First Man
starring Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Patrick Fugit, Christopher Abbott, Olivia Hamilton, Pablo Schreiber and Shea Whigham,
screenplay by Josh Singer
directed by Damien Chazelle
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
Based on Neil Armstrong’s official biography, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (Simon & Schuster, 2005) by James R. Hansen, First Man opens with a well-known flight of the X-15 rocket by Armstrong into low space. I know very little about Neil Armstrong’s history, so any information was interesting to me. After that, the story segues into the death of his 2-year old daughter, Karen, in 1962 due to a brain tumor.
In real life, Neil Armstrong was a very calm guy who went about his business methodically. Although he was a military (Navy) pilot during the Korean War, he was a civilian test pilot when he applied to join the astronaut corps alongside many other military test pilots. It seems that NASA took an interest in Armstrong's combination of calmness and personal skill coupled with his above-average intellect. Having said that about him, it is no shame for Buzz Aldrin to be the second man to step on the moon behind Armstrong, because Armstrong was a sincerely great man indeed.
I think the film suggests that the death of Karen created a silent tension in Armstrong’s personality manifesting itself in a clearly taciturn disposition combined with a laser-sharp concentration so intense that he isolates himself from others close to him. Karen’s illness and death are a theme the film returns to several times. Throughout the film Armstrong’s sons ask to play while their distracted father tries to concentrate on the monumental problems of manned space flight. His family communication skills are stiff to say the least. When he speaks to his young sons, he does not adapt his vocabulary for children. Instead, he speaks like he’s talking to another aeronautical engineer.
In later life, after his famous Apollo 11 moon mission, when Armstrong had left NASA and taken a college teaching post in his native Ohio state, he gained a bit of a reputation as a recluse because he shunned most interview requests. As we can expect, though, this reputation was moronic fluff created by the media. Armstrong did give interviews, and he was normally gregarious. He was merely concerned with preserving his privacy to enable him to live as normal a life as possible, and to be sure that his story and his life were not used for commercial advantage to the detriment of the space program that he always defended and supported.
There are several things that I notice about my favorite films. Sound editing is one of them. I really appreciate sound editing so crisp that it feels like I’m in the room with the actors - sound so sharp it’s like a Terrence Malick documentary. In First Man, what struck me was the interior sounds of aircraft cockpits and space capsules. The film features a lot of metal creaking noises, reminding us that these are man-made machines experiencing severe stress. They could break apart at any moment. The metallic creaking was so pervasive it was uncanny and unsettling, plus the sounds of fabric, leather and plastic rubbing together, doors opening and closing, plus the violent shaking of rockets blasting off. We tend to think of space travel as super-high tech, but in this film the vehicles definitely have the feel of being slapped together in a kid’s garage like a big plastic model, or something. Holey moley! They’re flying around in fancy tin cans! Seriously! There is a pointed reminder of this aspect of things based on a near-disastrous incident with Armstrong’s September 1965 Gemini 8 flight, when Janet Armstrong (played by Clair Foy) angrily explodes to the space flight director Deke Slayton,
“All these protocols and procedures to make it seem like you have it under control. But you’re a bunch of boys making models out of balsa wood. You don’t have anything under control!”
Yeah.
The sounds of the space capsules practically baptized the machines with personalities of their own. I watched it twice just so I could hear the sound effects.
The film opens in 1962 and closes in 1969. I am happy that director Damien Chazelle remembered to change Ryan Gosling’s hair length and style to help measure the passage of the years.
The fantastic mechanics of space flight - escape velocity, Earth orbit, lunar injection, et. al. - are practically ignored. After Apollo 11 finally blasts off we arrive in lunar orbit with almost no attention to any of the flight details - unlike, say, Apollo 13 (1995, directed by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks) in which the flight details were almost the entire story.
The suggestion at the end of the movie that Armstrong left his daughter’s bracelet on the moon as an eternal memorial to her is incredibly sweet, almost enough to make you cry, but it is not substantiated by evidence nor confirmed by the Armstrong family (two surviving sons). I would like it to be true.
Donald Trump criticized the film - swearing that he would never watch it - because it did not feature the planting of the Stars and Stripes flag on the moon. That’s not the point of the film, though. The film is not another story about the technological achievements of the American space program and the space race, and it’s not patriotic self-congratulation. It’s a psychological tale about Neil Armstrong’s personality. I suppose Trump is complete unaware that Ryan Gosling is Canadian.
Clair Foy plays Janet Armstrong. In real life the Armstrongs divorced in 1994.