First Man, The Movie

[airdvr 197]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4GtJB5WAlQ

I thought it was as well done as it could have been. I know too much about the story to buy into the dramatic license used...most of it anyways.

I give it a 7.5

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[Phillbo 11]

I plan to watch The Right Stuff again before seeing this movie.

[BillyVance 34]

This movie caused some controversy by not including the US Flag planting. While I understand Ryan Gosling's explanation that this was about humanity. In my eyes and those of millions of Americans, it was a slap in the face. This was the end result of a space race against the Russians. Just my opinion.

"Mediocre people don't like high achievers, and high achievers don't like mediocre people." - SIX TIME National Champion coach Nick Saban

[BIGUN 1,050]

BillyVance

This movie caused some controversy by not including the US Flag planting. While I understand Ryan Gosling's explanation that this was about humanity. In my eyes and those of millions of Americans, it was a slap in the face. This was the end result of a space race against the Russians. Just my opinion.

For those reasons; they will not make any money off me.

Nobody has time to listen; because they're desperately chasing the need of being heard.

[skycatcher68 7]

I found the movie disappointing and ultimately completely forgettable.

1) There's a backdrop of historical events, but it's devoid of any dramatic story. The Right Stuff it is not!

2) This movie proves they couldn't have faked the moon landings. Given today's cinematic technology the (action) scenes come off as a drug-induced fog of vague memories of historical events with nothing new to offer. The opening X-15 scene is a complete disaster. If I wanted to be in a situation where I had no clue what was happening while being vaguely aware of my own consciousness, I'd take twilight dentistry over having to watch this opening scene again.

3) I have no clue what the buzz is over Claire Foy's performance. There's absolutely nothing in it that hasn't been seen in the average soap opera. Perhaps people are comparing it to Ryan Gosling's catatonic interpretation of Neil Armstrong, but that shouldn't be the bar her performance is judged by.

4) They couldn't come up with even one new camera angle of the moon landing. Instead of seeing the lander from the outside as it approaches and lands on the moon giving perhaps a new perspective, we are stuck with a recreation of the same camera angle that was actually shot when Eagle landed the first time - like we haven't already seen this before.

5) The flag-planting controversy is just ridiculous. The movie is filled with American flags. When did certain scenes become compulsory in a movie? Well, okay if James Cameron hadn't showed a ship sinking in Titanic there'd be something to complain about. The entire moon scene is just so superficial that it looks like the only reason the astronauts went there was to plant a flag, and they didn't even show that!

[pchapman 261]

As an outsider I'm like, boohoo, some of those dumb Americans get so butthurt about the flag thing. Flag waving Americans, indeed.

Gee, like I need the flag to remind me. What? I always thought it was the ARMENIANS who landed first on the moon. Now I'm told it was the AMERICANS.

The lander descent stage built by Grumman should still be there doing fine on the moon. The flag has probably disintegrated from the UV light...

(Not quite practical to follow the flag code about "when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning." )

[wmw999 2,117]

I just finished watching it. Neil Armstrong was extremely emotionally reserved; in the emotion-amplifying world of movies, that’s a toughie; they did OK but not awesome. It was clear this was a movie about the man, and not about the event. I’d have enjoyed it more had it been more about the event (Apollo 13 is one of my favoritiest movies because it’s mostly about the events).

As far as the American flag not being planted on camera? Dang. Again, this was about the man, not the country. They never explained what the 1201 and 1202 errors were, either.

All in all it was OK, but I wouldn’t watch it again. Except for seeing those Clear Lake City house interiors (my folks bought a house there in 1972
Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[gowlerk 1,903]

BIGUN

***This movie caused some controversy by not including the US Flag planting. While I understand Ryan Gosling's explanation that this was about humanity. In my eyes and those of millions of Americans, it was a slap in the face. This was the end result of a space race against the Russians. Just my opinion.

For those reasons; they will not make any money off me.

You find the movie objectionable because it missed a chance to demonstrate jingoism? How very 'Murican of you! Forgive my laughter please.

[BIGUN 1,050]

I feel no need to apologize or take your childish attempts at denigrating my patriotism.

Nobody has time to listen; because they're desperately chasing the need of being heard.

[gowlerk 1,903]

BIGUN

I feel no need to apologize or take your childish attempts at denigrating my patriotism.

And I'm not offended by your patriotism. I just find it to be an amusing example of a uniquely American attitude toward the meaning of patriotism. A somewhat childish form of patriotism. I know you are not alone. I would neither ask for nor expect an apology.

[BIGUN 1,050]

The America I see is different from the America you see.

Nobody has time to listen; because they're desperately chasing the need of being heard.

[gowlerk 1,903]

BIGUN

The America I see is different from the America you see.

Yes, it's much more confident and less needy.

[sundevil777 93]

It was horrible.

It was soooo irritating!

So much over the top unrealistic vibration. From the X-15, even before release from the B52, gemini, and apollo, with a philosophy of "if a little bit of something is good, then a lot of it must be better". So stupid. If I had kept my eyes on the screen during all of it I might have gotten motion sickness.

We're supposed to believe that the X-15 just barely cleared a ridgeline with trees before smashing out of control (but staying right-side-down on the skids) on the dry lake bed.

So much unrealistic maneuvering, like when they showed the attitude indicator do a 180 in about 1/4 of a second when it was steady just before. Just prior to landing, they intentionally make it look like their horizontal speed is so very fast, then it is zero the very next second. Anyone that has seen the real video of it knows it wasn't anything like that.

They had him stepping on to the moon's surface not from the last rung of the ladder, but from the round pad of the lander - just inches from the surface. That seems to contradict one of the most historic moments ever caught on camera.

So much jittery camera, swooshing around camera, unnecessary zoom in and out. It would seem that when in doubt, constant motion is what makes a good film.

So many shots of eye/eyes/face ultra close ups. They even went to the trouble of getting his eyelashes backlit. That is so stupid. Perhaps the editors have instructions from the director that an eyeball must fill the screen every 30 seconds.

So many times they were supposed to be piloting a vessel in the dark, how could they have seen anything? Even the control panels were dark. So typical of modern tv and cinema, everything is dark, except for when constantly placing the sun or other bright lights in the shot to blind the viewer. So either ultra dark or blindingly bright is the modern cinematic default.

So much irritating and stupid nonsense.

I wasn't all that impressed with The Right Stuff, but the HBO From the Earth to the Moon, now that was done right.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[sundevil777 93]

Quote

They never explained what the 1201 and 1202 errors were, either.

The link below does a good job of explaining it by the guy that wrote the software. He mentions the reprogramming that had to done for the abort switch while Apollo 14 was on the way to the moon that the HBO series did such an interesting job of depicting.

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html

It was all just one of the many things that would confuse people that hadn't consumed everything they could in popular media about the moon missions. Like the guys that were killed flying the T38, my friend was confused by that. It is not at all obvious that to the uninformed viewer that the astronauts did a lot of flying themselves around from place to place in little jets.

The film seemed in some instances to rely on the viewer having in-depth knowledge of the history from those years, but in so many other ways insults the intelligence of such a viewer.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[airdvr 197]

I think it does a good job of portraying the danger of the flights Armstrong was making. Remember, we're talking 50+ years ago. Unless you're in your late fifties or have studied the program you most likely have no recollection of Gemini or Apollo. I found myself explaining things about the movie to my daughter like the X15 flights, or why we needed the Gemini program, or the crash of the flying bedstead. And this after having visited Kennedy Space Center last month.

I agree with Wendy that this was about the man, not the programs.

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[BillyVance 34]

wmw999

(Apollo 13 is one of my favoritiest movies because it’s mostly about the events).

Wendy P.

It's one of my favorites too. They did a great job with that one.

Now if you want some laughs... Try the movie Iron Sky... It's hilarious...

"Mediocre people don't like high achievers, and high achievers don't like mediocre people." - SIX TIME National Champion coach Nick Saban

[RiggerLee 61]

I was annoyed by a lot of the same things. It seams like they played into a lot of the stories about those events. Like the X-15 landing. He did in fact make a straight in approach over the hills on that landing. That was not normal. The normal flight path was a long steep spiral to landing that pretty much kept him over the lake bed. Allowing him to hit a window and follow a preplaned banking approach to final. Kind of like a carrier landing. The fact that he made a straight in approach evolved into a story about him scraping the trees as he came in, which was just not true. In fact the book that the movie is based on covered this. So I was rather disipointed that they didn't do better. But I was pleased that they made an effort to try and touch on so many things beyond the Apollo flight. If you know much about him you can see hints about his work as an engineer. And he was more of an engineer then he was a pilot. People considered him to be a bit of an egg head. There was actually a lot more that he did with very low L/D flight and approaches. He was a part of the Dynasore program which was an early space plane concept. There was a lot of work going on with lifting bodies and other low L/D designs that might be capable of reentry. Eventually some of that turned into the space shuttle. He did a lot of work with control systems and in particular simulators. And trying to make them actually fly like the vehicle which at the time was not necessarily the case. After he left nasa he did a lot of work on early fly by wire systems. You should thank him every time you get on an airliner because it is a decedent of one of his computers that is flying that plane. A human can't fly a 787. It wouldn't exist with out the kinds of flight control that he developed. A person can not maintain the AOA and side slip that is necessary to achieve the fuel efficiency necessary to make that plane viable. Want to see what the difference is? Ride in the back of an old DC-3 on a bumpy day with the tail washing around in a dutch roll. That's the best that a human being can do.

And I think they did a pretty good job of capturing a picture of one of the most quiet, kind, and reserved personalities to ever be part of the space program. That was probable one of the nicest people to ever live. If he ever said one cross word to another human being no one ever wrote it down.

And Iron Sky is awesome. I think I fell in love with the blond. It made me wont to be a Nazi.

Lee

Lee
[email protected]
www.velocitysportswear.com

[Guest]

Late to the party as usual but SunDevil made a lot of the same observations I did. Just saw it this past weekend. My take:

I thought Claire Foy did a good job of characterizing Jan Armstrong, even if some of it was over the top from time to time. I thought Foy was very faithful to portraying Jan, to the point where I really bought it (I never met the Armstrongs and only met Buzz Aldrin once, but from watching interviews with Jan Armstrong, I'd say Foy's portrayal of her mannerisms and speech patterns were quite good).

It (the movie) was all very stone cold and dead serious - way too somber. Yes, we got to see some of Armstrong's humanity, but there was little in the way of light moments or even some comedy relief. It could have used some. I mean, the real Neil did smile and laugh sometimes. Anecdote from the book: While working as a test pilot at Edwards AFB CA, Neil Armstrong flew a T-33 to a nearby lakebed to check it out after heavy rains hit the area (the lakebed in question was a divert site). Colonel Chuck Yeager, then commandant of the Test Pilot School, was in the backseat. Unfortunately the jet got stuck in the mud and need a truck to tow it onto solid ground. Yeager never let Armstrong live that down. Now THAT could have been a great moment in the film, to show how even the best can make a boo-boo sometimes, and it would have been funny too, if handled properly.

More things I didn't like were: 1) how darkly-lit the spacecraft interiors were. BS - there were nice bright fluorescent lights in all the spacecraft (okay, they turned them off for rest periods); 2) all the shaking and rattling going on. I get that the cinematographer wanted to convey how dangerous the job was, but fer cryin' out loud: the shaking was so violent in some scenes that the crews would have been turned to mush. And all that shaking and rattling of the LM on final approach, with the surface screaming by? One need only look at the 16mm descent footage to see (and hear) that the scene is completely ridiculous (and even though it has some flaws, like showing a cone-shaped exhaust plume from the descent engine, HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon" was a much, much better dramatization of the landing [and be sure to Czech out "Breaking Bad" star Bruce Cranston as Buzz Aldrin in the series]).

Anecdote: later investigation speculated that the extra oomph imparted by the escaping gases from undocking the LM from the Command Module caused a tiny amount of Delta-V (change in velocity) in the prograde direction of flight, but not enough to be noticeable. The astronauts themselves certainly didn't see anything during the inspection after undocking and before descent (when Armstrong deployed the landing legs and rotated the ship so Collins could see if there was anything 'not right'). However, over a huge distance (like orbiting the moon before lighting the descent engine) the tiny amount of extra push resulted in the craft going by the navigational waypoints (lunar features used as references so they could be reassured that they were on the right track) about 3 seconds early. The orbital velocity of the moon is about 1km per second, so 3 seconds would have put them almost two miles (3.2km) past their intended landing spot, which was well EAST of West Crater). That and Aldrin deliberately not turning off the Rendezvous Radar during the descent per the checklist, resulting in the computer overflows (1202 and later 1201.Thankfully, MIT made the computer robust, and it dropped the low-priority tasks to concentrate on the important ones, like engine and attitude control). Yea verily, I'm a space nerd

Armstrong had to fly the LM past the ejecta field of West Crater (not Little West) and land beyond it because the rocks in West Crater's debris field were the size of houses, but they flew over that at about 150 meters (approx 450 ft), so in the 16mm footage they don't look so big. Armstrong landed the LM about 550m (~ 1/3 mi) from West Crater, so this may have led to some confusion on the part of the filmmakers (West Crater [very big] versus Little West Crater). Yes, I'm nitpicky


Which leads to another strong dislike - the shot of Armstrong standing at Little West Crater. It was characterized as being this huge dark canyon, and Armstrong was on the very lip of it. Ridiculous. See Panoramic view of Little West Crater shot by Armstrong around 111:12:00 MET. You'd have thought they landed at Hadley Rille. Oh wait...

A last bit about Armstrong that not many people seem to know or remember. There was a point during the moonwalk where Armstrong shut off his VOX (voice-activated transmitter) and place his helmet against Aldrin's so sound would conduct. In a loud voice so Aldrin could hear, Armstrong said "Isn't this FUN!?"

"The mouse does not know life until it is in the mouth of the cat."

[Guest]

Addendum: I should have added this earlier. Apollo 11 landing scene in "From the Earth to the Moon". Much, much better than "First Man", but hey, how much can you expect from the director of "La La Land" versus Tom Hanks?

"The mouse does not know life until it is in the mouth of the cat."

[wmw999 2,117]

“From the Earth to the Moon” is just generally excellent. We passed it around the office. I think I still have a copy, and probably ought to watch it again.

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)