First Man

[Cail]

The film shows the flag on the moon, just not the physical act of shoving the pole into the dirt. If that's an issue for people, then I don't know what else to say.

Are you pissed that a damned Canadian actor is portraying an American hero?

[Zarathustra]

Cail, I'm not pissed at anything. I just disagree.

If the flag is shown, then fine. That should have been the answer when the writer, director, and actor were asked. But instead of saying this, they defended the choice to exclude the flag planting in terms that I think are either contradictory bullshit or flat out anti-American revisionism. It is those reasons to which I direct my criticism. Their words. I don't have to see the movie to know their reasons for making this conscious choice.

[Fist and Faith]

Anyway, I don't see too many movies these days. My time is limited, and I do other things with it. I never heard of this movie at all until the controversy started. I'll see it if the opportunity presents itself, which is the best I can say for most movies for the last several years. It could be great, like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. It could be crap, like the thing with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney that I have no problem judging from the five minutes I managed to stomach as someone at work was watching it. I suspect it's good. Amusingly, nobody who has posted here in more than a page has seen it.

[Damelon]

It's a very good movie. I saw it at an IMAX theater yesterday.

Neil Armstrong was a very private person. even his wife didn't know what motivated him, if the movie is to be believed. The movie takes a tack on that from a tragedy shown in the first scenes. With Armstrong often seen in scenes brooding over the event, looking at the moon. The movie is also about the journey from test piloting X 15's to flying the Apollo and the costs involved. The movie gives a real sense of how terrifying it was to strap into a Gemini or Apollo spacecraft and lift off.

Armstrong, in the movie, also gave the best reason for engaging in the expense of the space program that I'd ever heard. The opposing point of view about the program was also touched on a couple of times from both a right and left wing perspective.

I hope people aren't avoiding the movie because the flag being planted wasn't shown. The scenes on the moon are wonderfully done. Yes, they didn't show the flag being planted, but throughout the movie there were reminders of the country's achievement. An early scene showed the scale of what had been done in space up to that point and what the United States proposed to do to change the game. The scene of the elevator ride up the side of the Saturn V for the moon launch left no doubt as to who built it. Those scenes tie together in the next to last scene of the movie, when it is shown that it took less than 10 years from flying an X 15 on the edge of the atmosphere to landing on the moon.

I don't know how Buzz Aldrin feels about the movie but he comes across as as socially oblivious, knowing just the wrong words to say on a couple of occasions. But he does advance the plot by stating what is meant by the actions that had just happened.

If you get a chance, go see the movie.

[peter]

Ok - finally saw it today and liked it - but didn't love it. Fantastic visually, visceral in it's emotion and superbly acted, it's a masterclass in good film making - it's simply that it seems that a story that should have been a triumphant joy (if this was anything to go by) was anything but. I was left asking myself what became of Armstrong and his wife; did they make it. It was essentially a biopic of the couple that stopped half way through. We got, for sure, the ending we all know about - but of the one in which we had been engaged by the film's very story, nothing were we told.

I feel almost a heel for saying this, because the film was so damn good - but there you have it; it's simply my opinion. In respect of the flag controversy, I think Armstrong himself should have the final word. "......, a giant leap for mankind."

[Cagliostro]

Another American who hasn't seen the movie and is weighing in on the controversy.
As someone who was born at the time all this was going on, I do want to see the movie, but will probably wait for it to be on Netflix or something. I have to say that hearing this seems really stupid that they wouldn't include planting the flag. Hell, some of the most famous pictures of the moon landing is of them next to the flag. As someone who detest jingoist b.s., I don't view planting the flag as such, so I think it is stupid that they didn't do it. Alternately, I find the controversy stupid as well.
People are getting so frickin' stupid these days over every little thing. Ugh.

[peter]

On this, I think once seeing the film people will realise that the planting of the flag would have sat oddly within the moon scenes (given another scene that is shown) and to some extent, oddly within the film as a whole. It just isn't that kind of a film. This film concerns the people who landed on the moon, it depicts the activities of landing on the moon - but it isn't about the landing on the moon - or by far from wholly so (and when you think about it the clue to this is in the name). And it isn't a triumphant film - and for this reason, and rightly so in my opinion, the flag scene does not feature. That's another film.

[Zarathustra]

I finally saw this for free.

Boring. Pretentious. Slow. Depressing.

I don't understand what this movie was trying to achieve. It took something that was triumphant and turned it into a soap opera full of long, sullen silences. I don't care about Neil's wife or their marriage. Lots of people get married. Lots of people have fights. Very few have gone to the moon. If the movie was supposed to be about the man, instead of the mission, it failed in that regard, too. What do we learn about him? That he was quiet, mopey and brooding? That he had a wife that couldn't even smile at him or be happy when he made it back alive? We get absolutely no impression of how this historical achievement made him feel.

Watch the documentaries about the moon landing, not this drivel. There are some really good ones out there. This does nothing to capture the excitement of our greatest achievement.

[peter]

I think it might be argued that the moon landings were your greatest technical achievement (might being the operative word) but imho they pale into insignificance behind the near miraculous achievement of taking a multifarious mix of peoples from every corner of the world and in a few short centuries forging them into probably the greatest nation the world has ever known. This I find near miraculous in it's achievement - how did you do that?

This aside, and back on subject, agree - if you want to see a film about landing on the moon, this isn't it. But if you're prepared also to extend your knowledge a little deeper, to see the human stories behind the technological achievement, then this was a perfectly fair film to make. To go to see it expecting one thing and to then get the other is bound to be a disappointment; but it doesn't make it a bad film or preclude the directors/producers right to make the film of their choice, not yours.

[Zarathustra]

I think it might be argued that the moon landings were your greatest technical achievement (might being the operative word) but imho they pale into insignificance behind the near miraculous achievement of taking a multifarious mix of peoples from every corner of the world and in a few short centuries forging them into probably the greatest nation the world has ever known. This I find near miraculous in it's achievement - how did you do that?

I think the very same thing that forged this country also took us to the moon: a pioneering spirit, a yearning for a new world, for freedom, to push beyond the frontier. We had some really smart founding fathers who devised an amazing structure of governance, but this was already built into intellectual movements and revolutions happening elsewhere. America was able to put those into practice because it was new, unfettered (to a greater extent) from the weight of tradition and history and dogma that other civilization have had to endure. But I think it really happened from the ground up, rather than top down. The American Dream drew people here, and gave them the courage to do things no one had done before.

I'm sure Neil was an amazing person, one of those great Americans who was driven to do things no one had done before . . . but the movie gave you no inkling of this. This movie was about itself, its own pretension.

[peter]

Good explanation Z. A topic worthy of a thread of itself. There is no question that something very special happened in here.