Armstrong review – moon landing doc gets lost in space

This retelling of the Neil Armstrong story has been eclipsed by superior studies of his historic lunar mission

This Neil Armstrong documentary feels like unrequired viewing coming so soon after two cracking moon landing movies: Damien Chazelle's First Man, a character study correcting the myth of Armstrong as a surly recluse, and Apollo 11, the thrilling documentary made with colour footage of the mission found at the back of a filing cabinet at Nasa. By contrast with the latter film, Armstrong looks made for TV, filled with good ol' boys from Nasa - elderly white men every one of them, who you suspect are still pining for the days of American life when men were men and women waited by the phone in headscarves.

Armstrong was an Ohio farm boy who grew up obsessed with airplanes and got his pilot's licence before he could drive. He flew fighter planes in the Korean war; it gave him character and backbone, he said. It also acquainted him with death. As a civilian test pilot and later on Project Apollo, he risked his life and lost colleagues. Tragically, his daughter Karen died from a brain tumour, aged two. The film features upsetting home movie footage of Karen at home, her balance impaired, desperately unwell. Watching it, you realise how Chazelle prettified her illness in First Man.