Our first meeting with the main subject of “First Man”, Damian Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic is revelatory; Armstrong, played in a taciturn, restrained, understated key by Ryan Gosling, is flirting with disaster after a potentially disastrous test flight of the X-15 aircraft leaves him skipping along the upper edge of the earth’s atmosphere without navigation control. As with much of the film, our experience of manned flight in both the atmosphere and above is very much the perspective of the pilot. Chazelle’s film eschews many of the usual space travel or sci-fi “blockbuster” norms. There are no Kubrickesque big-screen panoramas of the earth (or moon) from space accompanied by swelling, symphonic chords on the soundtrack.
(In fact, the film’s climactic sequence, the first moon landing, plays out in total silence.) Also, there are no obvious, elaborate CGI sequences design to elicit awestruck wonder and no exhaustive exposition of the technical wizardry that made manned spaceflight possible.
On the contrary, the Gemini and Apollo missions, for all their mythology and veneer of well-nigh superhuman sophistication, are often portrayed in the film as somewhat makeshift, seat-of-the-pants, Jerry-built endeavours. The astronauts really are loaded, sardine-like, into cramped canisters atop vast, volatile solid fuel boosters. Karen Armstrong, Neil’s wife(Claire Foy), a model of stoic, at times barely-repressed anger, gives voice to this anxiety when she confronts her husband’s NASA colleagues:
“You’re just a bunch of boys. You don’t have anything under control!”
It is tempting to interpret Armstrong’s/Gosling’s closed-mouth reticence, and his immersion in engineering minutia, as a coping mechanism deployed in response to the various existential crises that he confronted, from his various near-death encounters as a test pilot and astronaut to his bereavement following the death of his infant daughter. But it should be remembered that Armstrong and his fellow space pioneers were products of a wartime generation that came of age with the expectation that they, like their fathers, might be called upon to offer up their lives in military service, and this expectation must have informed his perception of his possible role in history. The film is tightly focused on the lifespan of the Apollo mission, and we are only afforded brief glimpses of the wider, roiling turbulence of 1960’s American society. But Armstrong was a Naval aviator during the Korean War, and the film’s time frame incorporates the Vietnam War, JFK’s assassination and the Cuban missile crisis. Mortality, and the fear of mortality, is an ever-present character in the film, dealt with most poignantly with the death of three of Armstrong’s Apollo colleagues, including his close friend and neighbour Ed White, in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire in February 1967.
Chazelle defies the expectations that one might have of a contemporary Hollywood crowd-pleasing spaceflight blockbuster, and his film instead delivers an intimate, interior, domestic portrayal of the this epic landmark moment in scientific and human history. And his film is so much the richer, and more compelling, for it.