Tuesday 23 October 2018

Seeing "First Man"

leading from


 

On the 21st of October 2018, I went to see First Man which I considered to be a slightlystrange film for me to see, I am a fan of space rockets and exploration having been born around the time of the first Lunar Landing. However this film featured lots of extremely boring moments of down to Earth human drama where it seemed that Neil Armstrong (played by someone who looked remarkably unsimilar to the actual man) was someone with slight difficulty communicating his inner feelings, peppered with moments of life and death situations in rocket ships.

Trips through the darkness of space often looked mysterious and occasionally pretty. The final moonscape might inspire some people who see little or no reason to go back to the moon. 
 
I wanted to see things to perceive as lunar ruins or robot heads in craters and there was no chance of it, there wasn't even the feint shimmer around the moon that some blame on a supposed atmosphere around the surface that instead might be a ruin of glass canopy placed there by an ancient cicilisation or was there something extra for iMax audiences because I only got to see it in the X-Screen. Perhaps a lot of a sense of the details in the rather grim looking spaceship interiors might have seemed lessened.

However my creative thoughts started to kick in to try to alleviate the utter banality of the film .

The child's bracelet that Armstrong left on the moon,  I mistook for a bracelet of teeth when it was first shown in the drawer and wished that it actually was supposed to be.

There was small window that the Armstrong character pulled the curtain/drape across at a funeral that I wished was a long hundred metre shaft or one going off into infinity with multiple curtains/drapes being pulled across it at the same time and he realised that this would never be so.

When the Neil Armstrong character suddenly played with one of his sons holding him horizontally and doing things such as sticking his head in the fridge etc, I thought that the boy needed a docking port on top of his head and various other places such as the fridge interior to make it seem as if Neil was practising his Apollo docking with the Eagle routine. 

Perhaps a test rocket capsule in the film could be used as an oversized kitchen oven for cooking astronauts. Perhaps, the story every night would be that the Neil Armstrong should fear the idea of astronauts being baked inside the kitchen cook and then one day wake up in the middle of the night with the urge to open the oven door, crawl inside and find himself in the Eagle 11 capsule connected with the Eagle lander.

Certain papers that the Armstrong character was being handed all were blurred to the camera lens and I hoped that this meant he was living in a fake reality loosely created by extra-terrestrials based on his existence on Earth that saw no reason to make the contents of the papers clear in this loose reproduction.

The moments of fear took the form of astronauts caught in spinning rockets and the hideous shaking of the rocket as it headed up through the heavens into the darkness of space accompanied with thunderous noise

People who bring very young restless children who keep loudly asking questions such as why so-and-so is crying etc and have no interest in rocket ships, might be advised to choose another film for the sake of the child because the film is not very entertaining in that way and the rocket ship scenes area often very very noisy and nightmarish. I was thankful when a couple with their daughter sitting nearby did finally leave half way through.

Obviously I'll have to see it again but on the iMax, especially to make sure that there was nothing of the slightest bit of interest on the moon. Perhaps I need to take a dozen year restless five year old children with me just to see make sure there isn't one of them who would enjoy the movie.