First Man
Never before did I imagine how terrifying it must have been to be the first man to go to the moon.
Grade: C+
Next month, it will be 55 years since Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. Maybe by the time that moment has turned 65 a filmmaker will have made a film about it that realises its potential.
Damien Chazelle’s 2019 First Man opens in 1961 and Neil Armstrong is test-piloting an X-15 spaceplane. He’s breaking through the atmosphere, the close ups are as tight as the plane’s cockpit, and the camera shakes, rattles and trembles in tune with the craft and, like Neil, Chazelle looks from instrument to instrument in close ups so close it looks like a shot from Neil’s point of view as his brain is overrun with adrenaline.
This is how Chazelle shows all Neil’s flights in which he tests the craft that pave the way to the Apollo 11 mission to the moon: claustrophobic close ups and hand-held camera shots that put me in the craft with Neil Armstrong when it feels like it will fly apart and fling him out into space as a frozen corpse. Never before did I imagine how terrifying it must have been to be the first man to go to the moon.
If only First Man also made me understand what made the first man keep going. Wittgenstein said that whatever we cannot say we must let pass over in silence. That seems to be Armstrong’s motto in this film. A reporter asks him how he felt about being chosen to lead the Apollo mission and he answers: “I was pleased.” The reporter asks him how it compares to winning a car and he answers: “I was pleased.” Neil also spends a lot of time sitting or looking up at the moon or walking home and Chazelle just lets silence fill the scene. Chazelle is skilled when it comes to the terror in the moment of human engineering colliding with the force of physics but when it comes to answering the why that moves Neil into space he just stares at his protagonist as mute as a kid who know he’s looking at a great man but can’t say why.
I admire Chazelle’s boldness. He doesn’t let either his age or that of his career stop him from tackling big pictures that most filmmakers only take on when they’ve got lots of films under their belt. Oppenheimer was Christopher Nolan’s eleventh film but First Man was only Chazelle’s third yet Neil Armstrong is just as much a giant to get in focus on camera as Dr Oppenheimer. Chazelle followed First Man with Babylon. In that film set in 1920s Hollywood, Chazelle plunged into the oceanic territory of the very history, glory, and purpose of film itself. Chazelle was only 37 when he made Babylon. Other filmmakers have not gone into the ring with such beefy material until much later in their careers. John Ford and John Huston didn’t make The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance and The Treasure of Sierre Madre respectively until their 60s. Despite what Pauline Kael thought, filmmaking is not only a young man’s game. It’s not only an old man’s game either. Chazelle shows that.
But Chazelle’s boldness ultimately isn’t enough. Boldness lets you grab the material but you need skill to make the material work. Fortune may favour the bold but skill often waits for experience. Chazelle has the technical but not the character skills to tell the story of the first man on the moon.