First Man

Dir: Damien Chazelle

2018

****

First Man is a good reference when looking how trends and opinions have changed in a relatively short amont of time. Based on First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen, the project was originally announced in 2003, with Clint Eastwood slated to direct. For what ever reason this rendition fell though and director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La la Land) and writer Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post) were hired, changing the style and approach of the film. It’s great, but not exactly what you’d expect from a film executively produced by Steven Spielberg. I can only imagine what the patriotic melodrama Eastwood would have made of the whole thing would have looked like but I’m so glad film makers have now taken us away from that sort of thing and made films like this as they should be made. First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong is about Neil A. Armstrong and so is the film. It isn’t weighted down by country, duty and any ridiculous notion of Armstrong being heroic or special. He was a fascinating man with lots of positives and lots of flaws, we only really know him for being the first man on the moon, but what about everything else? How did he get to that position? What drove him? What on earth was going through his mind? That’s the great thing about this rather original space movie, it really does delve into the mindset of the man without relying on moody silence and handsome glares (even though Ryan Gosling is the king of moody silence and handsome glares). It feels like a million miles away from what you’d expect from a Damien Chazelle movie – for starters there’s no music – but he manages the same trick he uses in his all singing all dancing numbers here, in the stillness of reality. It’s all about the balance. His film doesn’t rely on 50s and 60s set-pieces and flat-top haircuts. He shows how life then isn’t that different from life now, so we’re not watching these events happening to someone we feel disconnected from because they’re from another era. The clothes and cars are different (not as good) but people were the same. Armstrong is of course a historical figure but before that he was just a man. It is impossible to put one mans life – or even the thoughts and feeling one man has in one week – into a 90 minute film, but Singer manages to explore Armstrong’s mindset as well as the key events that led to Apollo 11’s mission to the moon in 1969. I’m a bit of a space nerd. But there was plenty here that I was unaware of. It covers the time Armstrong spent as a NASA test pilot flying the X-15 rocket plane and the time he inadvertently bounced off the atmosphere, almost loosing control landing safely. It’s an exiting scene, but I had no idea that his colleagues expressed concern that his recent record of mishaps was due to distraction and that he was grounded for a period of time. I was unaware that his two-year old daughter died of a brain tumour, or that he had researched tirelessly to find possible treatments. He applied to be part of Project Gemini and was accepted to NASA Astronaut Group 2 when he was still shaken with grief but he never let his feelings be known to anyone. It explores how Armstrong befriended Elliot See and Ed White and how the space race developed in its later years. To properly realise the fear and tension that the astronauts were going through, the story explores the T-38 crash that killed Elliot See and Charles Bassett, the spinning incident when Gemini 8 docked with the Agena target vehicle and when the Apollo 1 crew are killed in a fire during a test launch. Armstrong also had to eject from an aircraft that nearly killed him the following year, shortly before being selected to command Apollo 11. We’ve seen the emotion involved in such events before in pretty much ever fictional and non-fiction film about space travel but never has it been so muted and so real. The truth is Armstrong never let his emotion out, which begs the question: Was he the best man for the job because of it or was he a liability? The film asks in a respectful manner, his sons Mark and Rick said that First Man was the most accurate portrayal of their father and their mother they could have hoped for, which is good enough for me. They even found the blue-prints for the Armstrong house and rebuilt it for the film. The detail is superb, with the special effects working brilliantly from a different angle. There is no CGI used during the film and no green screen. The lunar surface was recreated by building a set on the Vulcan quarry in Atlanta and the pods the astronauts sat in were built to scale using original plans. LED displays of up to 10 meters were used for the shuttle scenes. These projected images that would simulate the exterior of the spacecraft, both the earth and space. Next to the screens, several simulators were built, each corresponding to a spacecraft. These were programmed to move synchronized with the images of the spherical LED screens that could be seen through the windows. Chazelle chose this technique because it allowed the actors to get more into the role; instead of seeing a green screen, they saw the outside environment recreated with visual effects. It’s a level of detail that doesn’t go unnoticed and I would imagine if you were an actor you’d want to be in a Chazelle film for the sheer experience. I thought it was a brilliant drama with such impressive detail that it did Armstrong and his memory justice. It’s truly revolutionary in its realism, although I didn’t think Buzz Aldrin came off particularly well but maybe it was accurate. I met Buzz once and had my photo taken with him, I wish this film had been made before then so I could have asked him about it (not that I didn’t have anything else to ask him about). The film didn’t do as well as had hoped, which is a little puzzling. Maybe people feared it would be a musical in space, maybe it wasn’t actiony enough. I like to think it wasn’t the fact that Florida Senator Marco Rubio described the omission of the moment Armstrong and Aldrin planted the American flag as "total lunacy" that did it. You can clearly see the American flag on the moon, just not the moment it was put in the ground. Donald Trump soon threw in his overblown opinion and said "It's almost like they're embarrassed at the achievement coming from America, I think it's a terrible thing. When you think of Neil Armstrong and when you think of the landing on the moon, you think about the American flag. For that reason, I wouldn't even want to watch the movie." This comment says it all really. If you are interested in a detailed and intelligent retelling of the Apollo 11 mission, the events leading to it and the first man on the moon, then you’ll enjoy the film, but if you are a knuckle-dragging moron who simply wants action and thinks the flag is really the first thing that comes into peoples minds when they think of the moon, then don’t bother. I suspect it was the scene involving the protests aimed at NASA, the space race and the money being spent on it when poverty was rife, the civil rights movement was struggling and America were involved in a pointless war. The song "Whitey on the Moon" during the protest sequence is a cover of the famous song by singer/poet Gil Scott-Heron. It stands as a critique of the economic priorities of the Space Race for many of the economically and social disenfranchised at the time. It wasn’t a political statement by Chazelle, just another detailed look at history, one that some people still find hard to accept.