308: Armstrong

[00:00:00] Chapter 20, Documentary Film. Let's get to Armstrong from 2019. It's directed by David Fairhead, narrated by Harrison Ford, and he does a great job at that. And the synopsis is, dramatic, moving, and deeply human, Armstrong offers the definitive

[00:00:21] life story of Neil Armstrong from his childhood in Ohio to his first steps on the moon and beyond. I didn't know about this movie until in the last couple of months. I was searching for interesting science and space documentaries and

[00:00:38] I've always had a big interest in Neil Armstrong, the Ryan Gosling, Damien Gisele movie First Man from a few years ago. I love that movie. I've read I think one biography of Neil Armstrong as well. So I love space, I love space exploration

[00:00:56] and astronauts stories, everything in that world I am absolutely in love with and passionate about. So this documentary really piqued my interest and I encourage you to learn about not only people like Neil Armstrong but space and

[00:01:10] always have an interest in science no matter where you come from. Have an interest in science and have a grounding and basis and knowledge for science and space because it's very important. But I'm not here to preach to you, that's my

[00:01:22] little lecture. So I was surprised that this movie didn't have much of a and still doesn't have much of an audience really. I feel like it's sort of under the radar in a lot of ways and came and went, didn't really get much of a release

[00:01:36] or anything like that and I don't really get that considering the subject matter. It just come out after First Man and then also around the same time as the Apollo 11 documentary and it was narrated by Harrison Ford so I don't

[00:01:50] really get the lack of audience for this film but nevertheless I really enjoyed it. I don't think it's a masterpiece, it doesn't reinvent the documentary but what it sets out to do it does very well. If you like biopic

[00:02:05] documentaries, biographies, space, anything in that realm I think you'll really enjoy it. It's speedy, it's breezy in terms of the pacing, it's edited and directed well so it gives you enough of a kind of conventional like if this was

[00:02:21] for example a dramatization I think people would pass it off as generic, oh you're just rushing through his life beats and all that but in a documentary it works better because you're actually having interviews, you're having

[00:02:33] narration, you're having archival footage and whatever else like it works a lot better in that way as opposed to a dramatized version of that so I really enjoyed it. There's a lot I didn't know about Neil Armstrong and how and it goes

[00:02:49] I guess into some ways in First Man as well but while he of course was very very intelligent, very sharp, he in some ways got lucky in terms of his placement because there are plenty of other pilots who were talented and passionate just

[00:03:05] as he was. Some ended up dying due to the tests that they did and he just happened to get the right things right at the right time and things worked out for him and not say that he didn't have the knowledge and basis and wasn't

[00:03:22] deserving of what he accomplished but that was part of it in some ways and that's just how it goes in a lot of those sorts of situations but to me a very underrated documentary I will always want to know more about

[00:03:37] astronauts and space and science. I seek that stuff out religiously and I again I encourage you to and going back to the sort of conventional quote-unquote nature of the story like I really wasn't expecting it to start all the way back

[00:03:54] from when he was a kid and his family and friends talking about him and then leading all the way up I was thinking no this is just gonna be about the moon landing and everything like that so I really appreciated even having read a

[00:04:08] biography of him that part was to me very informative and really gave me a better picture seeing actual footage and photographs of him as a kid and people talking about him live you know so to speak rather than reading it through

[00:04:24] biographies or just thinking about what he was like as a kid so I would definitely watch more films like this and I wish more films would take a quote-unquote conventional approach because it's not inherently wrong if you

[00:04:38] do it well and you do it about the right subject matter so if you don't know much about the moon landing look into it it's very important and learn about Neil Armstrong because he of course is a very iconic American figure in the 20th

[00:04:53] century so that one is a heavy four out of five