Movie Review: First Man

This biopic of Neil Armstrong has now reached iTunes, and Netflix and Amazon can’t be far behind, so it seems appropriate to take a look at what most people did not see in the theatres in 2018. It’s banked $100 million on a $60 million budget. IMDb has it rated at 75% while Rotten Tomatoes has 88% from the critics and 66% from the audiences. In short, it’s not a great success, but neither is it a critical or commercial failure.

In the opening scene, with no preamble, we suddenly have Armstrong’s view from the cockpit of one of his X-15 rocket plane flights in the early 1960’s. The “GoPro” technique works brilliantly here. We feel the bangs, thumps, rattles and terrifying metallic shrieks as the X-15 clings to its B-52 mothership through turbulence and then launch, followed by silence and brief zero-gee as the rocket cuts out and Armstrong cruises into near space. Returning, he “bounces” off the atmosphere and is forced into an all too fast ride and U-turn down to the desert floor where he barely manages a very hard landing.
 
It’s breathtaking, but from that point on the movie is relentlessly grim and dark. Brooding might be the word, which certainly fits Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of the First Man. As my daughter said, a movie about how NASA almost killed three of its astronauts in space comes across as more uplifting than one where they successfully land on the Moon.
 

Not that it was ever going to be easy to put the story on screen, even using the biography from which the movie takes its name. He was famously reticent and retiring even among his compadres. The biographer Jim Hansen struck this, even as Armstrong “opened up” for the first and only time. Tom Wolfe came close with this concise sketch:

A lot of people couldn’t figure out Armstrong. …You’d ask him a question, and he would just stare at you with those pale-blue eyes of his, and you’d start to ask the question again, figuring he hadn’t understood, and— click —out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed, precisely thought-out sentences

And he was like that to the day he died, eschewing most requests for interviews and other publicity, let alone the money he could have made. Fame quite simply meant nothing to one of the more famous people in history. How do you make a movie about such a man?

Turns out that Hollywood can’t, although Gosling, Claire Foy, director Damien Chazelle and writer Josh Singer, all with success in their recent past, give it a good shot, with a story focus and two techniques that try to force you into Armstrong’s mind.
 
The first technique is the “GoPro” of the X-15 scene. It works again with the Gemini VIII launch, Armstrong’s first spaceflight in 1966.  We truly get to feel what it’s like to be stuffed inside a little tin can on top of a rocket, within an all-encompassing world of metallic screaming and shaking and only a tiny window to look out of, through which flames are seen. 

But later, when the flight starts going horribly wrong in orbit the technique stops working. Certainly the scenes of earth spinning through the windows are so vivid that had they gone on much longer, I’d have had to look away to not feel sick – and motion sickness is not something I’ve ever suffered from. But the noise and shaking is also such that you have no idea what Armstrong actually does to save the day in this little known story. The reality of that orbital failure was quiet – and terrifying. Armstrong’s coolness, quick thinking and actions saved not only himself and his co-pilot, Dave Scott (commander of Apollo 15), but likely the Apollo Program as well that day. But you get no sense of that here.

The technique is used again in the Saturn V launch scenes, yet it’s not as good as the one in Apollo 13 (1995). It’s in the lunar landing sequence, where it’s not only inaccurate but actually works against capturing the tension. All these scenes were better portrayed twenty years ago in the HBO TV mini-series, From The Earth To The Moon, and more powerfully. GoCam goes from being cool to annoying real fast. They even use it when Jan Armstrong walks across a street to comfort one of the other astronaut wives!
 
The other main technique is facial closeups. They always have a place, but here it’s overused and it doesn’t work with Gosling anyway for the simple reason that he’s trying to portray a buttoned-down man who does not emotionally react in obvious ways. That can be done via body language, which is where Gosling is great. But what’s he going to do with a close-up? A Roger Moore eyebrow? A Clint Eastwood squint? Similarly with the other actors.
 
Then there’s the story approach. We see everything through Armstrong’s eyes, with only a few occasions where the movie steps outside him to glimpse the world around. Even Mission Control and other astronauts don’t get much of a look. I can see what the movie is trying to do, but the problem is that the world becomes like him, and we’re robbed of a lot of emotions and feelings that were bubbling along at the time. Like Armstrong himself, most everything and everyone around him is flattened into figures of grim and stoic determination, starting with how he copes with the death of his two year old daughter, something which very few people knew about. That death is a fulcrum throughout the movie.
 
There are two exceptions to this. The first is that his wife Jan, played superbly by Foy (The Crown), becomes the emotional focal point, and as such she’s overplayed. What Foy does is necessary to the movie. In particular the part where, in an angry outburst, she demands that he sit with his boys and explain that he might not be coming back. Same with her turning up at Mission Control to berate them after the near fatal Gemini VIII spaceflight. In truth, no military pilot’s wife ever did that or ever would have.

The second is an approved feeling we get with a performance of Gil Scott-Heron’s obscure poem for a small group of protestors at the Apollo 11 launch, who object to the billions of dollars being spent on Apollo:

I can’t pay no doctor bill
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still
(while Whitey’s on the moon)

I laughed at that, and at one friend who said he appreciated that it was not “ra ra America” film – as if this age of Hollywood would ever allow such a thing around a traditional American triumph. This scene nails that narrative.

The story approach is also ironic because one thing Armstrong insisted on was the teamwork that made it all possible. One reason he ignored the fame-seekers was that he wanted the Moon landing to be about more than just himself. Stepping on the moon was not a big deal to him, whreas he was immensely proud of the landing, which he always said “we at NASA” achieved. It’s hard to reconcile that with the movie’s aim of seeing the event largely via Armstrong.

You can see that clearly in the landing sequence itself, as spectacular as it is. It’s true that he took manual control of the spacecraft when he saw the computer steering them into a large, rocky crater, and showed nerves of steel and piloting skills by landing with just seconds of fuel remaining. But the equal drama was dealing with the computer alarms, and in that case the crew had no choice but to wait for instructions from a backroom team in Houston who sweated through the decision to abort or proceed. You would not know they existed here. Once again, From The Earth To The Moon did it better, and took nothing away from the portrayal of Armstrong.
 
But there’s more at work here than just dramatic licence for one character or one scene. As is so often the case today, the moviemakers simply do not comprehend the past and the humans it contained. So with every astronaut death, the gloom deepens a little more around the survivors. That must be how they reacted to death, no?

Yet these men and their wives had been exposed to frequent, violent death in their line of work for years before the Apollo Project. Tom Wolfe’s famous 1979 book, The Right Stuff, captured it well:

By now the bad string had reached ten in all, and almost all of the dead had been close friends of Pete and Jane, young men who had been in their house many times, young men who had sat across from Jane and chattered like the rest of them about the grand adventure of military flying. And the survivors still sat around as before—with the same inexplicable exhilaration! Jane kept watching Pete for some sign that his spirit was cracking, but she saw none. He talked a mile a minute, kidded and joked, laughed with his Hickory Kid cackle. He always had. He still enjoyed the company of members of the group like Wally Schirra and Jim Lovell.

There is not even the smallest sign of that here. It is simply incomprehensible to the movie makers. And that failure is the driving force of this movie. 21st century technology has enabled First Man to immerse us in a magnificantly visceral experience, but it cannot show us the fully human reactions of the people who actually lived through it, only those feelings permitted to be true by the narrative of modern attitudes.

The result is this dour modernist reduction of America’s fulfillment of mankind’s age-old romance of flying to the Moon.