| Universal Pictures | Release Date: October 12, 2018 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
54
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Oct 11, 2018
This movie isn’t just about America, or the collective power of the human imagination, or one man’s heroism, or one woman’s strength in his absence. It is about how being human can mean cruelty and tragedy and loss and unimaginable pain … and how that’s still not enough to defeat us, not by a long shot.
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Sep 2, 2018
It’s very much its own thing – part harrowing and exhilarating space epic on a grand canvas and part intimate character study in miniature. And while both of those elements are stunning, especially when you consider just how early Chazelle is in his career as a director, the character sections are slightly less successful.
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Oct 10, 2018
Concentrate on the abundant factors that make First Man unmissable and unforgettable. There have been astronaut movies before, good (Apollo 13) and better (The Right Stuff). But few have been as much a triumph of the imagination fueled, not by FX but by indelible feeling, as this one.
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Oct 8, 2018
First Man is a movie to see in full IMAX because in that first scene after Neil and Buzz open the hatch, the whole screen suddenly blurts alive filling the whole IMAX screen, the sound goes away, and for a couple of seconds you can convince yourself that this is what it would have looked and sounded like.
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Oct 10, 2018
It's up to cinematographer Linus Sandgren to give First Man its almost operatic sense of drama. He replaces the Technicolor glories of "La La Land" with something closer to the period graininess of his work on "American Hustle" or "Battle of the Sexes." But he adds rawness and intimacy.
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Oct 10, 2018
Aug 29, 2018
Overall, it’s an impressively mounted film, from the seamless visual effects to the score by Justin Hurwitz, which is flexible enough to accentuate both the film’s tension and its earthbound humanity, to the always exquisite editing by Tom Cross (“Whiplash”), which plays a key role in establishing the characters, the stakes and even the passage of time.
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Oct 8, 2018
It’s a breathtaking piece of filmmaking that’s filled with some of the most intense portrayals of spaceflight ever put on-screen. But for all its technical wonder, First Man’s focus on Armstrong’s relentless stoicism ends up feeling more like a hindrance than a revelation. It’s an epic, ambitious film, but it ends just shy of true greatness.
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IndieWireAug 29, 2018
First Man is an anti-thriller of rare intensity, with lived-in performances from Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy heightening the sky-high drama at every turn. It’s not a comprehensive look at the Apollo 11 mission, but revisits that famous story from a more intimate angle, even as it delivers a satisfying ride.
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The PlaylistAug 29, 2018
Steering an astonishingly accomplished path between the small steps and the giant leaps of the Apollo 11 mission, reigning Best Director Damien Chazelle opens the 75th Venice Film Festival with First Man, an immersive, immaculately crafted, often spectacular and satisfyingly old-fashioned epic that may well become the definitive moon-landing movie.
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Sep 11, 2018
Chazelle seems to be trying to both uphold and transcend the narrative template established by astronaut dramas like “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13,” with their scenes of hard-working men barking orders from ground control (Kyle Chandler does the honors nicely here), and of astronauts’ wives worrying that they may soon be widows. Even his missteps...underscore his desire to tell a story of collective accomplishment through one man’s extraordinary perspective.
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Sep 11, 2018
The movie sees Armstrong’s reserve as both a blessing and a curse, a gift and a problem, but it’s unequivocal in its admiration of his humility. And in this way, it feels less like it’s forcing a myth onto the man who made it clear to his biographer that he wasn’t seeking renown — and more like a statement of gratitude.
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Oct 11, 2018
He's not an easy man to read, and he's not meant to be (Foy carries most of the emotional load). First Man relies on Gosling's own low-rev screen presence to hold the viewer's interest. Not until we reach the surface of the moon does the movie really venture into his head (almost literally in terms of camera point of view).
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Sep 13, 2018
The way that Chazelle films the inside of a cockpit (claustrophobic, sensorily overwhelming, fraught with potential danger) and space (stark, haunting, stunning) are both testaments to what’s possible with the latest advancements in technology and vision in filmmaking. That said, it’s hard not to wonder why this particular film, as well-crafted as it is, was made now.
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Oct 11, 2018
It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment — into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination — that the film is too careful, too earthbound, to attempt.
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Aug 29, 2018
It’s a beautifully made film, with an impeccable lead performance from Ryan Gosling as the sober, sensitive astronaut. Yet it’s also a film which takes elegant flight but stalls across its extended closing sequences; a project which, in its probing of Armstrong’s emotional mechanisms, neglects the development of other characters who might have anchored it more securely.
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Oct 13, 2018
First Man pays lip service to the politics of the cold war that surrounded the moon shot, but it’s not that kind of movie, really. For all its scale and ambition, it’s essentially a small-scale character study. The character, Armstrong, is microscopic, and the backdrop is macroscopic. It’s an odd, uneasy fit.
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Sep 2, 2018
There are indeed stretches of the film—particularly its gripping and just a little miserable opening sequence—when it soars (argh, sorry) to cinema heaven (ack, sorry again). But a lot of the movie has a curious drag, scenes repeating and repeating in slightly tweaked shapes until you just want to yell at the screen, “Get to the moon already!”
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Sep 11, 2018
More than a third of its runtime is frustratingly lifeless, mimicking the repressed, impassive psyche of Ryan Gosling’s astronaut, and when Chazelle finally takes us to that big rock in the sky, the sequences may be gorgeous to look at, but the film fails to capture how awe-inspiring something as epic as a trip to the moon must have been.
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