An inspiring telling of Armstrong’s triumph
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 near-catastrophe 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 fast-moving 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.