First Man

I thought this was an appropriate kind of shot to fit the title. I'm enjoying the odd bit of off-piste urban exploration, getting into parts of Leeds I never knew existed. Like all cities, it has many faces.

I saw First Man. It was so refreshing to watch a biopic that stuck close to the facts and the natural chronology of events, refusing to employ gimmicks and special effects. As far as I'm aware at least, the story was never bent away from its natural arc. I thought it was superbly done, hitting the perfect tone and pace. I do love a true story but I can often leave the cinema feeling like the truth has been manipulated to serve the director's own motives, and as a result, I feel manipulated myself. This was not the case here. Interviews with Neil Armstrong's son suggest that this was honest storytelling. Of course, the story is so amazing that it hardly needed to be changed in any way.

They did a terrific job of putting you in the seat of one of those space capsules. The infernal sound and vibration felt totally and terrifyingly authentic. It was utterly incredible what was achieved with the technology available at the time. Those astronauts had to have felt like those pilots and crew on second world war bombing missions, fully understanding the considerable chance of not coming back. Considering the huge risks and complexities, it's amazing that more astronauts didn't pay the ultimate price. It feels like far more of a miracle now that it ever did at the time.

It was staggering to think that the first lunar landing happened over twenty years before Forrest was born - and ten years before I was feeding programs into a computer using paper tape, with a six-foot high cabinet holding the core store of memory, all of 32K's worth. Even a quite basic smartphone has a million times more storage capacity than that huge cabinet did. I did leave the cinema feeling a bit ancient.