‘First Man’ or — Pretty Vacant?
It’s suffocating, claustrophobic, airless and contained… and that’s before we’ve even set foot inside the lunar module!
Neil Armstrong was famously stoic, often giving one word answers to history making questions and demonstrating an almost inhuman ability to remain focused under intense pressure. Director Damien Chazelle aggressively focuses in on this aspect of Armstrong making it less about the Apollo mission and completely about an emotionally distant man made more so after the death of his daughter. This is not about the famous small step but about a man trying to move forward inside the confines of his own heart.
So Chazelle strips away anything peripheral (but also accidentally jettisoning much that is central) other than Armstrong’s experience, not just to keep it centered on his POV but also to distance the film itself from the shadow of ‘The Right Stuff’ (1983), a movie ‘First Man’ happily acknowledges but also desperately steers clear from replicating. So gone are wide-shots of launch-pads, bursts of patriotic razzmatazz or even camaraderie for that matter. Instead the film dons the visual and emotional blinkers of one traumatised guy. The camera, often accompanied by annoyingly unmotivated shaking (it got on my nerves, anyway), is tightly kept on people’s faces in an almost Cassavete’s way or strictly limited to their points of view. Colours are furiously “natural” and all glamour banished to experience the Sixties as they were as opposed to being viewed through rose-tinted, brightly coloured nostalgia. Yet in rejecting artifice it all seems somewhat artificial at times.
Now I’m aware that the filmmakers would reply that this is their precise intention and every creative choice is to keep us close to our subject: it’s about the man, not the mission. I get it but I’m just not sure if I like this particular approach and trajectory.
The positives of this attitude means we get a good feel of what it must have been like to be in Armstrong’s moon-boots. There is fidelity to the experience and the lack of romanticising NASA’s equipment (the rockets are less glorious, sleek heavenly vessels and more tin-cans held together by vibrating rivets and bolts) feels refreshingly dangerous.
The negatives are you can feel the film sometimes engaging in awkward manoeuvres to keep this orbit around Armstrong sustained because for all its slavish adherence to “reality” ‘First Man’ is, at times, a highly manipulative movie. A historic event will be announced only for the following scene to be one of bleak foreboding simply to stick to the emotionally down-beat tone ‘First Man’ is so obviously straining for. At one point Buzz Aldrin attempts to lift the mood with some levity only to be slapped down by Armstrong’s no nonsense wet-blanket. It all starts to feel a little forced and emotionally myopic.
This isn’t helped by Ryan Gosling who delivers yet another one of his ‘wandering around silently’ performances, so I never once felt I was watching Armstrong but, simply, Gosling doing what he does in every other movie (it doesn’t matter if he’s a murderous killer, an android or an astronaut because he’s still going to be doing exactly the same thing every single time — i.e. more vacant than emotionally contained). It all makes for a deliberately uninteresting protagonist who only seems to come alive when his helmet is actually on (I also think they used Armstrong’s real voice when this occurs which also helps).
This lack of interest often extends to the story itself with the bulk of the movie consisting of the main dramatic incidents of the Apollo program — the tragedy of Apollo 1, Armstrong’s LLRV escape, the Gemini docking emergency — but they feel, like Armstrong himself, like isolated, discreet sections hung together as opposed to developing organically. And for anyone familiar with the space program there’s nothing of any surprise here.
Still, the exciting scenes are very exciting. The film opens with a punch as Armstrong pilots his screaming X-15 jet through the atmosphere, and the sequence of the Gemini 8 in an uncontrollable roll is tense as hell. The direction is taut and tight and aided by some excellent sound design, the majority of which created using human voices which provides a suitably hellish, nightmarish timbre. In my opinion, the sound design here is better and more impactful than the actual score. The Moon landing itself is handle well, evoking both the awe and danger of the lunar surface as well as depicting the skill and focus Armstrong brought to bear on the descent.
‘First Man’ is technically well made, good looking and, at times, quite compelling even if it’s a surprisingly conventional film in many respects regarding the dramatic beats. It doesn’t inform or illuminate as much as previous movies regarding the space program and the laser focus on Armstrong means the other astronauts are lost in the background meaning we don’t care too much as to their fates. It is riddled with some contemporary filmmaking tropes which I find personally grating (the “naturalistic” lighting was a big issue for me) but I enjoyed it enough to watch it a second time straight afterwards… just skipping over the boring bits like flying over darkened lunar craters.
