Small Foot
WE all know how this story ends, but only three men knew how it felt.
Director Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic aims to bring the experience of the Apollo 11 mission to a cinema near you.
You will hear the rivets rattle, feel the rocket engines roar and sense Armstrong’s exhilaration as his foot hovers over the pristine lunar surface.
This is a giant leap for the director whose last film La La Land was a bright and breezy musical.
Here the astonishing sound design and photography are aimed at making our pulses race rather than our toes tap.
This truly immersive movie is the first since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that absolutely demands to be watched on the big screen. Experience it in IMAX and you’ll be squeezed into a tiny cockpit between Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and the overlooked
Mike Collins (Lukas
Haas).
Chazelle makes the 1969 Moon landing the finale of his film yet his opening is just as spectacular.
We begin 140,000ft above the Mojave desert. It’s 1961 and Armstrong is testing a high-altitude plane.
As the curvature of the Earth wobbles into view, the numbers on his altimeter suddenly start whirring upwards. “You’re ballooning off the atmosphere,” says a worried voice over the radio. We hear Armstrong’s breathing intensify as he slowly wrestles the vehicle back under control.
Space travel operates at the cutting edge of technology, but here we are reminded of the physicality of these early vehicles.
These are cramped metal boxes perched on top of giant rocketshaped bombs and the men at the controls are betting their lives on a series of educated guesses.
Armstrong was a brilliant engineer, but the film suggests his superpower was an ability to think clearly in moments of unimaginable stress.
Death looms large in the story of Nasa. The film takes us through the build-up to the landing, through the failed launches, the crashes and the cabin fire that killed the astronauts of Apollo One in 1967 – Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom.
But it’s the passing of his daughter that seems to be the turning point. Karen Armstrong died of a brain tumour in 1962 aged three and there is a suggestion here that part of Neil died with her.
Like many men of his generation, Armstrong doesn’t vent his emotions. He shuts them down.
This makes him an infuriating husband for Janet (a largely thankless role for Claire Foy) but did it make him the perfect man for Nasa?
Perhaps only the coldest of fish could have survived 1966’s Gemini 8 mission, which tested the docking sequence eventually used for Apollo 11. On this mission, we see a faulty thruster sending the orbiting capsule “windmilling”. But Armstrong’s head doesn’t spin with it.
With mission control saying he will lose consciousness within seconds, he calmly identifies the problem and brings the spacecraft under control.
In a different kind of Hollywood film, this would mark him out as an allAmerican hero. Here flag-waving is conspicuous by its absence. We don’t even see one planted on the Moon, a sight familiar from newsreels and documentaries.
As Armstrong takes his iconic step, we feel the weight of history. But we are also invited to ask a very un-American question. What was the point?
Chazelle has already let us hear the voice of protesters including poet Gil Scott-Heron and novelist Kurt Vonnegut. With so much poverty and political turmoil on Earth, was this a monumental waste of resources?
Don’t look to Gosling for help. His Armstrong is as mysterious as the dark side of the Moon.
Ultimately, the film meets that question with a sense of awe. Armstrong pushed at the boundaries of human endeavour because he could. Perhaps that was reason enough.
ANDY’S RATING: ★★★★ In cinemas on Friday
PARENTS are used to hearing cutesy cartoon characters preaching to their children.
But the fluffy yetis in this delightful family adventure deliver a very unusual moral.
This time the “be yourself” message has become “think for yourself”. It sounds like a small change but it’s enough to give this animation an edge.
We begin high in the Himalayas, where yetis live a peaceful life in a village cut off from the world by thick clouds.
The big questions are soon answered by the Stonekeeper (rapper Common) who wears a tunic festooned with “truth stones”.
According to him, the world begins and ends with their village. Beneath the clouds are four giant mammoths that have held up the world since the dawn of time.
Belief in the existence of hairless “smallfoots” is considered a thought crime.
A young Big Foot called Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum) has been happy to toe the party line. Like all yetis he has a defined role in the working of the village. His job is to assist his once-tall father Dorgle (Danny DeVito) in summoning the giant bright snail that travels across the world (other civilations call this the sun).
Soon he will inherit his dad’s job and be proudly catapulting himself headfirst into a gong each morning.
Migo questions his faith when he runs into a intrepid nature reporter Percy (voiced by James Corden).
After teaming up with a group of hairy sceptics (voiced by Zendaya, Ely Henry and LeBron James) the Yetis go on a mission to find the truth.
It’s a timely message in this age of disinformation and religious extremism and it’s delivered with style and considerable wit.
There are sharp lines and some accomplished slapstick including a Loony Tunes sequence where Migo tumbles down the mountain and smashes his way into the world of humans.
The songs are bit of a mixed bag, the strongest being the rap-infused Let It Lie performed by Common. I’m pretty sure this is the first song in a children’s film to contain the word “genocide”.