WHITEY'S ON THE MOON.........BQ CRASH LANDS ON "FIRST MAN"

First Man (2018)    This movie seduced a lot of critics with the level of its craft and the studied, remote professionalism of its two lead actors.......

                Not us.

                 It's a pretentious, boring chore to sit through........and after 140 minutes, the film seems to celebrate its own failure to penetrate the Sphinx of Neil Armstrong or find any path at all into the heart of his character.........

                  The only way to describe "First Man"........imagine '2001' with the Monolith Slab played by a human actor........

                  ........and the filmmakers here are the apes gathered round the slab, chattering like mad, but staggered and confused at what they see, unable to process it.....

                   The forever stoic Armstrong remains an impenetrable riddle that the movie never solves......allowing Ryan Gosling to play the role as a blank slate, preferring to humanize him only through flashbacks of his young daughter who succumbed to a cancerous tumor.

                  And I've really no idea what they had in mind with Claire Foy's portrayal of Amrstrong's wife as a brittle, frigid woman barely containing a deep well of resentment and anger at her emotionally shut down husband.

                   No glorifying epic love story here........watching them, you can only wonder why they stayed married for 38 years until divorcing in 1994.....25 years after the moon landing.  Which only leads me to believe that the filmmakers understood as little about Janet Armstrong as they did about Neil......

                   And so the film proceeds as a grand re-telling of NASA's space-race history with most of the emotion squeezed out of it..........(the polar opposite of Ron Howard's respectfully dramatic "Apollo 13" or Philip Kaufman's breezy, cheeky version of "The Right Stuff")

                     A few good things pop out here and there........specifically the film's depiction of space travel as a harrowing, dangerous and altogether crazy enterprise.......thereby underlining the astounding courage of the astronauts who undertook such a quest.

                    A welcome breath of fresh air comes from Corey Stall as Buzz Aldrin......the only supporting actor in the film allowed to display some amount of un-suppressed humanity......

                    And kudos for including an actor playing musician-poet Gil Scott Heron performing his blistering "Whitey On The Moon", the legendary takedown of an America spending zillions on space while grinding poverty abounds..........

                     But the monolith of Neil Armstrong ultimately defeats this ambitious attempt to build a movie around him........Gosling and director never find way into the man......Armstrong remains a black hole that gradually sucks the life out of the film.

                      It's the final scene that's the most telling.......Armstrong and his wife, separated by the glass window of the contamination room the astronauts where forced to inhabit after the mission,  They're as walled off from each other as the movie is from them.......2 stars (**)