It seems safe to say that pretty much none of us will ever experience space flight. We’ve had plenty of movies try to show it to us, but I don’t remember any of them approaching it in quite the way director Damien Chazelle does in his new movie First Man, which follows Neil Armstrong in the 10 years leading up to his historic moon landing.
Chazelle stages the action as if we’re on an absurdly dangerous wooden roller coaster, with the camera whipping back and forth so hard that we can barely make out what’s going on.
And these scenes are magnificent. They’re as believable as anything I’ve ever seen as representations of what it must be like to take a rocket to the stars. And they’re also a testament to the nearly superhuman abilities of Armstrong and the other astronauts to be able to fulfill their missions given the circumstances. If we, sitting in the theater, can hardly tell what’s happening, how in the world could someone deal with all the switches and levers and joysticks needed to pilot a spacecraft?
The rest of the movie doesn’t feel quite as successful. Much of it is taken up by scenes of Armstrong with his family, and in training for his space missions. I don’t know a lot about Neil Armstrong, the person, but Neil Armstrong, the character, as played by Ryan Gosling, is so opaque that it’s difficult to invest in him emotionally. I will say that a lot of this must be intentional — we see the effect his coldness has on his family, but still, we, as an audience, have little to hold on to.
And some of Chazelle’s stylistic choices really turned me off. This must be an exaggeration, but it seems like 2/3 of the movie is shot in close-up, even when we’re not in a tiny spacecraft, and the shaky handheld camera he uses during even the quietest and most intimate scenes is distracting. He clearly did it for a reason, but all it did was grate on me.
Still, when we finally get to the moon, any of my problems with the film melted away. It’s as grand as we can imagine, and still, somehow, human. And however else he’s been throughout the movie, in the final shot, we finally see Neil Armstrong, the man.
