First Man (2018)

First Man

• I’m so glad I got a chance to watch this. I’ve been waiting months and months on end for it to come to streaming, and it finally came to Netflix, so I hopped right on it. I didn’t even know it was on there until I came across an article about it, and I got extremely excited. I’m a huge fan of Damien Chazelle, so it was only a matter of time. The dude absolutely cooked with ‘Whiplash’ and ‘La La Land’, so he cooked with this one, too. It’s definitely the weakest out of the three, and doesn’t merit quite as much enjoyment as his first two. But it’s still great, and a very well made piece of work. I’ll go ahead and get my complaints out of the way first. The first one is the runtime and plot structure. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of scenes that I would deem unnecessary, but you can certainly feel the almost two and a half hour length. There were several moments where I was waiting for the movie to speed up a little. That’s more of a me thing rather than a critique. My second complaint was that I wasn’t a huge fan of the acting. Everyone actually did a really good job, but when I think back on it as a whole, it seemed kind of stiff. Ryan Gosling (me) did an awesome job, it’s just that once I finished the movie, there wasn’t really anyone that stuck out as being super phenomenal or anything. But that’s enough complaining. The plot was extremely interesting watching, as it dives deep into the years leading up to the moon landing. It’s so cool seeing the behind the scenes of everything, as well as the use of archival footage/audio to help authenticate the movie. Like I said, Damien Chazelle cooked with this one. And it certainly deserved its Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. There were so many moments that used VFX and you couldn’t tell. Overall, this movie was very well made, and although I think it was a couple tiny kinks, it’s still awesome. I’d recommend it to most science/drama fans. This film is officially Berry Approved, so go watch it now!