Review: First Man is a searing portrait of spaceflight

In the opening sequence of First Man, we meet test pilot Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as he leaves Earth’s atmosphere in an experimental aircraft. For a moment, he soars into space; he is transfixed by the silence around him and the sight of the blue planet beneath him, and so are we.

Then things start to go wrong.

The controls don’t respond. He ascends when he should be descending. Everything in the plane shakes; the shouted instructions from the ground crew seem worse than useless. Armstrong corrects the plane’s trajectory, and the aircraft shoots back toward Earth’s surface. But suddenly he’s flying too low; he comes within inches of smashing into a mountainside. His safe landing in the Mojave Desert seems less a triumph than a shockingly lucky roll of the dice.

Those spectacular first scenes set the stage for what’s to come in First Man, which follows Armstrong through his days as a test pilot, his selection for Project Gemini, and his famous time in the Apollo program. A powerful, gripping portrait of not only Armstrong but the history of American spaceflight, the film deserves a place alongside space-race classics The Right Stuff (1983) and Apollo 13 (1995).

Spaceflight and family life

Director Damien Chazelle, best known for the frothy musical La La Land (2016), shows a completely different side of his talent in First Man. The flight sequences are astonishing and terrifying. The shaking camera makes it clear that the ride to space—and sometimes through space—was not a smooth one. Ominous sounds add to the sense of danger: the heavy thud of a capsule door as it shuts, the rasp of breath inside a helmet, the shriek of metal rivets as a capsule strains under intense heat and pressure. Even viewers who know that Armstrong survived to walk on the Moon may find themselves fearing for his safety, especially during a harrowing sequence aboard Gemini 8.

Many of the spaceflight scenes are shot partly from Armstrong’s point of view. That choice gives us a vivid window into just how hard it was to operate the Apollo and Gemini spacecraft. There are only slivers of sky and space visible through the capsule windows. The astronauts are crammed in so tightly, and strapped into so much gear, that it seems like a miracle that they don’t panic. The film goes to great pains to get the details right; even the error numbers on the alarms during the Moon landing match the ones Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin saw in the cockpit in July 1969.

Though packed with drama, those intense flights often yield to rewarding moments of sheer awe. After Armstrong takes his famous first steps on the lunar surface, the film pauses as he looks out at the silent gray landscape around him. It’s a stunningly beautiful scene.

Although Armstrong survived his missions as a test pilot and an astronaut, not all of his colleagues did. Josh Singer’s screenplay, based on the 2005 biography First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James Hansen, introduces the audience to astronauts who died testing experimental craft. With each death, viewers are reminded of just how risky it was to accept a place among the first men in space. Most films about NASA emphasize the brilliance and professionalism of the scientists and pilots. In First Man, NASA is a powder keg of stress, full of people who can’t help but wonder if they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

First Man also follows Armstrong’s family life, particularly his marriage to Janet Shearon Armstrong (Claire Foy). The death of their two-year-old daughter, Karen, shown early in the film, hangs over the rest of the movie. Without belaboring the point, the film suggests that Karen’s death permanently shifted something in Armstrong. As the Apollo program moves closer to its goal of the Moon, viewers also see strain on the Armstrong marriage. Neil works longer hours and is less willing to tell Janet about his day. Meanwhile, Janet watches friends lose their husbands and wonders if she will be next.

At what cost?

Much of the film’s success depends on Foy and Gosling, and both actors deliver. As Janet, Foy conveys love, strength, worry, and frustration, often in the same moment. Meanwhile, the reliably excellent Gosling turns in a subtle, moving performance. First Man depicts Armstrong as an engineer first and foremost—someone who keeps careful notes and takes refuge in calculations when stressed. He’s also a man of relatively few words. We spend a lot of the movie looking at tightly framed shots of Gosling’s face while he doesn’t say very much. Gosling makes those sequences compelling without overacting.

What viewers don’t get a sense of, however, is what drives Armstrong through the stressful years with Gemini and Apollo. He applies to Project Gemini partly to give his family a fresh start after Karen’s death. He tells the men interviewing him for the job that he thinks leaving Earth has the potential to help us “see things that maybe we should have seen a long time ago.” But it’s a vague answer to the question of why he wants to go to space, and as the disasters mount, it’s hard not to wonder why Armstrong continues doing this to himself. There are hints that his focus on the Moon is a means of dealing with Karen’s loss, but it’s not clear how—or if—it’s helping.

That ambiguity is likely there by design. Although the depiction of NASA engineers and astronauts is sympathetic and positive, an interesting thread of ambivalence about the space program winds its way through First Man. Various characters ask if the cost in money and lives is worth it. A particularly powerful sequence shows a black poet (Leon Bridges) at a protest, asking why Americans should focus on the Moon when so much is going wrong on Earth. It’s also not clear whether the personal cost has been worth it for the Armstrongs. The film’s final scene mixes triumph, relief, distance, and regret in a few silent gestures. It’s a memorable end to an outstanding movie.

First Man opens in US theaters on 12 October.