Damien Chazelle’s 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic First Man is pretty goddamned good. Okay, one could argue reasonably that not enough time is devoted to Apollo 11 because the director wanted to make it more “austere” or whatever. Or that Armstrong was “so much more than Apollo 11.” Who knows.
Whatever the point was in that decision it does not make the film any less worth watching. It can get fucking intense, especially the opener when Neil’s out on some extremely high altitude test flight in 1961. That shit with the bottom of his cockpit glowing red from the friction of the atmosphere. And then the gut-wrenching tragedy of his toddler daughter Karen’s death to cancer and the Apollo 1 test launch disater – The minimalism is freaking chilling and it’s so much better done than its (brief) depiction in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 – which First Man is not a “spiritual prequel” to.
UPDATE 3/1/2025 12:01 AM: They movie became unavailable on YouTube at EXACTLY midnight, lol.