The moon still seemed far away as the 1960s began, but the U.S. was determined to plant a flag there by decade’s end. First Man tells the story of America’s success through the eyes of the astronaut, Neil Armstrong, who became the first man to leave boot prints on the lunar surface with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission.
Based on James R. Hansen’s biography, First Man picks up Armstrong’s story at the start of the ‘60s when he piloted the X-15 rocket jet to the upper edge of the Earth’s atmosphere—and endured technical problems that could have killed him. It was like that several times in Armstrong’s space career. He was aboard the Gemini 8 when the capsule pitched and rolled like a barrel going over Niagara Falls. He piloted an unwieldy simulator of the lunar module that spun out of control and ejected just in time. Space travel wasn’t for wealthy tourists in those days. In every moment lurked a high potential for death.
As played by sad-faced Ryan Gosling, Armstrong is a man of his generation, incapable of verbalizing emotions, concealing his inner life behind stony silence. One of his children died as well as many of his colleagues, but aside from brooding silence, the most he is willing to say is, “I could use a beer.” His wife Janet, played by an entirely deglamorized Claire Foy (the British actress best known for “The Crown”) grows increasingly annoyed at a husband who would rather pack his suitcase before leaving for the moon than have a frank discussion with his children about the dangers of his flight.
Perhaps an astronaut with a more active imaginative or emotional life would have said no to a mission that involved being packed into a tiny capsule surrounded by a hundred gauges and a thousand toggle switches—any one of which might fail at any time. Then again, he had the imagination to utter an immortal line upon inching onto the lunar surface: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
First Man is directed by Damien Chazelle in a mode entirely different from his Oscar-winning musical La La Land or his sharp-edged indie film Whiplash. The special effects are determined more by the classic verities of cinematography and great editing than by digital pyrotechnics. The sight of the Apollo modules on their journey and of Armstrong stepping and eventually hopping onto the soft lunar dust are as poetic as any space scenes since 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The film is long but never feels that way as it chronicles NASA’s determination to finally get ahead of the Soviets, whose space program raced ahead from the late ‘50s through the late ‘60s. And despite the fake controversy launched by Sen. Marco Rubio—who should have better things to do than play movie critic—the American flag is shown in First Man standing on the moon as an eternal reminder of who got there first.
