First Man: Good movie, uncomfortable to watch

Any scene featuring Armstrong or his…what do astronauts call co-workers? It can’t just be “co-workers.” Can it? Well whatever it is, any scene featuring an astronaut in a space capsule is filmed in incredibly close quarters. Any scene involving liftoff or re-entry shakes violently. I walked out of the theater feeling the way I will when I come off the Tilt-A-Whirl next week. Just kidding. I’m not stupid enough to ride anything at the State Fair.

Gosling does a good job as Armstrong, but it certainly helps that he is surrounded by such a talented cast. There are a lot of “Hey! I know that guy!” kind of actors. Porn Stache from Orange is the New Black (Pablo Schreiber) plays engineer Jim Lovell. The alcoholic senator from House of Cards that gets killed in season one (Corey Stoll) plays Buzz Aldrin. That guy from Zero Dark Thirty that looks like Mac Tonight from those old McDonalds commercials (Jason Clarke) plays astronaut Ed White. Best of all, Kyle Chandler plays NASA’s Chief of the Astronaut Office, Deke Slayton. You read that right. Coach Eric Taylor is getting us to the damn moon!

I’m not going to do a story recap for you. Read a history book…but, you know, be prepared for spoilers.

First Man is clearly Universal’s big swing for the Academy Awards this year. If there’s anything past Oscar nights have taught us, it’s that dramatic space history biopics are prime trophy bait…I mean the only other movie in this genre is probably Apollo 13, but that makes the genre one for one.

It might be one of the five or six best movies I’ve seen this year, but wouldn’t call this a perfect movie by any means. For one, while director Damian Chazelle does a great job of taking us inside the capsules and making the discomfort of space travel clear, there isn’t nearly enough focus on how insane it is that we even made it to the moon in the first place. So much of First Man is about Neil Armstrong and battles with his personal demons. I wanted to see more of an emphasis placed on just how unsophisticated the technology was that got him to the moon. We’re talking like barely more computing power than in those old Casio calculator watches. There’s got to be more story there than what we get, which is at least four shots of Armstrong staring menacingly at the moon.

There are also some great audio effects in outer space. Namely, when the movie takes us off Earth, all music stops. When Armstrong is on the moon, there is no audio at all. I know it is a realistic reflection of what it is like to be in outer space, but it also helps drive home how lonely and unique an experience this is.

I am assuming these scenes are really moving. I wouldn’t know, because I saw First Man at Mission Valley, where every dumb zombie door decoration that those Halloween stores didn’t sell last year now lives. So, instead of the overwhelming loneliness the pure silence delivers in those scenes, I got mostly silence and then in the distance I could hear a very tinny rendition of “Monster Mash” coming from a dancing skeleton in the lobby.

There are awards waiting for First Man come the new year. Technically there are a lot of accolades coming. This is one of the most beautifully shot movies you’ll ever see. A lot of honors await First Man on Oscar Night, but Best Picture probably isn’t one of them.