First Man – first look review

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.

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.