But there are also a lot of feelings-too many feelings, even for those of us who like them.
FIRST MAN ON THE MOON MOVIE WITH RYAN GOSSLING MOVIE
You hear plenty of important-sounding men intoning stuff about vectors and coordinates and the like-a space movie needs that. Gosling is sensitive enough as an actor to understand Armstrong’s devotion to science, to the point where he must have preferred its language of numbers and facts to the murkier arena of feelings. First Man also helps you imagine the grief Armstrong must have felt when his close friend and colleague, Ed White (Jason Clarke), was burned to death-along with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee-during a pre-launch test for Apollo 1. He succeeds in making the events directly preceding that first lunar landing, a mission undertaken by Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and Mike Collins (Lukas Haas), seem suitably tense, even though we all know how it turned out. It took a long time for the Gemini astronauts, and later those of the Apollo missions, to reach the moon, and men died trying to get there in the movie’s best moments, Chazelle makes you feel that weight. Chazelle chooses another path, and his instincts aren’t inherently wrong. That movie’s cheerful casualness actually enhanced the sense of danger surrounding those early missions. First Man doesn’t have the jaunty spirit of Philip Kaufman’s great 1983 Tom Wolfe adaptation, The Right Stuff, which focuses on the original Mercury astronauts, the precursors to Armstrong’s group, who flew the Gemini and Apollo missions. That’s a drag, because Chazelle and Singer have taken visible care with some of the movie’s dramatic details. If anything, it makes the proceedings seem inconsequential, no-biggie events that need to be jazzed up visually with excess technique. The wriggly camera work doesn’t make the jostling more dramatic. Its star, Ryan Gosling, turns in a discreet, sensitive performance, almost too sensitive for the movie around it: Minute after minute, Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren are right there with the (often) handheld camera, coming in tight for allegedly meaningful closeups or jiggling hard to connote, say, the brain-rattling feeling of being an astronaut leaving the Earth’s atmosphere in a space capsule. But that’s the problem: The movie feels too fussed-over for such a low-key hero. This is a respectful movie, even a genuflecting one there’s never a moment when Chazelle fails to let you know he’s doing important, valuable work. “No, I never did that,” he said.Īrmstrong died in 2012, and it’s hard not to wonder what he’d make of Chazelle’s version of his story, adapted from Hansen’s book by screenwriter Josh Singer.
In 2001, while helping to conduct interviews for the official NASA oral history, professor and writer Douglas Brinkley met Armstrong and asked him if he’d ever gazed at the moon before that historic Apollo 11 flight. Armstrong, was published, the former star astronaut was living quietly in a Cincinnati suburb. Hansen’s biography, First Man: The Life of Neil A. But in the years that followed, he largely retreated from publicity.
In 1969 Armstrong took the first step onto that strange, powdery surface and uttered a few simple words that captivated people all over the world. Chazelle’s fourth feature, First Man tells the story of astronaut Neil Armstrong, one of the unflashiest heroes of NASA, if not of the whole last half of the 20th century.
You don’t scale a movie about the first guy to walk on the moon if you’re not. Damien Chazelle, director of the macho-jazz wingding Whiplash and a floaty modern musical about a great American city, La La Land, is a flashy filmmaker of great ambition.
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