Shooting for the moon
Viewers get out-of-this-world ride with Gosling in ‘First Man’
It’s hard to believe NASA sent Americans to the moon in 1969 and haven’t done it again since 1972, but “First Man” may help get us back on the lunar surface. The film, directed by Academy Award winner Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), produced by Steven Spielberg and scripted by Josh Singer (“The Post”) based on the 2005 book “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong,” falls a bit a short. While its rocket launches and lunar scenes, which were shot with IMAX cameras, are predictably spectacular (and I was happy to see them at an IMAX theater), the film’s shaky-cam domestic scenes were made even more annoying by the extreme, bouncy-castle close-ups on a giant screen. In scenes reminiscent of “The Right Stuff,” the film opens with a crew-cutsporting Armstrong (Ryan Gosling, “La La Land”) piloting the X-15 hypersonic plane into suborbital space in 1961 and “bouncing off the atmosphere,” but figuring out how to get back down and landing on Rog- ers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base. At home, the studious and repressed Neil and devoted wife Janet (Brit Claire Foy, “The Crown”) have two small children, a boy and a girl, and struggle with the sickness and death of daughter Karen (Lucy Stafford) at age 2.
Neil gazes at the beckoning moon and rises up the ranks of the competitive and press-scrutinized Gemini and later Apollo astronauts, where his friends and rivals include the first “space-walker” Ed White (Aussie Jason Clarke), buzzkiller Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and Elliott See (Patrick Fugit). Neil wrestles with a lack of social skills, an inability to suffer fools gladly and the gaping void left by the death of his daughter. The film is wellwritten and acted. But I was distracted by the constant bobbing camera and trying to figure out what accents Gosling and Foy were using for Ohioan Neil and Illinoisborn Janet, who died in June. While mission head Robert Gilruth (Irishman Ciaran Hinds) struggles to get Congress to fund the space program, the Soviets keep beating the U.S. in space “firsts” and a horrific accident takes the lives of three astronauts trapped in a burning capsule-turnedcoffin. Missions designed to “rehearse” the moon flight succeed, and Armstrong and Aldrin are chosen to land on the moon. Poor Mike Collins (Lukas Haas), who pilots the orbiting command module, while Aldrin and Armstrong land the Eagle and bound around Tranquility Base, is barely seen. We hear the famous line, “A small step for (a) man, a giant leap for mankind.” In this time of bitter division, it is nice to be reminded of an event that united the world, binding millions to their TV screens and radios for news of the landing. But “First Man” comes across as a bit stodgy and routine from the artist who gave us “La La Land,” and the music by Academy Award winner Justin Hurwitz, which echoes “2001: A Space Odyssey” in one climactic scene (making sense since some ditzes think Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing), is hardly Richard or Johann Strauss. Sound and visual effects add immeasurably to the impact. Foy’s Gollum-like baby blues are mesmerizing in her big scene to be sure. Since the American flag figures in so much of the film’s iconography, I can only guess the whole “planting of the flag” controversy is trumped up. (“First Man” contains mature subject matter, brief strong language and lifethreatening danger.)