Ryan Gosling: Man or robot??

Rating: 2/10 (24 October 2018)

Wow.
I've seen a few movies about the space race before, and generally they have a mixed spectrum of quality but are mostly enjoyable. This one for me, was almost completely devoid of any enjoyability.
Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong, and I expressed concerns about this to my friends before. My concerns were not unfounded. He seems to me to be simply unable to convey any emotion at all. I get that as an astronaut and test-pilot, he needed a cool head, but there's a big difference between keeping a cool head, and simply looking bored and disinterested all the time.
Also, I get the tragedy of the death of Armstrong's young daughter, and the stresses this and the very nature of his career put on his wife and family life; but they've taken a 9 year segment of the most daring technological, and human achievement in human history, and made it slow, ponderous and boring.
The massive over-use of handheld cameras to make it feel like you're actually there was really irritating to me. I want the story to tell itself without me actually being in the room with all the characters all the time. Especially when Armstrong's wife is trying to listen to the NASA broadcast of spaceflight comms, and her son steals the radio and won't give it back. It just made me feel awkward in my cinema seat; by all means play the scene, but I don't want to feel like I'm in the room with them.
There were a few good bits, like his test-flight at the beginning of the movie, but my overall experience was that they somehow managed to make a story about landing the first man in history on the moon, a very boring experience.
The Right Stuff, this is not.