Neil Armstrong could not have been this bad!

Rating: 2/10 (30 October 2018)

This movie title is "First Man", so presumably, it is supposed to be a biographical sketch about the guy who first walked on the moon. It is based in fact, on a biographical book about Armstrong. Given that, hopefully, the theoretical reason that director Damien Chazelle, actor Ryan Gosling and their production team chose to make the movie, was because Neil Armstrong was such an interesting, likable character and his story so compelling that a big audience would want to see it and learn more about him.
If that was their goal, they failed miserably. The movie they made depicts Neil Armstrong to be ... so unlikable, so obtusely stoic, so mindbogglingly unemotional and boring, that no one in the audience gives a damn about watching him. Ryan Gosling played Armstrong with such a blaze' lack of emotion that in the entire movie, I don't think he smiled even once. He did not raise his voice. He did not get excited. His voice, his persona, his behavior during all the crazy excitement of spacecraft launches, testing, saying goodbye to his family, landing and walking on the moon for God's sake, was as emotional as a toad, and that is saying a lot. All the camera kept doing, was zooming into closeups of his inexpressive, boring, almost zombie-like face. If the plot of the movie was to depict Neil Armstrong as a mindless but intelligent robot with no emotion chip at all, then it would have worked. The movie was NOT about that!
Frankly, as I watched scene after scene play out, I just keep thinking ... who cares about this guy? Why would anyone spend millions of dollars to bring us a biography of such a one-dimensional, boring, lackadaisical, even dis-likable character? If this was the real Neil Armstrong, then its no wonder his wife finally divorced him. If not, which there is evidence he was not, then Chazelle and Gosling really did him and their movie audience a big disservice.
What is sad is that this is good fodder for the Oscars. Character biopics are supposed to be good "best picture" or "best actor" material. Sadly, Ryan Gosling had such an easy role here (don't smile, yell or show any emotion ... just stare into the distance for two hours worth of scenes), that if he is nominated in 2019, it will be a real tragedy. Neither he nor his director deserve it.
First Man has a few good points. The sound effects made the movie watchable. It should get an Oscar for sound effects. In some scenes, you get the clear impression that these men were put into metal boxes with a few switches and controls, and thrown into space with a good possibility that the whole thing would crash and burn. NASA was that primitive in those days. However, as a Biography of the man who first landed on the moon, either it sucked, or that man was someone you would not really care if you ever came to know!