Just as there are films that, due to their outstanding quality, deserve a place in film anthologies, there are also films that warrant attention for being failures or disappointments. First Man, Damien Chazelle’s 2018 biographical film dedicated to the life and work of US astronaut Neil Armstrong—which has been regarded as one of the more serious contenders for the Oscars and other prestigious awards—could over time become remebered as one of the more intriguing disappointments. Its issue, however, lies not so much in its execution as in the fundamental misjudgement of its core concept.
The film is based on historian James R. Hansen’s 2005 book, which Armstrong himself declared his official biography. The plot begins in 1961, at the very outset of the famed Cold War-era Space Race between the US and the USSR, during which the Soviets enjoyed a notable advantage in the early years thanks to Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) is a test pilot tasked with testing experimental aircraft at the very edges of Earth’s atmosphere. After one such flight, during which he successfully saved himself and the spacecraft thanks to his exceptional resourcefulness and cool-headedness, Armstrong was admitted to NASA’s elite spaceflight programme called ‘Gemini’. The programme’s aim was to overtake the Soviets and win the Space Race by achieving its most crucial objective—landing humans on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. Armstrong, who enjoys the status of one of the finest astronauts, stoically endures countless often gruelling tests and witnesses a series of failures and tragedies that not only delay the Moon landing but also claim the lives of his colleagues and friends. Armstrong’s journey to the Moon will come at a cost to his family, who, despite their comfortable suburban life and middle-class comforts, suffer due to the tragic death of one of Armstrong’s daughters, as well as the emotionally reserved astronaut’s difficulty in connecting with his children, leaving that responsibility to his wife Janet (Claire Foy).
At first glance, First Man appears to be the ideal project for the kind of films Hollywood has long excelled at—propagating the United States as the most advanced, powerful, and successful nation in human history. The landing of American astronauts on the Moon—a technological achievement so impressive even today that numerous conspiracy theorists refuse to believe it—is precisely the kind of story even the least talented Hollywood filmmakers should be able to turn into a stunning epic with their eyes closed. Chazelle’s film, unfortunately, is not, and for a simple reason: that is not its primary purpose. This is evident from the fact that the premiere was not scheduled for July 2019, when the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission could have been celebrated, but for autumn 2018; the aim was far more mundane—not an opportunistic celebration, but Chazelle’s attempt to snag as many Oscars as possible, which, knowing today’s Academy, could only be achieved by focusing on a biopic centred on a single individual.
All this might not have been an issue if that man were not Neil Armstrong, who, to put it mildly, is not the most compelling material for masterful acting performances. Armstrong was an exceptional pilot, engineer, and commander—a man who perhaps fits the definition of a hero most precisely—yet, on the other hand, he was exactly as Gosling portrays him: always as cool as a cucumber and never showing emotion. This was, on one hand, excellent if you entrusted him with the outcome of a project worth 25 billion US$ at the time, in which a million things could go tragically wrong, but on the other hand, it is difficult to craft a compelling drama from his life and robotic career. In Gosling’s case, we have an acting talent wasted on something a wooden actor like Keanu Reeves could easily portray, or at best, a charismatic minimalist like Gary Cooper. Compared to Gosling, all the other actors appear as hysterical ‘drama queens’—including Foy as the wife and Corey Stoll as Armstrong’s far more intriguing and colourful colleague Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, who ultimately, whether the makers of First Man intended it or not, comes across as the closest thing to a villain in the entire film.
First Man also suffers from the fact that, like all recent “Oscar-bait” films, it has become a victim of contemporary politics, relating both to domestic political parameters of “political correctness” and the foreign policy context of today’s increasingly questionable American hegemony over the rest of the world. The makers of First Man are torn between the desire to celebrate what may not be the most important, but certainly the most spectacular achievement in their nation’s history, and the realisation that this achievement, half a century later, means little to most people today—that aside from a symbolic Cold War trophy, it had no far-reaching effect on American or world history. This is evident in the film through certain details—reminders that the triumph on the Moon coincided with the bloody fiasco in Vietnam, as well as scenes questioning whether billions of dollars could have been spent solving pressing problems on Earth. Perhaps the most explicit example is the famous poem Whitey on the Moon by African-American poet Gil Scott-Heron (played by Leon Bridges), which suggests that his fellow African-Americans languish in poverty in Black ghettos because someone decided to send a few white men to the Moon. The poem, which anachronistically appears in the film a year before its actual release, was likely included to distance Chazelle and his work from all SJW criticism regarding the film’s exclusively cis-hetero male white characters; while its themes warrant discussion, its inclusion feels clumsy and out of place. Similarly, certain details whose omission enraged right-wingers and Trump—such as the absence of planting the American flag on the Moon—would seem superfluous in First Man.
Though impressive and well-acted at times, First Man is a routine “Oscar-bait” film and falls far short of what Armstrong and Apollo 11 truly deserved.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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