4 stars out of 5
You were expecting me to review a different movie? Patience, dear friends.
I’ve been fairly interested in space exploration my entire life, yet I was surprised how little I knew about the Apollo moon mission and the lengthy lead-up to it. Weird. Was there never another movie about it? Were they waiting for Neil Armstrong to die before making one? I’d read how Armstrong famously eschewed publicity and attention. Can you imagine him trying to pull that off today? “Uh, Neil, we’re gonna need you to post this to Facebook Live, and after that, some Instagram comments need liking ASAP.”
The differences between now and then is actually one of the most compelling aspects of this movie. In the Hulu series The First, we’re preparing for a trip to Mars, and the technology is believable — just a notch or two ahead of what’s currently available. So to journey back to the 1960s, when the space program was very much knobs, levers, dials, nuts, and bolts, it’s pretty shocking. We made it to the moon in that junker?
Ryan Gosling is terrific as Armstrong, a serious fellow of few words, dogged by some recent sadness. Claire Foy (having a great year with this, Unsane, and the upcoming Girl in the Spider’s Web) does what she can with the traditional worried “astronaut’s wife” role. We get a strong sense of the strain the space program can place on a family, even if there’s no scene as memorable as the Apollo 13 ring down the drain.
Casting is strong all around: Reliable Jason Clarke is here as astronaut Ed, Coach Taylor is a NASA official and so is Nucky’s brother, rocking another buzzcut. Ciarán Hands wears a suit too, Corey Stoll, who had fun as a baddie in Ant Man, portrays Buzz Aldrin as a bit of a jerk (the impression I also got when he did an interview for our kiddie magazines and turned out to be a climate-change denier). And cruelly appropriate to have Lukas Haas play forgotten astronaut Michael Collins.
Preparing for the mission took the better part of a decade, and the astronauts and their families live “on campus” the whole time. The film does a good job showing how they’re generally isolated from both the turmoil and the joy of the 1960s, though the real world does manage to seep in a little. To that effect, the movie makes great use of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.”
First Man looks and feels like the 1960s, rather than actors playing dress-up, so credit must go to director Damien Chazelle and his cinematographer and production crew. I learned a lot (including how those NASA guys pronounced “Gemini”) and the movie kept things tense, even though I knew how it was going to work out in the end. Spoiler alert: One small step for man….
Jack Silbert, curator