September: the unofficial National Overreaction Month. In the first week alone, we’ve witnessed Nike apparel set aflame, Serena Williams’ tempestuous courtside tantrum and, most recently, Americans criticizing a film that hasn't yet reached theaters.

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Not long after Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic "First Man” premiered at the Venice Film Festival Aug. 29, news broke of the director's decision to omit the American flag-planting scene.

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That information sent conservatives into a nationalistic brouhaha, with prominent figures and officials like Sen. Marco Rubio, Ben Shapiro and (surprise, surprise) Donald Trump lambasting a film misconstrued as “anti-American” and a “pernicious falsification of history.”

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Sure, a movie depicting a solely American feat while removing our stars and stripes entirely would raise justifiable concern.

 

But “First Man” doesn’t do either.

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Vanity Fair’s correspondent did confirm that the flag-planting won’t be shown on screen, but the American flag is still featured—“more in there than any movie you’ll see this year,” assured Tatiana Siegel of The Hollywood Reporter.

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Chazelle released a statement clarifying his choice, emphasizing his desire to focus more on the obscure facets of Armstrong’s life and role in the mission. The move, he said, was not political.

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But more importantly, he noted something that ought to stop the sky from falling on the right-wing Chicken Littles: the mission was ultimately a human achievement.

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It’s an achievement manifested best, not by a flag, but a footprint.

Armstrong’s first step was the epochal moment of the moon landing, forever changing how humans saw the curiosity that had pulled our ocean tides and colored our folklore for millennia.

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 In 1969, a great mystery had become tangible, and headlines around the world praised a miracle performed by the 400,000 people of NASA—a group comprising mostly Americans.

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Mostly.

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This workforce also included Englishman Frances Thomas Bacon, whose fuel cell patents were the blueprints to a reliable energy source for Apollo 11.

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The Telegraph reported that the dozens of British who played a hand in the moon landing included Lunar Landing Test Vehicle Program Manager Peter Armitage, Houston Mission Control Flight Director John Hodge, and Thomas Chambers, who aided in designing the Apollo guidance computer.

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And let’s not forget, America’s rocket technology and space science program is the brainchild of Nazi-defector Wehrner von Braun and his team of 1,600 Germans.

So, it wasn’t just an American achievement. It was a global one.

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Almost 50 years ago, the world watched us place six US flags on the moon. According to NASA, those flags are now white. Half a century of harsh exposure to ultraviolet rays have blanched the flags colorless.

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I find it fitting. It was imperative, during the Cold War, for America specifically to gain the upper hand in the space race against the USSR. But since then the Soviet Union has faded, like our flags themselves.

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What remains as permanent as the human footprint in the Sea of Tranquility is the fact that mankind left a footprint there in the first place.

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Our star-spangled banner is not gone entirely from the film or the moon. You won’t leave the theater doubting which country spearheaded the initiative. But, waning ever so slightly into the background, it’s a detail eclipsed by something even greater.