Why First Man is such a yawn

Damien Chazelle's First Man (2018), about Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and the path that led him to be the first man on the moon, is far more technically demanding (tons of flight simulations and recreation of space capsules and lunar modules, all of which led to nerve-shattering journeys, all depicted brilliantly and probably accuratel, so far as I know) than his previous highly successful films Whiplash, La La Land) but it will not earn him the coveted BP Oscar toward which he seems to be striving. Bigger and longer is not necessarily better, and definitely not in this instance. First of all, by now the space race so called is overly familiar ground, in biopics (Apollo 11, The Right Stuff), miniseries (From the Earth to the Moon), fiction Gravity) - and it's not clear what new ground Chazelle hopes to find here. More problematic, he tries to cover a long span of time involving many space missions and it's really hard to keep track of the development of the Apollo program - too much material to over even in a bloated 2.5 hour slog. Third, and more important, Armstrong is a vapid character, terse and uncommunicative, which may be true to life (the astronauts by and large were not the most effervescent group) but is deadly for this movie; we know little more about him at the end than at the outset, and as a personality he never holds our interest - nor to the other players, none of whom has a distinct role or identity. The movie tries for some family background - the long-suffering wives and children, etc. - which we have certainly already seen; Claire Foy does her best as Mrs. A., but she has little to work w/ aside from one powerful seen when she tells her husband off. Obviously any real tension about Armstrong is minimal, as every viewer knows the outcome of his mission. All in all it's a technically proficient project - and a stretch into a new area for Chazelle - but it's a yawn of a movie, unable to live up to its ambitions.