Rather than revelling in the majesty of space travel, First Man puts its audience inside a tin can as it shakes and rattles its claustrophobic way into the sky. It’s no surprise when someone asks for a Swiss army knife to do some last-minute adjustments. Like the Armstrongs’ under-stress marriage, the space vessels themselves are in constant danger of falling apart, accurately portrayed as an alarming collection of screws and rivets that Janet dismisses as “balsa wood” boys’ toys. While Gosling plays everything close to his chest, it’s Foy who invites us into the unfolding drama with her wonderfully empathetic performance. Claire Foy’s Janet Armstrong proves adept at keeping the connection between these two worlds open, even when the live feed from her husband’s spacecraft is cut. In space, Donald, no one can hear you whine.Ĭhazelle describes this tale as existing “between the moon and the kitchen sink”, and, like Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, he juxtaposes convincingly evoked Nasa sequences with back-garden scenes of beers and barbecues in which the moon glimmers distantly through the trees. While “ space force” cheerleader Donald Trump may have declared (sight unseen) that the absence of an American flag-planting scene in First Man is “ a terrible thing”, anyone with a pulse will recognise that there is more at stake here than some empty gesture of faux patriotism. Brilliantly, Sandgren uses handheld 16mm for the up-close-and-personal scenes and 35mm for the industrial Nasa sequences, shifting to the stark Imax clarity of 65mm for the expansive silence of the moonscapes where Armstrong can finally confront his awful loss.
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Time and again, cinematographer Linus Sandgren frames him alone amid the darkened spaces of the Armstrong home – the camera gazing through doors, halls and hatchways that paint a black shroud around his softly illuminated figure. Significantly, Gosling’s outwardly emotionless antihero seems to be lost in space even when down on Earth.
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Yet it’s Karen’s memory that haunts Armstrong throughout training and into his Apollo 11 mission – a vision of her hair running through his fingers recurring at key moments of crisis. When Nasa puts out the call for trainee astronauts, his successful application seems to offer a new start. His superiors think he’s a danger to himself, and the film suggests a connection between his desire to slip the surly bonds of Earth and his bereavement at the loss of his young daughter, Karen. Chazelle’s La La Land star Ryan Gosling is the titular explorer whom we first meet almost skipping an experimental plane off into space.