Not sure if we ever went to the moon but in the movie we always walk on it

Rating: 8/10 (28 November 2018)

Midway through First Man, astronaut Neil Armstrong is asked by a reporter at a press conference how he feels about the fact that, should the Apollo 11 mission be successful and he lands on the moon, he'll go down in history.
Armstrong can't answer the question. He impatiently snaps that NASA and the ship's crew plan to be successful. Buzz Aldrin, seated by his side, eventually has to step in to talk about the crew's great responsibility and excitement, while Armstrong stares intently into the middle distance.
The stoicism that might have prevented a man like Armstrong, who was facing either death or a kind of immortality, from being able to articulate an answer in that moment is the heart and soul of First Man. The film is less concerned with delivering a triumphalist portrayal of the 1969 moon landing - which has been done before, we've all seen it - and more with probing what kind of person is able to white-knuckle through the physical, emotional, and psychological toll of this sort of mission and successfully pull it off.
The answer is gratifyingly, understandably intricate. Like last year's Dunkirk, First Man funnels a historical moment through an intimate experience, reminding us that events that appear triumphant in history's rear-view mirror often come at the expense of pain and great personal sacrifice shouldered by real people. But the movie, first and foremost, tells Neil Armstrong's story. We're allowed to see it through his eyes, but in return, it asks us to respect what he went through - and that is not always easy.
First Man is the story of Project Gemini and the moon landing through one man's eyes. At the distance of a half-century, the facts of the moon landing are well-known to most Americans: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, the culmination of a "space race" between the US and the USSR.
All these elements are present in First Man, but the challenge with any movie based on epochal historical events is to find a fresh story in familiar facts. In this case, screenwriter Josh Singer (The Post, Spotlight) adapted James R. Hansen's authorized biography of Armstrong. (Armstrong was famously private, but he granted more than 50 hours of interviews to Hansen and gave him access to private documents and family sources.)
The resulting film, directed by Damien Chazelle (who won the Best Director Oscar for La La Land in 2017) is laser-focused on Armstrong's life, beginning with the tragic cancer-related death of his 2-year-old daughter Karen in 1962, prior to him being chosen for Project Gemini. Like the book on which it's based, First Man paints a portrait of Armstrong as someone for whom heroism was never a motivator, and who viewed notoriety with deep reluctance.
That the movie never really reaches a state of full-blown exhilaration is likely to frustrate viewers who are looking to have their sense of ownership in its historical events reinforced. But rather than focus on American achievement, First Man pays its deepest respects to Armstrong and to the men and women who risked and sacrificed their lives to get to the moon. The movie sees Armstrong's reserve as both a blessing and a curse, a gift and a problem, but it's unequivocal in its admiration of his humility. And in this way, it feels less like it's forcing a myth onto the man who made it clear to his biographer that he wasn't seeking renown - and more like a statement of gratitude.