First Man and Free Solo are strangely alike: both are about how far two very similar men have driven themselves beyond anything even resembling normalcy, and how that drive affects other people, especially their significant others. They are also very different movies; First Man is a Hollywood spectacular about one of the most famous men in the world, Neil Armstrong, the first human being to step on the moon, and Free Solo is a small budget portrait of an almost unknown climber, Alex Honnold, the only man to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope. First Man was good – but not as good as I wanted it to be given that it was about one of my favorite subjects, the Space Race and going to the moon the first time, a trip in which Neil Armstrong’s sticks it with the gutsiest landing of all time – however, I liked Free Solo better. 

First Man stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong with Clair Foy as his wife and is directed by the great Damien Chazelle, of LaLa Land fame. What the movie does well is to show what a big risk going to the moon was. First Man is shot – primarily – from Armstrong’s point of view and, because of that, counter-intuitively, we don’t get a good sense of Armstrong as a person or the Space Program as history. Free Solo is shot by and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. They are friends of Honnold – and openly worry if even making the movie increases the danger – and the movie is shot from their point of view. To my of thinking, that point of view presents both Alex Honnold as a person and puts his feat in context better than First Man did. Are the feats comparable, I think so. 

Check out their trailers, or, better yet, check out both movies.