In its opening moments, The First Man draws viewers into a powerful setting. Your eyes follow the Neil Armstrong traveling through the atmosphere, and you feel the weight of that atmosphere on you. I hold my breath for the first three minutes, wondering how it feels to shoot through the sky like that. I imagine it feels like being on an airplane and feeling your heart in your throat.

I wonder how he feels in that space rocket going up to space. The camera is positioned in a good way that lets us see things from Neil’s perspective, which creates a memorable experience from the beginning.

If you want to experience what it feels like to travel to space, The First Man is the film for you. The intensity of the movie is so real, leaving you on the edge of your seat at times. You feel the same tension that Neil and his team members experience as they get dressed up to experience another world. The contrast of rowdiness and silence throughout the movie helps you experience the action from Neil’s perspective. You experience the chaos and the confusion of someone in a space rocket with all the noises and quaking until you feel a rush of satisfaction as the rocket reaches space.

The most intense scene in the movie is when the whole team gets ready for the space launch. The look on everyone’s face is one of pride but also fear. The intensity in Neil’s eyes during the countdown resonated with me. When he looks at the moon, his distant destination seems very sad, in my opinion. For a brief second, I felt like he was about to run out of his seat and go home during that scene.

Overall, the film was nice. It is very intense but ironically a bit slow as well. I like to laugh out loud and relax when watching movies, so this movie provided a different experience. If you like historical films with heavy dialogues, you will really enjoy this. Altogether, it was a very informative movie.