconsistent movie that includes a few great moments and a few terrible ones.
But the great ones are real eye openers, so I would recommend that you watch it.
However, this is not as good as Chazelle's previous work.
It seems that good biopics have become a field of cinema where tv-quality direction and a straightforward script are overall more effective than the kind of cinema that Chazelle delivers.
I would rate it with a 7 because of the excellent performances, the wonderful music and those beautiful Kubrick moments.
However, 2.5 hours of hand held camera are a very poor choice, and equally poor was the omission to put this man's life in the proper historical, political and scientific context that he deserves.