"Never before have so many people been tuned in to one event at one time." The late news anchor Walter Cronkite said those words following the unforgettable Apollo 11 mission by NASA from Earth to the moon, as well as the television broadcast that coincided with it, back in 1969. And it remains an iconic event.
What director Damien Chazelle does with the story that leads up to it in First Man (based on the bestselling biography by James R. Hansen) shows the raw and difficult reality of what NASA and the families involved had gone through, far from the victorious publicity Apollo 11 had become known for. Specifically chronicling the life of astronaut Neil Armstrong (who eventually became the first man to step foot on the then-unknown terrain) over a near-decade-long journey, it's an intense but very human story.
The screenplay (written by Spotlight co-scribe Josh Singer) chronicles how Armstrong's familial and professional lives affected him, how the losses in both lives affected him (including his 3-year-old daughter Karen, who's untimely death opens the film), and how he may have used work to stay away from the heartaches of family (or at least the memory of his daughter). Ryan Gosling (who worked with Chazelle on La La Land) is great at expressing himself, subtly yet complex, through his face and eyes, for almost any role he plays, and this one is no exception. (Ditto for The Crown's Claire Foy, who's just as dynamic, as his wife, Janet Armstrong.)
As he did with Whiplash (2014) and La La Land (2016), Chazelle pulls no punches on the central raw emotions here, despite some quick transition cuts between years of failed tests and familial/personal heartaches. Consider a scene where Janet forces Neil to prepare their children for the possibility that he may not come home from the Lunar mission, as previous losses during launch tests have proven.
Many even question (as they did at the time) if all that NASA was doing, financially and personally, was worth the risks and sacrifices. Some would even call it a waste of resources. But as Armstrong states earlier, "This mission may allow us to see things we should have seen a long time ago, but we just haven't been able to until now," foreshadowing the notion of being more than just "the first" to do something unprecedented. Or, as John F. Kennedy would declare, a belief in our "progressing as a nation".
From frame one, you feel as if you're right up there with the astronauts themselves. Case in point: the opening test flight. Shaky camera techniques and tight framing on display make the experience (and film) claustrophobic at times, not to mention very immersive, compared with, say, Apollo 13 or Gravity. Ditto the Gemini 8 launch sequence, or the signature Lunar sequence (beautifully filmed with IMAX cameras).
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| Ryan Gosling |
The filmmakers made a smart choice to shoot on film, as it puts viewers in the period of the 1960s. And yet, the story, strangely, doesn't feel dated, thanks, in part, to stunning cinematography (e.g., blue light shots) by Linus Sandgren (echoing Kubrick and Malick), production design by Christopher Nolan collaborator Nathan Crowley, heart-pounding sound design by Ai-Ling Lee, and a score by Justin Hurwitz that is beautiful, haunting, and astounding. The aforementioned moments are recreated as if we're witnessing history-in-the-making, or the early days of the space program for the first time. Either way, it leaves you breathless.
Out of the many space-related films to have come out this decade (Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, Hidden Figures), this film is, perhaps, the most grounded and the most intense. Chazelle's approach is fresh, brutally honest, and on-the-edge-of-your-seat. It's involving and moving, to the moon and back.
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