There was a guy who worked at the same place as my dad who said he had been to the Bonneville salt flats in Utah. He was convinced that the moon landing was staged there.
Omitting the American flag planting, which may have taken all of 30 seconds in movie time, was significant and meaningful. He was in the limelight of an accomplishment that thousands of Americans worked very hard to achieve. Not showing the flag planting is shameful and anti-American. I don't care what his two sons opinions are, but i would have liked to know what his might have been. And i'd be interested in Buzz Aldrin's opinion.
The space race and race to the moon was a cold war epic. JFK targeted the landing of a man on the moon as an AMERICAN statement of our superiority. Anyone who live in those times knows the truth and to say anything else is BS. Now I can understand the Armstrong sons’ statement about the movie being about their father and everything that made him who he was....but planting that flag was a great part of who he was and not including it diminishes the movie and makes me not inclined to see it. Ryan Gosling is a wimpy ass wipe anyway.
Really? You don't care? Interesting. My grandfather is in just about every aviation hall of fame around the world. Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Science. He had an office in the White House during the Eisenhower Presidency. He holds multiple patents involving aviation components. He counted people like Donald Douglas and Werner Von Braun as colleagues and friends. And yet, there was a distinct difference between that man and the family man. People would probably be shocked about his thoughts on designing aircraft that ultimately killed thousands of people. If Armstrong's sons feel this movie depicted their dad....so be it.
Fair enough, in the son's depiction of their dad. That's significant (probably, unless they're just selling out for a pay day). But still, the "First Man" on the moon was the result of thousands of Americans hard work and omitting that flag planting is disgraceful. If you're going to show him stepping on the moon, let's be accurate and acknowledge this American achievement.
And let me put it another way. This movie is like a NFL game. 99% of the show may be great, the real deal. But that act of kneeling for the anthem is disgraceful. This movie's option to not show the American Flag is like them kneeling for the anthem. And if the 2 sons say "Pop would be okay with that", they can shove it.
I can see how someone could have misgivings about having had a role in developing and using weapons of war. Robert Oppenheimer had ambivalent feelings about developing the atomic bomb. But they shouldn't. What they did was necessary to defend freedom. I don't know what demons might have haunted Neil Armstrong but I seriously doubt that planting the American flag was one of them.
And yet, they would know him better than any of us. This movie was based on a book focused on Armstrong, the man. Not Armstrong the astronaut. Of course he had a pivotal part of American history and we all want to be proud of that. The flag is still in the move....just not the planting of it. I'm willing to hold off judgement until seeing how the movie plays out. Okay....let me share. Years ago my grandfather was inducted in to the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio. That night I sat next to Admiral Thomas Moorer, at that time, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the person my grandfather had chosen to read his induction commentary. It was an amazing night for me. I met many influential and powerful people. At the end of the evening, as I was pushing my grandfather in his wheelchair, I told him how proud I was of him. He got angry. He told me not to be proud. He told me he carried the burden of having designed aircraft that ultimately killed a lot of people and that was nothing to be proud of. I was stunned and it was the first of just 2 times I ever saw him weep. The point is, that many of the people we look up to, consider heroes and such, are just human beings and maybe it's best left to their kin to determine how they might want to be remembered.
