Just came from seeing “First Man” on the super-duper senior matinee rate. Glad I did it then, so I can’t whine quite as much about the price.
As others have noted here, what they presented was historically accurate, but left out large pieces of the narrative that would have better explained things. For instance, no mention was given to the Gemini 8 docking problem, nor the fact that, after the Apollo test flight burned up, why it happened and that a redesign was required, which backed things up some.
As to Armstrong himself, it would have been nice to mention that he was a Naval pilot in the Korean War, or all the things he did AFTER Apollo 11. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he appeared in NASA in 1961 and did nothing after the moon flight. And even the moon flight seemed like a Kubrickian fantasy. It was “one small step...”, mourning his dead child, then blast off from the moon.
One more thing about the “global” effort and affect of the moon landing. Earlier in the movie, when the USSR beat us into space, beat us to the first EVA and a few other space firsts, there was a pronounced notation of the “Space Race” between the two countries. Yet, when the US pounded the USSR on the most important race, no kudos to NASA and the American spirit that had done it. Well, save for a replay of the JFK speech from the early 1960s, and that was shown on TV while the Apollo 11 team were in isolation after their return!
All in all, I could have waited for it to show up on cable and watch it on my big screen TV. The visuals would be close and the audio would have been, too.
The film is about Neil Armstrong joining NASA and his time there leading up to the Apollo 11 landing. Everything else you mention as a detriment is superfluous. Who wants to go see a movie about Neil Armstrong and have everything grind to a halt for technical explanations about Gemini docking problems and 100% oxygen environments and the flammability of Velcro?
Armstrong and Aldrin were on the Moon for 2.5 hours. You wanted them to show every minute of that? “Oh he mourned the dead child...” Yes, that was the emotional core of the entire film, so it was very important to show, and I thought it was heartbreaking and beautiful.
The film made it very clear we were racing against the Soviets, and we were losing. After Apollo 11, the world was in celebration of the U.S. beating the Soviets. What more did you want?