First Man (2018)

(On Cable TV, July 2019) A Damien Chazelle film about Neil Armstrong? Sold—there’s no way I wasn’t going to watch this. Alas, the feeling I get at the end of First Man is merely one of satisfaction, not one of exceeded expectations. It may be that Armstrong, as one of the prototypical solid men specifically selected for moon landings because they were low-drama, may not have been as interesting a biographical figure as everything surrounding him. It may be because most of the highlights of First Man have been covered in other movies before (most notably The Right Stuff, and then For All Mankind, and then Apollo 13). It may be because in trying to portray the experience from a subjective perspective, Chazelle has minimized the impact of the spectacle we expected. But, no matter why, First Man is about as average a rendition of Armstrong’s experience as would have been put on-screen: he gets the highlights, but not much in terms of what made him tick—the characters surrounding him, whether it’s his wife, his superiors or teammate Buzz Aldrin (in another superlative supporting performance by Corey Stoll). Ryan Gosling doesn’t help—his mandate it to play a very private, very inward-driven character and he does exactly that. The highlight of the film, fortunately, arrives at exactly the right moment—stepping out of the Lunar Module and stepping on the moon, with the grainy artificially aged images finally giving place to the clean crisp splendour of IMAX footage taking us on another world. But it feels like a little too late, and actually limited by Armstrong’s perspective. I do like First Man (after all, I watched it exactly on the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing), but I’m disappointed that I’m not loving it.