The nauseating shaking and deafening clatter put me in mind of the (possibly apocryphal) John Glenn story: as he looked around his satellite before the launch of his historic mission, he realized that he was sitting “in a capsule on top of a rocket that were both built by the lowest bidder.” First Man may have cost $60 million to bring to the screen, but it often strives for an aesthetic of hardware purchased at the local Home Depot.ĭeath shadows Armstrong throughout the film, from the hair-raising opening of a F-15 test flight 20 miles over the Mojave Desert, when he loses control and almost spins off into space, to the terrifying malfunction of the Gemini 8 capsule that follows his successful space docking, a historic first. In First Man, Chazelle’s astronauts are tied down in a claustrophobic tin can from whose puny window they see only a slash of sky-when they can focus their eyes.
You won’t find many of those flaming sunrises crowning the curved horizon, or the jewel-like Earth suspended in midnight sky that have become the stock images of space films.
Still, director Chazelle avoids slipping into outright hero worship and the familiar trap of space romanticism. Gosling, whose unassuming, sad-eyed watchfulness has inspired a “Feminist Ryan Gosling” meme, including a Tumblr blog and a novelty book, evokes the loving, ordinary family man-though one with superhuman willpower and nerves of steel. Armstrong is fearless and self-confident he is John Wayne with a joystick and archaic computing power. “He had no ego,” Chris Kraft, head of Houston flight operations, once said of the real-life Armstrong. He’s the opposite of the mansplaining, manspreading, entitled white guy of feminist (and often Hollywood) imagination.
#1ST MAN ON THE MOON MOVIE MOVIE#
Marco Rubio even tweeted about it. It’s ironic because First Man is a beautifully made, countercultural movie that should warm conservative hearts.Īs portrayed by Ryan Gosling and imagined by screenwriter Josh Singer, Armstrong is a paragon of nontoxic masculinity, a type as rare as good manners among today’s usual screen buffoons and betas (not to mention the harassers back in the studio offices).
Immediately after its Venice Film Festival opening, the movie’s failure to show Neil Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission became its defining feature in conservative chatter. Ironically, the first (and sometimes last) thing most of the public heard about Damien Chazelle’s F irst Man was that it was un-American.
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