Sunday 21 October 2018

Thoughts On _First Man Part 1. (No Spoilers)

Hi all,
          Going in to see this much-anticipated film, I was not sure what to expect, was it a documentary, a biography, an action film or what? I had not seen a trailer to it, because I wanted it to keep my impressions of the film unsullied by little clips of action.
        It begins when he is taking part in the X-15 program, during his test pilot days, this was a good starting point, as it showed Armstrong could get out of some tricky situations when he had to. Next came the Gemini 8 mission, the task was to find and to dock with an unmanned Agena capsule, which they did, but not without a little bother along the way.
          They did not shy away from showing the disasters that befell the Astronaut Corps, but they did ignore any mention that there had been any female participants. The "Mercury 13" women were not given a mention at all.
          They fast forward again to the Apollo 11 mission.  There were very nice Spaceship mockups and filming here of some of the drama they went through. I say some as I wished the film would have been longer so they could have included more of the story. (No, I do not mean aliens.)
            As to the acting, the wives were mainly seen and not heard. Many of the astronauts were just "there", you were supposed to work out who was who in many cases. For instance, Mike Collins and Edwin " Buzz" Aldrin, the other two crew members on Apollo 11, their names were barely mentioned at all.

Part two will include what I would have added.

Rating - 7 out of 10.

Ivor Cogdell

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