First Man – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

First Man – first look review

29 Aug 2018

Words by Adam Woodward

Astronaut in spacesuit with 'Armstrong' written on it, lit by blue lighting in dark environment.
Astronaut in spacesuit with 'Armstrong' written on it, lit by blue lighting in dark environment.
Damien Chazelle’s tech­ni­cal­ly accom­plished Moon land­ing dra­ma, star­ring Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy, fails to achieve lift off.

When Apol­lo 11 took flight on 16 July 1968, it was the cul­mi­na­tion of cen­turies of dream­ing and more than a decade of sol­id plan­ning, dur­ing which time each small suc­cess was met by a seem­ing­ly giant set­back. Mil­lions of dol­lars and many lives were expend­ed as Amer­i­ca bid to become the first nation on earth to put a man on the Moon, and it is the human cost of this his­toric event that pro­vides the main nar­ra­tive thrust in Damien Chazelle’s star­ry fol­low-up to 2016’s La La Land. Despite some heart-stop­ping set-pieces and fine per­for­mances all round, how­ev­er, the act of bal­anc­ing per­son­al dra­ma with effects-dri­ven spec­ta­cle proves, well, rock­et sci­ence for this director.

Based on the 2005 biog­ra­phy of the same name by aero­space pro­fes­sor James R Hansen, First Man charts the lit­er­al ups and downs of NASA’s Apol­lo pro­gram over the course of about nine years, from its incep­tion at the dawn of the Space Race, through numer­ous tri­al-and-error tragedies, to the icon­ic moment when the Eagle’ lunar mod­ule com­plet­ed its mis­sion and Neil Arm­strong uttered that immor­tal soundbite.

Ryan Gosling – tip­toe­ing and twirling away in the moon­light once again – plays the epony­mous space­man along­side Claire Foy as his long-suf­fer­ing but sup­port­ive wife, Janet. Their rela­tion­ship comes under increas­ing strain as Neil ris­es through the ranks before even­tu­al­ly being ear­marked for The Big One. Ear­ly on the cou­ple are shown mourn­ing the loss of their young daugh­ter, Karen, to a brain tumour, which leaves a pal­pa­ble emo­tion­al scar – par­tic­u­lar­ly in Neil’s case. As per Hansen’s book, Arm­strong is por­trayed in the film as a gift­ed pilot and engi­neer, but also a dis­tant man who is often found look­ing to the heav­ens when he should per­haps be focused on mat­ters clos­er to home.

Two silhouetted figures embracing in a dimly lit room, with blue curtains in the background.

This is the essen­tial con­flict of Chazelle’s film. As mem­bers of Con­gress and senior NASA offi­cials begin to ques­tion the program’s short-term via­bil­i­ty, and pub­lic sup­port wanes against the back­drop of the Viet­nam War, the peo­ple at the cen­tre of this dan­ger­ous mis­sion are left to ask them­selves whether they can real­ly stand to lose anoth­er col­league or loved one. It is an unde­ni­ably inspir­ing sto­ry of human for­ti­tude, per­se­ver­ance and sci­en­tif­ic endeav­our, but Chazelle and screen­writer Josh Singer, whose pre­vi­ous cred­its include Spot­light and The Post, only scratch the sur­face of the indi­vid­ual aspect of it.

Chazelle is a roman­tic film­mak­er with lofty ambi­tions of his own, and he spends a good chunk of First Man’s two-hour plus run­time attempt­ing to frame the film with­in the wider social and cul­tur­al con­text of the 1960s. But just as he ges­tured at pay­ing trib­ute to jazz under the guise of a Gold­en Age Hol­ly­wood musi­cal in La La Land, here he pays lip ser­vice to the civ­il rights move­ment by hav­ing an unnamed black man recite Gil Scott-Heron’s protest poem Whitey on the Moon’ in the shad­ow of Cape Kennedy. He would have been bet­ter off keep­ing things more inti­mate, stick­ing with the Arm­strongs and their imme­di­ate domes­tic strug­gle, instead of reach­ing for greater meaning.

As it stands, this is a con­fi­dent but pret­ty bland tech­ni­cal exer­cise, in which theme park ride hydraulics and some nau­sea-induc­ing shaky­cam are employed to con­vey the sen­sa­tion of being cat­a­pult­ed into space. Mul­ti­ple scenes detail­ing the pro­ce­dures and pro­to­cols fol­lowed by the var­i­ous Apol­lo crew mem­bers are filled with code words and ter­mi­nol­o­gy that will fly straight over the head of your aver­age non-astro­naut movie­go­er. The over­all result is an authen­tic, visu­al­ly impres­sive view­ing expe­ri­ence that doesn’t quite land.

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