Cinema review: First Man

Strange that in the nation that invented the cult of celebrity, the first man to walk on the moon should have lived as a virtual recluse after his historic ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. Whether Neil Armstrong had a charisma bypass, or whether he simply had other more pressing matters on his mind is unclear from this brooding but uplifting film. Director Damien Chazelle, eschewing the stylisation of his wildly overrated La La Land, tells it straight this time out – and with such material to work with, why would he not? The Apollo 11 mission was nothing short of remarkable. Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) had been earmarked as having the ‘right stuff’ from his days as a naval test pilot and the movie covers the years from when he was inducted into the space program until that historic event of July 1969. Just eighteen months before the mission, three of Armstrong’s fellow astronauts (and friends) were incinerated when a module into which they had been strapped exploded. As his wife Janet (Claire Foy) says in frustration at his sangfroid, ‘you’re just boys making models out of balsawood!’ Outside the inner sanctum of NASA, president Lyndon Johnson was waging an unpopular war in Vietnam and demonstrators were demanding that the money being thrown at the space race be channelled elsewhere. Oblivious to the white noise, Armstrong was coping with the unendurable pain of having lost his little girl Karen before she had turned three – the tragedy haunted him. As his focus on the job intensifies, life at home shows signs of fraying at the edges and Chazelle does not dodge the issue of Armstrong’s cool detachment. The take-off and flight of Apollo 11 is brilliantly executed and Justin Hurwitz’s epic score is heard to heart-stopping effect as the landing craft makes its descent to the moon. Nearly half a century later, smug with our smartphones and numbed by technology, we might pause to grasp the enormity of Apollo 11’s achievement. On that day, the world was one.