 I managed to go see a preview of First Man Before It Hit Theatres, and here are my thoughts. And in case you're wondering, no, I did not bring pee with me. Right up front, guys, this will contain spoilers. If you would like to bookmark this video and come back to watch it after you've seen this movie, I will give you a second to do that right now. Alrighty, let's get going. I really wanted to love this movie. I mean, it's Neil Armstrong, it's Apollo, it's Apollo 11, it's mid-century, it's space history, it's everything that I love. But the whole thing didn't totally do it for me. Now, my favorite thing about this movie was without question the technical elements. I mean, it is an absolutely beautiful movie. There is so much incredible attention to detail in the hardware. There's an X-15 panel with the altitude dial clicking over, and it really does look like the old 1950s dials that if you've seen pictures of the cockpit, you know, are in there. There's, of course, shots inside the Gemini 8 spacecraft, as well as Apollo 11, both the command and lunar modules. And there's the texture in the dials. Everything about the coloration is so stunning. And like I said, the color palette of the entire movie is just so perfectly mid-century. There are moments, and there are some shots, especially in the Gemini sequences, where you look at it, and the framing is such that it looks, it looks like the old B-roll, and the old pictures that I, and presumably many people watching this video, have spent hours looking at. It's really quite stunning. And the camera work in some of those shots, it's just super, super shaky. And you're sort of like, I saw, I managed to see it in IMAX. You're like, okay, now I'm a little bit seasick because an X-15 under the pylon on the wing of the B-52 would be pretty jossily. They actually had a tractor seat in that airplane, in that rocket plane, because that was the best way to dampen the vibrations on the pilot's spine. Little fun fact for you. The other thing that deserves a mention in terms of cinematography is the beautiful use of space in the Armstrong home. So not only does the color palette, this beautiful mid-century color palette carry over from vintage NASA to vintage Neil Armstrong's house, but the way some shots framed either him or Jan Armstrong or the family in door frames or down hallways was really quite striking. I mean, this was honestly just a absolutely beautiful movie. The gorgeous cinematography, however, did not totally make up for what I really felt was an odd lack of humanity from Neil Armstrong's character. And this was actually my biggest concern going into this movie. Neil Armstrong's career was incredible with the X-15 Gemini program and Apollo 11, of course, but he was notoriously very stoic and reserved, which aren't necessarily qualities that make for a dynamic main character in a biopic. So quick sidebar for a personal story. I never met Neil Armstrong, but he did review the first two print articles that I ever wrote, which was one of the most terrifying things ever. My first two print articles were for Timeline, the Ohio Historical Society's magazine, and they were about Neil. One, it was a two-part series, one about him as an X-15 pilot and one about his work with the dinosaur because he actually developed the launch abort procedure for this space plane that never got off the ground. And he did give me notes from the editor that I was working with, so I never spoke to him directly or got an email directly. It came through the editor and everything that he picked up on were things that only an engineer would pick up on. The one that I can remember off the top of my head, I had translated or converted rather the landing speed of the X-15 from 200 knots, if my memory serves, 200 knots to about 220 miles per hour. And his comment was, in aviation, we measure airspeed in knots, not miles. And I just was scared of it, but he was an engineer through and through. The narrative in the movie focuses on the, until now, little known fact that Neil Armstrong lost his infant daughter in 1962, not long before he joined the astronaut corps. And this becomes the driving force behind his entire emotional experience throughout the movie. It sort of becomes the jumping off point for his struggle with mortality to be at odds with his engineering brain that can look at everything very logically. And of course, it only gets worse because he experiences a lot of death as the movie goes on. Not only does he lose his daughter at the beginning, he loses a handful of his dear friends. He experienced the deaths of Elliot C, Ted Freeman, C.C. Williams, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, and probably more when he was at Edwards. So as the movie goes through all of these deaths, Neil starts to have visions of Karen everywhere from when he's training and blocks out to when he sees other children playing at a friend's house. And it, while he kind of maintains an outward even strain and doesn't really demonstrate emotion, he also grows increasingly withdrawn into himself and spends time looking up longingly at the moon and lashing out at his friends and not really talking about the reality of the fact that he might die on any of his missions. So this struggle with emotion and sort of repressing it and having it boil out at various points follows Neil all the way to the moon, to the crux, the emotional crux of the movie. After the landing, he's standing at the rim of a crater and he has one of Karen's bracelets in his hand and he drops it into the dark abyss of this crater in a shot so strikingly reminiscent of old Rose throwing the heart of the ocean back into the sea at the end of Titanic. The whole emotional arc in the movie kind of made me wonder if Neil Armstrong was really the kind of man to cry on the moon would he have been put on a lunar mission at all. Now I've been deep in the weeds researching the development of NASA's Astronaut Corps for a while now. I have a project, the announcement about it is pending. We'll leave it there for now. And I've, I'm pretty convinced that for NASA at the time going to the moon, military test pilots were exactly the people who should have been on those lunar missions. These were men who, through the combination of intense training and a constant radio babble to keep them occupied, were able to stave off any intense emotional reactions to the reality of oh my god I'm standing on the moon looking at the earth and it's a quarter of a million miles away. Because can you imagine the emotional strain and intensity that that would bring? Personally it's the deep space EVAs that get me as like way scarier to even think about but I digress. It was strange that this emotional climax of the movie which was coupled with a complete silence which I know was not exactly a common occurrence on the moon for the aforementioned keeping emotional panic attacks at bay. That combined with the presentation of all the drama leading up to that moment from the space end of things didn't evoke the emotion for me that Neil felt in that moment. So thinking about that moment more I think it might be that that moment of sadness on the moon is meant to invoke this idea that even though there were 400,000 people that worked on Apollo and who got Neil Armstrong to the moon he ultimately felt like an island because of this emotional strain that he never let out that kind of kept him just blocked off from the world in a way. And this isolation of Neil Armstrong is really solidified by how much all the other characters very few of them are really explored and developed. Aside from Jan Armstrong Ed White gets a decent amount of development and Dave Scott is in there for a bit and Buzz Aldrin is there and he's bald and mean but everyone else is sort of thrown out by first name. There's no real sense of any kind of camaraderie between the astronauts. There's no sense of like what it was like for him to be an astronaut. It's sort of all drama at home the occasional fun moments with the kids that feel almost bizarre next to his robotic self at work. That struck me is really odd because I've actually read all the Apollo mission transcripts and the Germany transcripts and the Mercury transcripts and mission reports and by all accounts Neil Armstrong you know had emotion in space. There are a couple of my my favorite moments that I'll mention his standouts so there is a quote on Apollo 11 131 hours 42 minutes and 30 seconds into the flight where he said to Mike Collins you ready for your underwear Mike you ready for your underwear you ready for your underwear and I found this and I was very confused by this when I read it and I actually had the chance to ask Mike Collins what it was about and that video was right up here if you'd like to see the entire exchange but Mike Collins told me that he's pretty sure that it was Neil kind of like gently teasing him that while they were suiting up before separating the lunar module from the command service module that Mike didn't have a liquid cooled garment because he wasn't going to the moon so that he just put on regular underwear whatever that meant in this situation so there is a sense of humor there um I've also read there's this great exchange between the crew on the far side of the moon after the landing they stayed in orbit before they came home and they're not in contact with the earth they don't really have much to do they're just kind of hanging out for a bit you know minding things but Neil and Buzz are really kind of enjoying going through all of their samples and explaining it all and sharing it all with Mike Collins and you have this sense of like this is a crew they weren't the best of friends they weren't you know Apollo 12 buddies but um they they were really kind of excited to be there together and to be sharing this experience and I kind of missed that um even he's portrayed as being so extremely robotic on Gemini 8 when um when he got into orbit that was the first time getting into orbit his reaction was that's fantastic boy here we go for me I really wanted to see some of that like happy excited Neil because it felt like there was just too much sad Neil to the point where it was just long pained glances and thoughtfulness and no discussion of wow I'm in space for the first time hey look it's the moon which is ultimately the human response to being in space and being at the moon or so I would imagine having never been there myself but there was it it felt too stark in a way that it felt unhuman the other thing worth mentioning is that this isolation of Neil comes to the point where some major emotional moments were almost downplayed the Apollo 1 fire is of course in there because he did lose his good friend Ed White um and it's shown from inside the capsule you see them during the plagues out test and you see the flames and then it switches to a shot of outside the capsule and you hear sound like a muffled bomb and that's it when in reality that fire ruptured the hall and the flames came out into the white room where it did significant damage to the pad and all the pad crews who rushed to try to get the astronauts out before the hall ruptured um they were burnt they were injured there was a chance to bring out the idea that there are a lot of people involved and that the toll is greater than just the astronauts that it's there was I think a lot to do there and I think it was very an odd decision to show the Apollo 1 fire ending in a thud as opposed to an actual inferno that damaged a lot more than just the spacecraft and injured a lot of people um it was an odd that was an odd very odd decision for me I felt strange seeing that for some reason all right I have to bring it up because every review I'm seeing is mentioning it and of course everyone will this movie will not surpass Apollo 13 as the best space movie for me now when I saw that movie for the first time when I was a kid I knew very little about the Apollo missions I knew they happened in the 60s I knew they were done by capital A astronauts advisors I didn't know what they looked like um I I really just I liked space and I was interested in this idea that people had been to the moon and when I watched that movie it it kind of changed everything for me I I learned that it wasn't capital A faceless astronaut soon to the moon it was people with families and stories and that movie for me captured so much humanity in the Apollo missions that it completely changed the way I looked not only at space and about my own interest in Apollo but how I look at science that movie brought so much humanity into something that was so technical it was incredible and and somehow even though I knew they got back safely because I had read Encyclopedia Encarta at the time on acd run it it built so much tension and every time I watch it I am still struck by the humanity in the story in those little moments that make the crew feel like people not just characters not just astronauts and it's still tense every single time they get to the the long ionization blackout when they're you know you see Jim Lovell's son in the as a cadet watching on tv to the family I can't not I can't look away from the screen I know what's coming but I can't look away from the screen this movie did not do that for me this movie did not have the same depth of character through those little moments that I felt like I came away with a deeper understanding and appreciation of either the astronauts or the missions it it didn't have that depth for me that made it stand out as something that will will linger if that makes sense and you know same thing I know a lot more about Apollo now I know how it's going to end I know how the Gemini 8 ends I know how the LRV crash ends I know how the X-Routine ends I still didn't feel any tension and and I don't know and I chalk that up for me knowing what I love about movies like this is it didn't bring in that emotional element for me but maybe that's just me maybe you guys have a different experience of it so once you've had a chance to see the movie let me know your thoughts let me know what things you absolutely loved in the film what things you didn't love and whether or not you agree with me that humanity is a good thing to have in our astronauts um of course guys leave everything in the comment section down below and of course you can also follow me all across social media for daily vintage based content I'm on Instagram Facebook and of course Twitter and of course anything else you would like to see me cover in future episodes leave all that in the comment section below as well thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you next time