Oh, Man

If you were to imagine a movie in a lab, cooked up to cater specifically to my tastes, that movie would probably end up looking a lot like First Man. It's about the 60's space race. It's from Damien Chazelle, the director of one of my favorite new movies of the past decade, Whiplash. It's not necessarily that First Man was ticking all the boxes, but it quite dramatically ticked those big ones.

I was probably going to like a movie about astronaut Neil Armstrong to some extent no matter what. It may be that I was also going to be a bit disappointed in it no matter what. Prophecies fulfilled, and now I'll see if I can explain why.

As for what I liked about the movie, I'm not sure space travel has ever been put on screen in a more thrilling fashion. I'd even include in that my personal favorite Apollo 13, which used the famous "Vomit Comet" aircraft to film scenes of actual weightlessness with no visual effects trickery. First Man is more intense than that. It makes going to space feel risky and dangerous. In particular, there's a lot of critical praise for a harrowing aerial test flight at the beginning of the film. And of course, there's the lunar sequences at the end that are pretty much What We're All Here To See -- and they are breathtaking (if brief).

But it's actually three other sequences in the film that stand out for me. Two relate to Neil Armstrong's first orbital flight, aboard Gemini 8. The launch of the craft is presented without the conventional exterior shots of the rocket climbing to the stars; instead, the entire experience is presented to us from inside the violently rumbling craft itself. Later, a mishap during the flight does an amazing job of conveying life-or-death stakes (even when, of course, we know Armstrong made it out just fine). The third sequence centers around the Apollo 1 fire, which has been dramatized multiple times, but never with quite the visceral horror it receives here. (It's worth noting that all of these moments I mention were depicted in the mini-series From the Earth to the Moon. And great as that was, I again maintain that the portrayal here is more amazing still.)

Where the movie falters, though, is in trying to present us a portrait of Neil Armstrong, the man. As a public figure, he was rather famously closed off. Other astronauts said often in interviews that the real Neil they knew really wasn't like that, and it feels like the promise of a movie like this is to show us that, to humanize a near-mythic figure. Instead, First Man doubles down on the myth. The movie's Armstrong shows emotion perhaps three times in the entire two-plus hours, always briefly and compactly. He otherwise seems to remain a cipher to his family, his co-workers, and mostly, the audience. The one Big Moment that counters this is a fabrication departing from actual history. It's a bit of artistic license I'd welcome more if it had been part of a more complete strategy to illuminate Armstrong, rather than a play for resonance at the end.

As good as I've noted the space material is, the Earthbound stuff is often that weak. Damien Chazelle opts for a transparent metaphor here, shooting all the "family drama" with a conspicuously unsteady handheld camera. Armstrong's life lacks solidity, but everything "up there" is stable and assured -- get it, people?! Claire Foy does some powerful acting as Armstrong's wife Janet, but you won't necessarily get to see it -- if you go to this film in IMAX for the moon scenes, you may well get motion sick from the domestic scenes. As for Ryan Gosling? It's getting to be cliche to cast him as one of these emotionally impenetrable stoics. Sometimes less is indeed more. This does not feel like one of those times.

As a side swipe on the way out, I also want to call out the distracting musical score by composer Justin Hurwitz. It's quite repetitive, and features oddly conspicuous instruments that call attention away from the action. Most confoundingly, the score makes judicious use of the Theremin, the instrument that provided the signature whine of many a black-and-white science fiction movie. Is this intentionally trying to make this film seem hokey and outdated? What on Earth (or the moon) for?

Objectively speaking, I should probably be grading this movie a C+. But the fact is, I loved the space travel sequences too much. To me, they were that impactful, that immediate, that tense, enough that the movie lands at a B in my book. But, as I said in the beginning, that's the book of someone who has always been a fan of the early age of space flight. If that's your thing too, you'll probably find enough here to be glad you went. Everyone else might want to proceed with caution.