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For all of you out there eager to feel what it was like to fly in one of the earliest supersonic planes, or even ride a rocket into orbit, “First Man” is the perfect movie. It has something that other films about the US space program like “The Right Stuff” or even “Apollo 13” do not. It vividly portray the whole experience as a terrifying adventure instead of feeling monumental such as being in a runaway truck where the driver loses control and ends up tumbling down a mountain.
The slightly distant and ordinary Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) was daydreaming, imagining himself to be the first man on the moon while he began strapping himself with his crew of the Apollo Program. They all wore highly specialized insulated suits that came equipped with pouches to contain their feces, sat in narrow chairs with seatbelts strapped over them, and then they waited for clearance to launch which could take hours or even days. And of course, the entire time they were aboard the vessel they were jolted and tossed about. Each bone loosening vibration coupled with the sound of eardrum shredding noises were a part of life in the vessel. Great peace or beauty might have accompanied them during the journey in the form of a glance at planet earth blue along with the grey and white moon while being surrounded by the infinite blackness of space. Even if they did get ample beauty satisfaction on the travel there was a limit to it. All of the intense mental effort was expelled toward one singular device in front of them. The instrument panel. Each slight mistake or unanswered question, while being bombarded with information from mission control, could easily kill them.
Whether you have a death wish, or are the most courageous person alive, this type of work is not advisable. Directed by Damien Chazelle (“Whiplash,” “La La Land“) and screenwriter Josh Singer (“Spotlight,” “The Post“), this drama suggests there may not be a difference and if there is, astronauts are people who in denial, as they are steeped in a culture that forbids admitting they even have feelings, let alone discussing them.
The Apollo program captures the attention of Neil, a handsome yet introverted test pilot, for several reasons. Never speaking about his personal life, wrote Sam Shepard, “The Right Stuff,” saying Neil was going through the grief of losing his two year old daughter, Karen to cancer. Janet, Neil’s wife, is equally nervous, but while Neil is out there, she does have some relief from her anguish, and that comes while watching the halls of NASA hoping to gather some intel regarding Neil’s safety.
The filmmakers remind us that, as dangerous as Neil’s job is, it offers a distraction from dealing with emotional pain. The wives sitting in the living room, staring at the TV coverage, or just waiting for the phone to ring were undergoing an emotional torment of their own.
The film also reminds you that there were other things happening in America during the 1960s, other than trying to win the space race against the Soviets. A USAID work showing a Gilbert and Sullivan style performance where many African Americans (that were behind the scenes participants in the space program as shown in “Hidden Figures,” but weren’t allowed on airplanes and rockets) thought the Apollo missions squandered money and was a distraction from the battle for racial and economic equality on the ground. Many members of the white political left, and some women, even those inspired by astronauts’ courage, thought the same. We see discontent in snippets of conversations and television images related to Vietnam and social demonstrations, and in the wives of astronauts simmering in the background while their husbands steal the limelight.
Chazelle and Singer truly deserve recognition for allowing hints of national discomfort into the narrative. This helps the film ‘First Man’ feel more correct about the time period in question compared to other films made about the US space program, although when it comes to HBO’s “From the Earth to the Moon” miniseries, that piece does its vision far better.
Sadly, none of these pieces are developed beyond what they eventually become, which is mere detours or neglected thoughts. It soon becomes evident that most of the heart of the movie resides in the flight parts, the recreated climax moon landing, and various other shots that show Neil suppressing his anger and depression because here is a mid-century American man who knows physics and engineering a lot better than he knows his social conditioning. “First Man,” at that moment, becomes a tragedy of American machismo, deeply embedded in Chazelle’s examination of Neil’s inarticulateness, similar to snippets of “American Sniper” (which shamelessly proclaimed its hero’s volunteer work for combat duty stemmed from an inability to face life as a husband and father) and “The Deer Hunter” (where straight white men exhibited love for one another through pain and suffering).
Almost every man who was a part of the Apollo program must have found himself in the same emotional predicament as Neil, including Jason Clarke’s Ed White, Kyle Chandler’s Deke Slayton, Ethan Embry’s Pete Conrad, Pablo Schreiber’s Jim Lovell, Shea Whigham’s Gus Grissom, Cory Michael Smith’s Roger Chaffee, William Gregory Lee’s Gordon “Gordo” Cooper and many other crew cuts in the mission control.
They have the quintessential Life Magazine portrait, complete with that Midwest charm: square jaws and all. The actors perform as expected – without much effort to capture the essence of the era, and overall, none of Neil’s contemporaries stand out as much more than glorified extras. It becomes disturbing when Chazelle stages the Apollo 1 capsule fire of 1967, which resulted in the death of three astronauts. It is unsettling because of the dispassionate bluntness of the presentation; it’s not, after all, as if we had formed any kind of attachment with the crew. Their demise mostly serves as a danger to Neil’s security and the overall wellbeing of his family.
Corey Stoll, who plays Neil’s Apollo 11 capsule mate Buzz Aldrin, is the only actor aside from Gosling who makes an impact. This sullen character appears to be a wise-cracking, garrulous man with access to a rich emotional life. He knows he’s good-looking and charming, and loves to play the part of the cocky space pilot when the TV cameras are on. Neil admires him, but it seems like he is also kind of irritated by how Buzz seems to be so at ease with himself. Whenever they are together on screen, Chazelle, and Singer approach the dangerously alluring proposition that embracing your feelings and emotions is a form of weakness.
Otherwise, if the movie did not explore Neil’s grief and resentment, “First Man” would have come across as an endorsement of the notion that after all these decades, the strong and the silent type is still the masculine ideal. The stoic, happy-suppressed man was, after all, a caveman.
A historical psychodrama, “First Man’s” primary intention may be muddled, but it still represents a giant leap for all flight revolving movies. I wouldn’t say the piloting, the blastoff, and the orbit scenes are particularly effective—I want to say there’s no underlying poetry in the images but neither do I think they’re intended for that. They are focused on single-handedly implanting you into the body and mind of Neil Armstrong and letting you experience first hand how difficult it would be to focus, loudly work out equations, and flip switches amidst all the motion and noise that thrashed around your sense.
Linus Sandgreni, his regular cinematographer, and Chazelle try to keep the camera on Neil while he absorbs information during a NASA briefing, reads to his son, fights with his wife, or even strolls away from a burning wreck. The goal is to have you walk a million miles in Neil Armstrong’s boots by the end of the movie.
So, judged solely as a spectacle IMAX has its merits. Depending on your point of view, seeing “First Man” exclusively through the lens of its spectacle scope makes it a success. Southern Californians watching will shake like the easterly regions of the San Andreas Fault, but fear not, because it is just the film doing its job.
Determined by his work, Chazelle is an incredibly visceral director, in comparison to Zemeckis, or Flight. Character driven gritty films Chazelle speaks about the most on his interviews are definitely not made by him; Chazelle references them more than he copies them. During a solo, those who have suffered through “Whiplash” were indeed stuck inside a drum. Intense does not even begin to describe those musical scenes…and let’s not even begin to explain “First Man”, where the action plays like a reality based version of one of the scenes Chazelle uses as a warmup for training instead of as an end goal. For the motion first and foremost, it’s so extreme, ferocious, and ruthless that one wonders how long can one endure that ongoing amusement park pain without tapping the eject button. Chazelle and Sandgren get two of the three stars for Chazelle’s visuals alone, the third star goes to Gosling’s rarely mannered internalized but hugely powerful acting. Makes one wish the design of sound was enabled over the bowels.
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