Landing a big success
FIRST MAN Cert 12A Running time 142 minutes ★★★★★
Have an out-of-this-world experience with this brilliantly ambitious biopic of history-making astronaut Neil Armstrong. He became the first man to walk on the moon on July 21, 1969, during NASA’s Apollo 11 space mission, and we learn how this flight of global importance was a trip of deeply personal significance.
Superb cinematography and astonishing sound design convey the bone-shaking, ear-shattering and nerve-shredding experience of travelling in the extraordinarily primitive spacecraft in terrifyingly immersive sequences.
While attempting space travel in little more than a Morris Minor strapped to a skyscraper-sized firework, the spacemen have to calculate their trajectory with paper, a pencil and a slide rule.
Inspiring, mournful, uplifting, terrifying and heartbreaking, it’s another staggeringly accomplished success from Damien Chazelle. For 2016’s romantic musical, La La Land, he became the youngest ever winner of the Best Director Oscar, and he’s reunited with his star, Ryan Gosling, who is skilfully cast as the impressively impassive pilot who is inwardly troubled.
We follow Armstrong, the devoted family man, on his seven-year mission preparing to boldly go where no one had gone before, and experience his arrival at an unexpected and emotional destination. His down-to-earth wife, Janet, is played with precision by The Crown star Claire Foy, and with Armstrong regarded as a US national symbol, their relationship becomes a reflection on the US in the 1960s.
Corey Stoll is abrasively outspoken as Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon – coming across as someone you wouldn’t want to spend two minutes in a lift with, never mind a week-long space mission. The third member of the team, Command Module pilot Michael Collins, is played by Lukas Haas, the Amish boy in Harrison Ford’s 1985 cop thriller, Witness.
Elevated by the spectacle of outer space, this trip will leave you bruised, battered and moved to high Heaven.
Corey Stoll is abrasive as Buzz Aldrin, someone you wouldn’t spend two minutes in a lift with, never mind a space mission