I did not see First Man in theaters because Damien Chazelle directed it, and he directed La La Land, which I narrowly escaped seeing in theaters because I liked Whiplash. Also I did not give the same cold shoulder treatment to Ryan Gosling that I gave to Emma Stone because he was in Blade Runner 2049 so it seemed like the perfect time for fiscal retribution. (In the meantime, Stone temporarily redeemed herself by appearing in The Favourite, but she is in a precarious position and will probably never return to unconditionally adored status.) I added the movie to my queue and waited until it was available for home viewing.

I hate to admit that First Man is probably best seen in the theater, not at home. It is two movies in one, but tonally it never convincingly manages to achieve its goal of being the Citizen Kane of space pioneer movies with Neil Armstrong’s Rosebud being his daughter. The only time that the daughter angle really resonates is when Armstrong parallels his physical endurance challenges with his memories of his daughter’s struggles. If a baby can endure, then a grown man can too.

First Man is like an IMAX movie meets Contact. I beg of filmmakers to stop unofficially remaking Contact—I’m looking at you, Christopher Nolan. Is the real secret of space that everyone goes there to mourn and connect with a lost loved one? I don’t want to read James R. Hansen’s First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong so if you’ve read it, please let me know if this movie is an accurate adaptation then I’ll take it all back and apologize, but I can’t believe that if a person was as emotionally repressed as Armstrong was depicted that anyone would know his motivation. He would remain inscrutable, and considering that he is a character based on a real life person, it slightly bothers me to play armchair analyst if there is not a lot to go on. I’m no astronaut, but the lure of space and any extreme, but beautiful terrain has always been less dour and about the joy of transcendence and injecting the eternal into the temporal then returning to life altered.

First Man excels as a visceral, sensory, vicarious experience of what it physically felt like to be Armstrong. It does leave the viewer impressed with the massively ridiculous and insane undertaking of what it means as a human being to go into space. Chazelle and Justin Hurwitz did for space and the natural elements what Steven Spielberg and John Williams did for sharks. Space and the natural elements become an impersonal, dispassionate threat out to get these men at every stage of preparation. It is the real star of the movie.

Chazelle does a solid job of depicting the ephemeral nature of how Armstrong’s moods affect the entire household. He is either joyfully rough housing with his kids or hurriedly leaving it for work after getting too close to negative emotions and is trying to escape. I used to think that Gosling was a good actor, but sometimes a person points out something, opens your eyes, and you can’t unsee it. Gosling always plays men who don’t show emotion, but at one point is it acting and not being asked to do much? I feel as if he has explored this type of character too much-a man with turbulent emotions playing just beneath the surface and constantly pushing them down. He has also played the smarmy, slick guy too much. I get that Chazelle’s new muse is Gosling, and with so much Oscar buzz, it is hard not to argue with the combo since it seems to be successful, but they both seem to be better when paired with others.

First Man was frustrating because as you’re watching the movie, you have to pay close attention to the tons of people that are being introduced, and if you aren’t familiar with the historical figures already, it occasionally can feel rushed because you have no idea who people are, how important they are to the overall story until they’re gone or the end of the movie. I know that life is also like that, but it should not feel that way for us if we’re supposed to be vicariously living through Armstrong. It is possible to be emotionally stunted and spend the majority of his time with people while finding satisfaction in that rhythm and routine. They’re all a bunch of potential red shirts with famous faces like Jason Clarke, Shea Whigham, Lukas Haas, Pablo Schreiber, etc. Please note that I’m not slamming their performances, but the way they are presented. It feels like a very superficial, exterior examination of work life.

While I hate when movies stuff needless exposition in a character’s mouth and basically halts the story to insure that the audience knows someone is important while winking at the character, it feels as if Chazelle goes too far the other way and is more interested in painting by numbers and giving us the sense of the rhythm of daily life without giving any sense of the people while simultaneously presenting itself as a portrait of one man. Is everyone important or no one? I actually would not have had a problem with this approach if the movie stated earlier with depicting Armstrong’s service in World War II as he had to get accustomed to being around men every day that could die the next, but because he socializes with these men outside of work, the light, loose way that the movie holds them feels inadequate.

First Man does feel as if it is making the argument that Armstrong made a perfect first man on the moon because he was good at suppressing his emotions. It may be true of the man and the time, but it does make a viewer less invested in the part of the movie not strictly devoted to the practical survival logistics of space exploration lacking. Only Claire Foy as Armstrong’s wife and Corey Stoll as Buzz Aldrin get to have personalities, but only Foy wins the Viola Davis of upstaging everyone else with a rousing and true speech, “All these protocols and procedures to make it seem like you have it under control, but you’re a bunch of boys making models of balsa wood. You don’t have anything under control.”

Irrationally I did feel messed with as a black person at two moments in First Man. Disclaimer: just because I felt some kind of way does not necessarily mean that I think that Chazelle was deliberately or consciously trying to do that. He is an outspoken opponent of Presidon’t and gets harassed by Presidon’t supporters on Twitter. I’m really glad that a movie like Hidden Figures exists, and I don’t think that Chazelle is obligated to show how his movie relates to the events of that movie though I’d love someone else to comment on the relationship between the two movies’ depicted events.

The political point of First Man is to assert the importance of this mission in spite of the financial and human cost. By using “Whitey on the Moon” and protest culture as an opponent to that mission, on an emotional level, it retroactively makes the countercultural movement seem wrong, especially black people within that movement, which is news to me since the substance of those movements were retroactively vindicated with the toll that the Vietnam War exacted on Americans and Vietnamese and the fact that some women and black people are still fighting the same battles today. Plus that song didn’t exist yet. Chazelle pulled some Nolan Dunkirk levels of revisionist history. I’m sure there was opposition, as there is now, to NASA’s existence, but condemning protests and using ahistorical black voices to represent that opposition seems like a way of lashing out at protests now. Am I going too far in that last statement? Nope, because visually when Armstrong achieves his goals and reaches a sense of peace, there is a red baseball cap in the idyllic setting!

I don’t care if First Man was filmed before red caps became equated with Presidon’t, which it wasn’t, but if Ridley Scott could reshoot an entire movie with a different actor after one of the best actors of our time got accused of sexual misconduct and was not yet charged with a crime, you can reshoot one single fucking scene and use a different hat! I don’t care if the hat was blank and had no writing or images on it. It was still red. In 2018, we knew what that meant on an instinctual level, and even at an early point in 2019, it has become the subject of too many criminal investigations to not matter. If Chazelle is supposed to be a visual artist, he should have a passing familiarity with the icons of our time and their meaning. Chazelle has failed and needs to do better if he did not recognize how volatile placing a red hat in the denouement would be. The worst-case scenario is that it was a wink of support, which I don’t believe.

Also Chazelle gave audiences an unfortunate opportunity to compare the poignancy of one scene with real film masters when a couple of people are separated by a glass partition. One of Hirokazu Koreeda’s lesser works, The Third Murder, involves a professional relationship, and Barry Jenkins’ most recent masterpiece, If Beale Street Could Talk, occurs between lovers. To be fair, these movies spend a lot of time with each pair separated. Chazelle decided to take an ahistorical route to create this moment. Visually and emotionally this moment is flat in First Man whereas these moments are showstoppers and imbued with feeling in Koreeda and Jenkins’ films. Chazelle is on his third movie. His style should be recognizable and mesmerizing by now, but he is inconsistent and has not completely found his signature style.

First Man fails at empathizing with human emotions, but excels at making viewers feel the tactile exposure to the extreme and precarious life of a space pioneer. You will leave in awe of what men can accomplish with so little, but also wonder if the filmmakers extrapolated the wrong take away lessons from this moment in time.