☆☆½
Ostensibly, First Man is a biography of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, a subject that should make for one hell of a good movie, yet this one is curiously aloof, as cold and distant as it depicts Armstrong himself. We may no longer live in an age of heroes, but is that reason to turn its main character into such a passive-aggressive bore?
It may well be that Armstrong was a man of few words, but First Man makes him into a constantly unhappy and vaguely bitter person, which doesn't give the audience much to work with when the outcome of the story is already known.
It's not that First Man doesn't get off to an exciting and perfectly pitched opening, with Armstrong testing the limits of his aircraft and himself as he heads ever higher and faster into Earth's atmosphere, then comes crashing down. First Man aims to put us right there into the cockpit -- and later the capsule -- with Armstrong, and that's the one thing the movie does staggeringly well. As long as he's airborne, so is the movie; the trouble is, almost all of it is set here on the ground, where Armstrong is glum, surly and almost always lacking in passion.
Ryan Gosling plays Armstrong with weird detachment; everything is going on in this guy's head, almost none of it showing on his face or in his actions. It's enough to frustrate his wife, played well but with almost stereotypical feistiness and headstrong independence by Claire Foy -- she's fantastic, but both the actress and the character only get to come to life when she's struggling and fighting against the impassiveness of her husband and his NASA co-workers.
The goal, it seems, was to humanize Armstrong by making us understand how deeply he was affected by the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Karen, but there's something missing in this characterization; his fixation on his daughter is more an extraneous plot device than an emotional revelation.
First Man has a big story to tell, moving both across time and (literally) space, with a great many characters -- which is another one of the challenges the movie's screenplay (by Josh Singer) can't overcome: There are just too many names and faces for any of them to register, especially with a constantly moving, jittery camera and choppy editing that make it difficult to follow who's who and what's what. The movie needs to resort too many times to on-screen title cards to tell us what's happening, and rarely makes any of it feel connected to the rest.
It's impossible to make a movie about the space program without recalling both The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, which is to the great detriment of First Man, because the comparisons are both apt and not complimentary. Those movies, especially Kaufman's magnificent epic, took enormously complicated stories and made them comprehensible to anyone. First Man doesn't fare as well, which is most telling when it gets to the grim-but-necessary sequence that dramatizes the fatal Apollo 1 fire.
It's a defining moment both for NASA and for Armstrong, but if you don't know much about it, First Man doesn't connect it to the broader story. In this scene, as in much of the movie, the audience is expected to have some first-hand knowledge. The movie doesn't get anything wrong (one shot of the door to the space capsule, bulging and leaking smoke, is haunting), it's that none of the moments, even this one, seem to matter much. The entire movie lacks a certain enthusiasm, and is devoid of the adventurous spirit that you'd like to think motivated the astronauts as much as it did Americans.
Why did we go to the moon? Why was it worth the cost in money and in lives? First Man offers up a snippet of John F. Kennedy asking the same question, but has trouble figuring out the answer itself. Perhaps it's telling that the most lively sequence in the film that isn't set in space is one in which protestors gather outside Cape Canaveral to decry the cost both in lives and in dollars of the space program. To the words of Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon," which angrily denounces the wasteful spending to get men to the lunar surface instead of worrying about what's happening right here on earth, First Man gets an unexpected zap of energy criticizing the very project it's supposed to be glorifying.
After the boundless energy of Whiplash and La La Land (both marvelous and exquisite movies), it's unexpected and disconcerting to see Chazelle struggling to find both the story and the meaning here. In the car on the way home from First Man, I found myself looking up at the moon, thinking back to what I had just seen, and, as a backdrop for the moment, listening to Bill Conti's score to The Right Stuff. That's a hard legacy to live up to, and it's not so much that First Man is the wrong stuff, exactly, it's just that it's never quite entirely right.
Viewed October 13, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 16
1645
It may well be that Armstrong was a man of few words, but First Man makes him into a constantly unhappy and vaguely bitter person, which doesn't give the audience much to work with when the outcome of the story is already known.
It's not that First Man doesn't get off to an exciting and perfectly pitched opening, with Armstrong testing the limits of his aircraft and himself as he heads ever higher and faster into Earth's atmosphere, then comes crashing down. First Man aims to put us right there into the cockpit -- and later the capsule -- with Armstrong, and that's the one thing the movie does staggeringly well. As long as he's airborne, so is the movie; the trouble is, almost all of it is set here on the ground, where Armstrong is glum, surly and almost always lacking in passion.
Ryan Gosling plays Armstrong with weird detachment; everything is going on in this guy's head, almost none of it showing on his face or in his actions. It's enough to frustrate his wife, played well but with almost stereotypical feistiness and headstrong independence by Claire Foy -- she's fantastic, but both the actress and the character only get to come to life when she's struggling and fighting against the impassiveness of her husband and his NASA co-workers.
The goal, it seems, was to humanize Armstrong by making us understand how deeply he was affected by the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Karen, but there's something missing in this characterization; his fixation on his daughter is more an extraneous plot device than an emotional revelation.
First Man has a big story to tell, moving both across time and (literally) space, with a great many characters -- which is another one of the challenges the movie's screenplay (by Josh Singer) can't overcome: There are just too many names and faces for any of them to register, especially with a constantly moving, jittery camera and choppy editing that make it difficult to follow who's who and what's what. The movie needs to resort too many times to on-screen title cards to tell us what's happening, and rarely makes any of it feel connected to the rest.
It's impossible to make a movie about the space program without recalling both The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, which is to the great detriment of First Man, because the comparisons are both apt and not complimentary. Those movies, especially Kaufman's magnificent epic, took enormously complicated stories and made them comprehensible to anyone. First Man doesn't fare as well, which is most telling when it gets to the grim-but-necessary sequence that dramatizes the fatal Apollo 1 fire.
It's a defining moment both for NASA and for Armstrong, but if you don't know much about it, First Man doesn't connect it to the broader story. In this scene, as in much of the movie, the audience is expected to have some first-hand knowledge. The movie doesn't get anything wrong (one shot of the door to the space capsule, bulging and leaking smoke, is haunting), it's that none of the moments, even this one, seem to matter much. The entire movie lacks a certain enthusiasm, and is devoid of the adventurous spirit that you'd like to think motivated the astronauts as much as it did Americans.
Why did we go to the moon? Why was it worth the cost in money and in lives? First Man offers up a snippet of John F. Kennedy asking the same question, but has trouble figuring out the answer itself. Perhaps it's telling that the most lively sequence in the film that isn't set in space is one in which protestors gather outside Cape Canaveral to decry the cost both in lives and in dollars of the space program. To the words of Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon," which angrily denounces the wasteful spending to get men to the lunar surface instead of worrying about what's happening right here on earth, First Man gets an unexpected zap of energy criticizing the very project it's supposed to be glorifying.
After the boundless energy of Whiplash and La La Land (both marvelous and exquisite movies), it's unexpected and disconcerting to see Chazelle struggling to find both the story and the meaning here. In the car on the way home from First Man, I found myself looking up at the moon, thinking back to what I had just seen, and, as a backdrop for the moment, listening to Bill Conti's score to The Right Stuff. That's a hard legacy to live up to, and it's not so much that First Man is the wrong stuff, exactly, it's just that it's never quite entirely right.
Viewed October 13, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 16
1645
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