First Man

I can’t be the only one who finds space and space exploration extremely interesting and enticing, right? There’s just so much stuff out there, and it’s all so damn big and bright and mysterious and such. But there’s also something about the stress and toil here on Earth that got us to the stars that also intrigues me. Those crazy fighter pilots and engineers and what-have-you just went all-out, often at the cost of their very lives, to extend the length of man’s reach into the heavens. First Man gives us a close-up view of possibly the most famous of these men to enter into the history books.

We may not get to see Neil Armstrong’s days at our ol’ Purdue (all hail and boiler up!), but we do get an unexpectedly deep idea of what it was like inside his head. We follow him from his test-piloting days through the early lunar program of Gemini and full-steam into Apollo, all through his trip to the moon and back. It’s nowhere near as glamorous as it may sound from the outside, especially when dealing with the emotional shut-in that Armstrong was.

Still, we’re not left completely out of the loop, thanks to director Damien Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren (the Oscar-winner who lensed La La Land, American Hustle, and Joy) keeping the camera smack-dab in everyone’s faces. Seriously, the camera almost always favors a tight shot, usually centered on the face, with a touch of motion tossed in for good measure. At first, this filming choice was off-putting and a touch straining, but as the film went on, it was clear there was a purpose to it (always welcome to get some nuance whilst your senses attune to things, eh?): The close angles, the camera movement, even a relatively heavy bit of film noise over every shot, it all winds up feeling like it was shot by some invisible, omniscient presence near the events unfolding, documenting everything for future generations on a contemporary home movie camera. Really, it looked just like some of the footage my grandfather shot of my mother and her siblings back in the ‘60s. We feel like we’re following Armstrong along his path to glory, even possibly reliving it all with him later on in his den or something. It’s a unique perspective on a type of story that’s usually told in a wider, grander manner.

This isn’t to say there aren’t such bits, especially when we get to the moon’s surface and those IMAX cameras do their thing. The full sun-reflecting splendor of our little rocky satellite seers our retinas as we take in the lonely desolation Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got to see firsthand. It’s a wonderful counterpoint to the almost claustrophobically close human drama we’ve been following to this point, and, like the lunar program itself, it’s a destination very much worth the effort expended in getting there.

All the while, Ryan Gosling does his damnedest to get down Armstrong’s almost comically and tragically stoic character, at once as heroic as we’d imagine and kinda creepily emotionally distant, even from his family. The heavy toll exacted by the constant death surrounding him, especially that of his young daughter, is made very clear, and you can feel the pain through the screen. Meanwhile, the fairly extensive supporting cast excels at bringing the panoply of early NASA’s crew to life: Jason Clarke as Ed White, Claire Foy as Armstrong’s suffering wife, Corey Stoll as the rather brusque Aldrin, Kyle Chandler as Deke Slayton, Lukas Haas as Michael Collins, our boy Shea Whigham as fellow Boilermaker Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Matthew Glave as the gruff Chuck Yeager, Kent Wagner as Fred Haise, John David Whalen as John Glenn, Patrick Fugit as Elliott See, Ethan Embry as Pete Conrad, Pablo Schreiber as Jim Lovell, and even Kurt Vonnegut shows up in some archival footage with some unfortunately anti-space-program words for us. Josh Singer’s script, based on the biography by James Hansen, makes sure we remain mostly on the ground with our flawed hero, regardless of how in-the-clouds (or above them, as the case may be) his mind may be.

First Man is an excellent picture, one that manages to instill a strong sense of pathos and understanding with its characters – be they larger or just kinda sweeping in for a moment from the sidelines before disappearing again just as quickly – while also gripping us with test- and real flight tension and illustrating just how and why we did the seemingly impossible and shot ourselves toward the moon. It’s another spectacular entry into not only Chazelle’s burgeoningly awesome oeuvre, but also that of everyone involved. It’s a grounded spectacle demanding of our eyes and time.