Few films have been able to put you in the headspace of someone who is in space flight like First Man does. Each of these sequences seem to be where director, Damien Chazelle, stretches his muscles the most when adapting Josh Singer’s script, which itself is based on the book, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen. The grainy, film stock images shake violently, the engines boom loud, the camera is often done in the characters’ POV, it’s almost unbearable, and it makes you admire the patience and bravery necessary for an astronaut to be able stay in control, communicate with the base, and push all the right buttons and pull the right levers and whatnot, lest he or she makes a mistake that results in their deaths.
It makes it seem like the film is aiming for spectacle when that’s really not the case, unlike other recent space films. Despite the two-and-a-half hour runtime, and the epic scale, spanning several years, the film’s scope is kept deeply intimate. It follows the years leading up to the moon landing from Neil Armstrong’s (Ryan Gosling) perspective as he quietly copes with a tragedy in the opening moments of the film when he loses his young daughter to cancer.
The film hits the kind of beats that you’d expect from many other biopics. In many ways, it’s very conventional as it details the various trials and tribulations that Armstrong and his peers went through to get to the point where landing on the moon felt like a possibility. Claire Foy is also stuck thanklessly playing the concerned wife character, Janet Armstrong. She’s excellent in the role, offering a more outspoken counterpoint to Gosling’s quiet and reserved interpretation of Neil. She’s only better than other examples of this archetype in the sense that she is simply in it more, and thus, gets to have a skosh more agency and personality.
However, Damien Chazelle is able to elevate the material through his direction, even if it is often full of seemingly obligatory nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey or the style of recent Terrence Malick films. What he does here is rather interesting, as it feels less like a standard biopic and more like a meditation on death. Death has a tendency to follow Neil wherever he goes, be it his daughter in the beginning, his fellow co-workers, and even the way he constantly grapples with the idea that he might die during his mission. Neil struggles to deal with these emotions, so he dedicates himself to his work. Dedication has been a running theme in Chazelle’s previous films, Whiplash (which I didn’t particularly like) and La La Land (which I loved), and how it can destroy someone (Whiplash) or lead you down a path that isn’t what you may have hoped for (La La Land). This time dedication is more a coping mechanism, and one that can attract people who might have a death wish, or even a form of depression. There’s an underlying sadness through the entire film, giving it a vibe closer to being more melancholic than triumphant, which is punctuated by Justin Hurwitz’s stellar score.
This slow (and maybe to some, tedious) build up leads to an incredible piece of filmmaking in the moon landing sequence. It’s simultaneously breathtaking, cathartic, and utterly devastating. A beat towards the end of the scene left me in a puddle of tears, and it really brought a lot of the subtextual ideas to a full circle. It’s beautifully crafted, and Ryan Gosling is wonderful in handling the subtleties and nuances of a man who, due to his position, has to remain stoic in the face of constant loss and tragedy.
I can definitely see First Man testing the patience of an audience who may want a straightforward biopic, but Damien Chazelle has other things in mind, and I find that his impulses are far more interesting. I’m admittedly an easy lay for anything related to space exploration, but the film does come together in a way that I found very satisfying. Despite his filmmaking techniques have a tendency to lean on the showy, aggressive and muscular, he’s really a brilliantly effective sentimentalist (which he rarely embraces), and the moments where he taps into that are profoundly powerful. A part of me was a bit skeptical of First Man, but Chazelle shows that even when he isn’t writing a project, he can bring the same artful, thoughtful, and distinctive voice that made his previous films stand out.