The Apollo moon landing had many beneficial side effects. The almighty effort required in a successful lunar mission provided a growth spurt to existing technology, making for everything from better computers to non-stick frying pans. Those images of the earth stood as a galvanising symbol for the emerging environmentalist movement. But this week comes a less-welcome consequence of that heroic space voyage almost 50 years ago: First Man, and it’s one of the dullest films you’re likely to see this year.
How did the heroic effort to land Neil Armstrong (played by Ryan Gosling) on the moon inspire such a boring film? The genius behind this peculiar accomplishment belongs to filmmaker Damien Chazelle. He’s the youngish director behind Whiplash and La La Land (for which he became the youngest person to win an Oscar for Best Director), both wildly over-rated movies in my view but box-office successes that have allowed him to work with a bigger budget.
The money shows on screen, and in that regard First Man exerts a certain fascination. This is a meticulous, large-canvas recreation of the US’s Apollo mission, from Nasa’s uncertain, gravity-bound prototypes in the early 1960s to the majestic passage of the Apollo 11 through space that took Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Sea of Tranquillity in 1969.
In the space sequences Chazelle demonstrates a few flashes of poetry. The opening sequence sits us inside Armstrong’s tiny cockpit as he shudders through the earth’s atmosphere as a young test pilot. His pen suddenly rises, free from the pull of gravity, and Armstrong allows himself a moment of wonder, before plucking the pen from its slow rise upward to note down some figures in a clipboard.
Nasa’s space efforts are played out largely as a high-stakes variation on uneasy office politics
It’s a telling moment: onflight statistics take priority over any sense of the extra-terrestrial sublime. Armstrong is a no-nonsense, restrained figure, played by Gosling with a precision that his real-life source, an aeronautical engineer by training, might have appreciated. You suspect such an undemonstrative work ethic was the governing ethos at Nasa.
