IT FLEW ME TO THE MOON
This Neil Armstrong epic is so thrillingly realistic that...
The line ‘Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ may have been written by the Anglo-American Spitfire pilot and poet John Gillespie Magee Jr, to describe the sheer unbridled joy of highaltitude flight, but it was made famous by President Reagan, when he used it in his tribute to the astronauts killed in the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
It comes up in Damien Chazelle’s stunning new film First Man too, but I found myself thinking of it long before it actually arrived. Because those surly bonds don’t get much surlier than they are here.
Now I love a good space film, but the thrilling triumph of this one is that it puts you right there in the cockpit, alongside Neil Armstrong – first as he flies the rickety X-15 rocket plane, then the orbiting space capsules of the Gemini programme and, finally, on Apollo 11, the mission that would propel him into history as the first man to stand on the Moon.
You feel every bump and vibration, are deafened by the noise, and generally marvel at the sheer brute power required for those surly bonds to be slipped.
And then finally, just when you’re beginning to wonder how much more of this disorientating, horizon-swinging punishment you can take, the vibrations stop, the noise ceases and something small – normally a pen – suddenly floats past to indicate that weightlessness has been achieved.
They are absolutely stunning sequences and if the film doesn’t get major award nominations for its cinematography (Linus Sandgren’s kinetic camerawork is particularly effective), editing and sound design, I shall be astonished.
Thankfully, what happens on the ground is top-notch too, as you would expect from the Oscarwinning Chazelle, who made both La La Land and Whiplash, and a cast led by Ryan Gosling and The Crown star Claire Foy.
Gosling plays Armstrong, who by the time the film begins in 1961 was already a veteran of the Korean War, a Navy flyer and had become a civilian test pilot.
But while by day he flew the X-15 to the very edge of space, by night he researched the aggressive tumour that was soon to claim the life of his two-year-old daughter, Karen. This loss, the film convincingly suggests, would be a defining moment in Armstrong’s extraordinary life.
Gosling, currently Hollywood’s favourite leading man and certainly the charismatic focus of La La Land, gives a quieter performance here, portraying the pioneering astronaut as an intense and intelligent but, at times, angry and inwardlooking man of limited public charms.
His wife, Janet (a splendidly convincing Foy), clearly has a lot to put up with, even without the daily worry that her husband, given the dangers of his job, might not walk through the door that night. At his last posting, she explains to new neighbours, they lost four pilots in 12 months. ‘We got good at funerals that year.’ But the deaths don’t stop, as Armstrong moves to Nasa and becomes a key member of the Gemini programme, the forerunner of Apollo. The first time I saw the film, at the Venice Film Festival, I had a little trouble keeping up with these tragic losses, with one clean-cut all-American hero looking rather confusingly very like another. But, movingly, it makes more
‘Intense , intelligent but at times an angry and inward-looking man of limited public charms’
sense second time around, with the appalling launchpad fire of Apollo 1 sticking in the memory as much as the sickening endover-end spin of Gemini 8 that almost cost Armstrong and his co-pilot, David Scott, their lives.
In the wake of its Venice premiere, there was a fuss about the lack of the American flag in the Moon-landing scenes but, almost 50 years on, I can’t see non-American audiences caring a fig, believing, as Armstrong’s famous words foretold, that this was ‘one giant leap for mankind’, not just the United States.
But make no mistake, this is a giant leap for Chazelle’s career too. Still only 33, he’s made three stunning films in four years and, by delivering an action-packed space film that stands every comparison with the likes of The Right
Stuff and Apollo 13, has opened up his career in such a way that the only real question is: ‘What next?’ Armstrong would sympathise.