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Friday, February 1, 2019

First Man (2018)

I did not love this movie, and I definitely thought it could and should have been a half our shorter.  But here is the thing. 
If you want to get an almost first-person sense of what it felt like to fly in one of the earliest supersonic planes or ride a rocket into orbit and beyond, then this is the movie to see. More so than other films about the US space program it makes the experience seem more untamed and scary than grand, like being in the cab of a runaway truck as it smashes through a guardrail and tumbles down the side of a mountain.
Future first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong (quietly played by Ryan Gosling. Almost no dialogue and little emotion is required) and his colleagues zips into insulated suits, wait hours or days for clearance to take off, then spend a few minutes being shaken and rolled. The vibrations of the trip rattle their bones and the noise scorches their eardrums. There might be a brief moment of beauty or peace, along with a sidelong glimpse through a window of the earth or the moon but it's largely deep space. They expend most of their mental energy studying the instrument panels and trying to process the information that's being fed through their headsets by mission control, knowing that one missed fact or wrong choice could mean their deaths.

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