First Man explores a dream fulfilled
From tragedy through perseverance to triumph, Chazelle’s First Man explores a dream fulfilled
Neil Armstrong was not the first parent to lose a child in infancy, but that tragic fact underscores much of what takes place in First Man, director Damien Chazelle’s look back almost 50 years at the events leading up to the first moon landing.
Following up on his collaboration with Chazelle in 2016’s La La Land, Ryan Gosling perfectly embodies the taciturn engineer-test pilot who was Armstrong. He could be funny, loving and in his own way emotional, but his default mode was introversion.
So while it may not be fair to Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) to have him make a callous remark about the death of another astronaut and then defend himself by adding: “I’m just saying what you’re thinking,” it is pure Armstrong when Gosling replies: “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
In many ways, the two hours and 20 minutes of First Man skips from catastrophe to nearcatastrophe on its way to the ultimate triumph of the moon landing. (Though even that is coloured by Armstrong ’s recollection of his deceased daughter, in a moment that pushes the envelope of artistic licence but hits an emotionally resonant note.) The film opens on a test flight of the rocket-powered X-15 aircraft in which Armstrong narrowly missed hitting some trees on landing. We witness the funeral of his daughter; a neardisaster on his first space flight aboard Gemini 8; the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts; and a crash-landing of the lunar landing research vehicle from which Armstrong ejected with less than a second to spare. “We need to fail down here so we don’t fail up there,” he tells a flustered NASA director (Ciarán Hinds). We even hear, on the eve of the landing, a portion of a presidential speech, never delivered, titled In the Event of Moon Disaster.
This may sound like something of a downer, and it’s also worth noting that the score, by Justin Hurwitz (another La La Land alum) tends toward sobriety when it’s not lapsing into total silence. (Compare his low-key music with the jolly bombast that was James Horner’s score for Apollo 13, a story about an accident that almost claimed the lives of three moon-bound astronauts.)
But Chazelle more than compensates with moments of sublime beauty. Flying in the face of cinematographic conventions, he shoots much of the X-15 footage and all of the Gemini 8 launch from within the craft, so we see only what the pilots see. And while this is the dawn of the Space Age, the soundscape inside the vehicles, punctuated by mechanical rattles and the groans of stressed metal, sound more like that of a Second World War sub.
The lunar footage is superb, and the next best thing to being there. Shot with Imax cameras, it pushes viewers out of the tiny lunar module and onto the moon’s silent surface, undisturbed for eons. If you’re a fan of extraterrestrial exploration, this is your goosebumps moment.
The sprawling cast includes Christopher Abbott as Armstrong ’s Gemini 8 co-pilot; Kyle Chandler as astronaut chief Deke Slayton; Lukas Haas as Apollo 11’s command module pilot, Mike Collins and Jason Clarke as the sympathetic Ed White. They
sometimes get lost in the fastmoving narrative, but harder to miss is Claire Foy as Janet Armstrong, Neil’s wife.
The star of The Crown (and the upcoming Girl in the Spider’s Web) plays a member of that thankless sorority, the astronauts’ wives club, but she gives Janet the spirit and spitfire it must have taken to manage a household and two small boys with a husband for whom away-at-work could mean a 350,000-kilometre distance. Her refusal to let him leave for the moon without a word to his sons — which he handles with all the warmth of a news conference — sets that scene on fire.
Armstrong ’s reactions can at times be darkly funny. The screenplay by Josh Singer (The Post, Spotlight) captures the rhythms of his quotations in the biography by James R. Hansen on which it’s based. Asked by a reporter what he plans to take with him to the moon, Armstrong replied: “If I had a choice, I would take more fuel.” It’s clear Gosling ’s Neil will generate much Oscar Buzz.
I don’t spend much time pondering regrets, but I will forever rue the day I felt too shy to approach Neil Armstrong and thank him for the moon landing.
It was July 20, 2003 — the 34th anniversary of the Apollo 11 touchdown. My friend Andrew and I had gone to Dayton, Ohio, to an air show commemorating the centenary of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight. We toured a Lockheed Constellation with a 1940s interior, watched a modern F-15 jet fighter fly in formation with a Second World War P-51 Mustang, and rode in a 1931 de Havilland biplane. And then we saw Neil.
It was our final morning in Dayton, and we decided to visit the Wright brothers’ grave in Woodland Cemetery. There was to be a flyover by a Wright Model B, weather permitting. First flown in 1910, it’s a delicate bird. There were to be remarks from local clergy. But we arrived to news of two previously unannounced special guests: John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth; and the First Man himself.
It was a gorgeous day, and a tiny crowd gathered around the grave. Wilbur had died of typhoid at the age of 45 in 1912. Orville died in 1948 aged 76, three months after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the rocket-powered X-1.
Glenn said their bodies were buried in Dayton, but not their spirits. Armstrong, his voice quivering with emotion — this was just a few months after the Columbia space shuttle had disintegrated on re-entry, killing seven astronauts — paid tribute to the two as the original engineer-test pilots (which is how he thought of himself ), and urged us to remember the men, not just the achievement.
As the memorial broke up, Glenn and Armstrong walked slowly away, like the old men they were. I could have approached them. Could have told Neil that when I was born, 34 years ago that summer, he and fellow travellers Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were still in a NASA quarantine facility as a protection against bringing “moon germs” back to Earth. That I’d never looked at a moon untouched by his footprints.
From as soon as I was able to appreciate the historic event — and it was already history when I was born — I have tried and failed to grasp the magnitude of the accomplishment, and why it has always had such a hold on me. The best explanation that I can find is that it was a defining moment in the history of our species, and the only such one we know, down to the second: 4:17:39 p.m. EDT, Sunday, July 20, 1969.
We’re aware that humans left the continent on which they first evolved. There must have been a First Woman or Man to set foot on North American soil, probably having travelled over the top of the world. We know that someone discovered fire, invented language and, much later, writing, without which we never would have got off the planet. But these moments are lost in time.
If (a big if ) we don’t stumble back from that first step, future humans will forever count the moon as among the defining moments in history. And we were lucky enough to have witnessed it! (Or, for me and anyone younger, almost witnessed it.)
It often seems as though we have already staggered backward. We couldn’t go back to the moon tomorrow if we wanted to. Since the last mission returned in 1972, no human has travelled further than about 400 kms from Earth — about the distance between Toronto and Ottawa (or, as the crow flies, between Calgary and Kelowna). The moon doesn’t even have a terrestrial counterpart in distance — going there is the equivalent of going around the world nine and half times.
But it took millenniums for humans to fully rove the Earth. And the best description I’ve ever heard for the unlikelihood of the Apollo missions — so unlikely that many otherwise intelligent people choose to believe they never happened at all — is that it felt like someone snipped a decade from a future century and stitched it into the 20th. We’ll get back.
In the meantime, it’s been my pleasure to have interviewed Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, and Jim Lovell, one of the first to orbit it, and one of only three men to do it twice. It was my pleasure (and to my wife’s chagrin) to purchase a tiny lunar module tie clip that flew to within 10 kms of the moon on Apollo 10.
But I never did get to tell the First Man of my gratitude for his job as the vanguard of our next great step. I shall instead be content with having seen one of his rare public appearances. As I wrote in my journal that evening: “Standing there in the cemetery, surrounded by summer trees, deep green lawns, birdsong, the far-off sound of a jet plane passing, I had a sudden vision — of a similar dais, similar dignitaries, a similar crowd at the grave, at the 200th anniversary of powered flight, AD 2103. The names being spoken would include the first people back to the moon, the first ones to Mars. In the green and bright Ohio morning, we would remember the pioneers not only of flight, but turn our thoughts to those on the red planet, the new world. What a day it will be.”