Thumb's down "First Man" movie review (w/ some spoilers)

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The pressure was too enormous to be contained. The once-ignited gaseous elements demanded release. Lift-off would be achieved.

3 … 2 … 1 …

I’d just endured 138 minutes of “First Man.” I enjoyed the movie, and would have enjoyed it more had I not made the ill-considered decision to consume a heaping plate of refried beans at Don Patron’s just prior to show time. 

Blast off!

It wasn’t the faux pas you might imagine. In space no one can hear you fart. 

Same goes for the distant rear stall in the men’s room at Latrobe 30 Theater & Cafe.

I’m not saying the movie was a stinker. 

Not at all. It’s just that Neil Armstrong, who died in 2012 at age 82, was our most boring American hero. The Wapakoneta, Ohio, native didn’t drink, didn’t brawl. His idea of cutting loose was snacking on a Twinkie.

He was a true straight arrow.

I prefer my arrows a bit bent. Give me Benjamin Franklin, peerless pilot Chuck Yeager, fighter ace and baseball legend Ted Williams. These men had swagger. They were swashbucklers.

Armstrong was a buckle that had never been swashed.

Even his signature line — “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind” — seems like it hales from the horse-and-buggy era. Had it happened today I’m certain a lucrative endorsement deal would have been pre-arranged and the celestial salute would be something like, “Boy, this would be the perfect time for an ice cold Coke!”

A Blawnox friend — hello Greg! — said I was being shortsighted, always a possibility when the climatic scene takes place 238,912 miles from the planet earth.

He said NASA engineers had to re-fit the seats of the astronauts to accommodate the enormous testicles of men like Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. I get that.

But the earthbound half of the film hints that part of Armstrong’s motivation for being an astronaut was to escape the tedium of routine family life. I know lots of beleaguered spouses who say they need a little space, but c’mon! 

The film is visually fantastic, but even parts of that struck me as redundant.

Take the dramatic lift-off sequences. They showed sparks, fire, choking smoke and fervent prayers the vehicular occupants would survive.

Sounds to me like my near weekly efforts to accelerate my 2007 Saturn Vue up the Pennsylvania turnpike on-ramp at at the Irwin interchange. And I’m not making that Saturn part up just so it fits with today’s space theme. I really do drive a Saturn.

So, yes, it’s a good movie. 

But I’ll wager the better, more entertaining film will be “Bohemian Rhapsody,” out November 2.

It’s about a truly dynamic earthling who overcame great odds to achieve what even us gravity slaves refer to as stardom.

But what else would you expect from a movie based on a guy named Mercury?  

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"Lucky Lindy" was a bigamist; Neil Armstrong a bore

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So as an antidote to so many stories of so many men behaving so badly, I was reading a book about Neil Armstrong, our premier astronaut who, it seems, never even once entertained a single dirty thought. Thus, his biography is a bit of a bore. 

No orgies, no binges, no excess, no salacious episodes where he invites aspiring female comics to his hotel room so he can liberate his penis.

Armstrong, who died in 2012, never once sought to capitalize on his historic fame. A man celebrated for in July 1969 being the first to step on the desolate surface of the moon lived his entire life as if he’d never find any human fulfillment in Vegas.

I kept waiting to learn if he ever cut loose and maybe snacked on a Twinkie.

But the Jay Barbree book, “Neil Armstrong: A Life in Flight,” was not without merit. For instance, I scored a dandy brain barnacle about another American icon.

A brain barnacle is what I call trivial facts powerful enough to survive a cranial power spraying. Once grasped, they never depart. Guaranteed, this one is something I’ll bring up every time I hear the name Charles Lindbergh.

Turns out Lindbergh was a bigamist. And not a little bigamist. He was a big bigamist.

“Lucky Lindy” fathered 13 children to four women!

Sounds more like “Get Lucky Lindy.”

Who knew a man who became famous in 1927 for the first trans-Atlantic flight had so much in common with so many 21st century NBA stalwarts?

I learned this after reading how Armstrong was honored when Lindbergh showed up July 16, 1969, to watch Apollo 11 lift off for the moon. I was surprised Lindbergh was still alive in ’69. He seemed to me to spring from an entirely different epoch. But I was mistaken.

He was 25 in ’27, thus 67 at lift-off. He’d die three years later of lymphoma complications in Maui, where he spent his final years — and he’d been getting laid years before landing in Hawaii. 

Yet his life after the flight that made him famous was spackled with darkness. How much of that was a reflection of having had his 20-month-old son, Charles Jr., kidnapped and murdered is one for psychological speculation.

I was moved to look up Lindbergh to confirm my recollection he was a Nazi sympathizer.

He was. A moralizing anti-Semite, he campaigned vociferously against FDR and any argument America should enter WWII on behalf of Britain and proudly wore the Order of the German Eagle presented to him by Hitler henchman Hermann Goring. 

And through it all he espoused the sanctity of holy matrimony and derided womanizers for their petty infidelities.

Here, apparently, the pilot was just wingin’ it. Because in addition to the six children he had with his life-long wife Anne Morrow, he fathered seven more to three European mistresses. On his deathbed, he wrote letters to the women imploring them to preserve his silent hypocrisies beyond the grave. 

As the truth began to emerge, Reeve Lindbergh, his youngest daughter wrote, “This story (of her father’s double life) reflects absolutely Byzantine layers of deception on the part of our shared father. These children did not even know who he was! He used a pseudonym with them (To protect them, perhaps? To protect himself, absolutely!)”

So that’s the warts ’n’ all story of one of the most venerated men in American history, just another male icon laid low it seems by unstemmed surges of excess testosterone. 

And I’m left to wonder if the only way to keep men grounded is to send us all to the moon.

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I really thought by now we’d have at least the galactic equivalent of a 7/11 on the moon. We could go there for stale hot dog buns, overpriced milk and things like batteries and toothpaste.

Those would be all the things you might forget if you were packing for a moon vacation.

It may sound farfetched, but for the past 15 years or so I’ve talked to experts who assured me the future for moon vacations was on schedule for right about now. Back then I was told by 2010 a select few would be staying in inflatable lunar hotels, playing micro-gravity basketball with 40-foot hoops and sipping Tang & Tequilla Sunrises as the earth set on the Sea of Tranquility.

That’s why the 40th anniversary of the moon landing is triggering mixed emotions. It’s a landmark historical event, but seems like a nagging reminder of a wasted opportunity, sort of like 59-year-old Tom Watson whiffing on an 8-foot putt to, egads, win the British Open.

So it’s all very disappointing to an optimist who has been impatient for the future since way back in the past.
It all began for me in the mid ‘90s when I spied a tiny blurb in The Wall Street Journal that said there would be moon vacations by the year 2020 (and let me be the first to predict 2020 will be a good year for visionaries).

I knew the fuddy duddies at the WSJ were prone to erring on the sound side of prudence. At the time I was doing lots of stories for National Enquirer and instinctively erred on the side of gross recklessness. So I cut the projected number in half and launched a niche career as a half-baked futurist.

I did dozens stories for dozens of publications about what the future of moon vacations would look like. I found Japanese companies working on giant inflatable hotels. I found Swedish companies that were planning golf courses that would charge gray fees instead of green fees.

I found a man, Dennis Hope, who can justifiably claim he’s the king of the universe. In 1969, he seized on an obscure United Nations loophole that says “no country or nation can own outer space.” Because he’s an individual and neither country nor nation, Hope brilliantly laid claim to the moon and six planets and commenced to selling the real estate. He’s already sold more than 25,000 lunar acres at $27.15 a piece.

He’s going to be a whole chapter if I ever get around to my book about making millions by selling stuff that’s not yours.

And, of course, I found many people who were consumed with prospects of space sex. I don’t want to spoil the fun, but suffice it to say that bondage in the future will lose its deviant chic because experts say space sex will be impossible without straps, velcro and enough traction chains to get a cheap rent-a-car over the Rockies in a blizzard.

I found a private sector brimming with enthusiasm and Barnum-like initiatives that would re-ignite enthusiasm for a program that has somehow squeezed the euphoria out of what is man’s last, greatest adventure.

I believe the space program is at a standstill because we’ve turned the entire enterprise over to one of the most boring alliances ever conceived.

That would engineers restrained by accountants.

These are the people who for years have given us space experiments involving the mating habits of insects, frogs and worms when it seems all people really care about is the mating habits of astronauts.

Just imagine that pay-per-view.

In fact, the best human interest story involving the space program in recent years involved astro-naughty Capt. Lisa Nowak, kidnapping charges and a sordid love triangle. It was a fascinating peek behind the curtain at the lives of the star-chasing stoics.

And that all took place on earth.

We need some enterprising reality TV producer to develop a “Big Brother”-type show for outer space. And it should be R-rated.

We can’t ignore that adult entertainment was the driving force that keyed the development of the internet. A little space nudity -- lunar moons! -- could go a long way in humanizing the space program, a worthy endeavor that is ironically hitting bottom for its lack of cheekiness.