Also caught the latest space race flick First Man, a flick about Neil Armstrong and the moon shot. This one is directed by Damien Chazelle who did LaLa Land and Whiplash prior. Neither movie about song suggested he had a technical historical space race movie in him but that’s alright. I’ll welcome any NASA-inspired drama AND any flick from the guy who made Whiplash.
So First Man is centered on Neil Armstrong and follows him from 1961 to 1969, from the pre-Gemini days, through the various Gemini launches, into the Apollo era, and ends with the first manned landing on the moon. It kind of sort of is a biopic of Armstrong as it focuses primarily on his missions and his life… but that’s part of where the movie runs into problems.
Because Armstrong is played by Ryan Gosling who is asked to play even more stoic and brooding version of a Ryan Gosling character. Now, it may well be true that Armstrong was not the showiest, most outgoing guy and, to that extent, this was good casting… but its hard to hang a movie on a guy who can barely elicit a smile or a frown or pretty much any emotion. So the flick also gives us us his home life… his children and his wife played by Claire Foy. But Foy’s job is to just be a buzzkill about NASA, the space race, and her husband being all closed off and quiet.
The movie only bounces off the atmosphere of that marriage at random times. There’s certainly a story there and arguably they circle it a decent amount, but so much of the rest of the film is the historical and technical focus on the various missions. But, to these events, the movie just kind of bounces a stone across the water. If you don’t know the history, the movie barely tries to explain any of it. They’ll have one scene, for example, of Armstrong at a White House party talking to senators worried about all the tax money being spent on NASA. This is immediately followed by a launch-pad disaster… then it skips forward a year and they are testing a lunar lander. I guess the budget issues were taken care of despite the loss of life?
And that brings me to the main problem I had with this historic flick. It’s 2 hrs and 20 minutes and the first hour and forty are a huge drag. Just one depressingly filmed gloomy scene after another. Hopping from one mishap of a test flight or mission problem to another, never once eliciting a sense of adventure or excitement. It’s crushingly depressing for a movie about space flight. But, hey, the Armstrongs did live a life of funerals… the test pilots and astronauts had dangerous jobs… so it could be argued this is a good focus of the film. I guess.
And it does lead up to an evocative and actually pretty great moon landing sequence that is kind of an argument why they had to show us, the audience, how dangerous all of this was. I get that the movie wanted to be a downer for so long to score this ending, but it didn’t make sitting through it particularly engaging or fun. That said though, the moon landing was pretty fantastic and managed to pull the nose of the movie, avoiding a crash landing. Hard to recommend the final thirty minutes of the movie, but it’s not like the the other stuff was BAD, so much as it was unfocused and depressing.
So, yeah, this movie was kind of a well-meaning, well-made failure. I think its good history, if you’re looking for 90% of a good reason not to have a space race, and 10% of an excuse for one. Too much focus on depressingly, gloomy, sad moments and not enough on hope, elation, success, and that sort of thing. Not every movie has to have a Hollywood ending… though we do know this one did so maybe pop some anti-depressants, maybe?
Score: 72