(SPOILERS, obviously)
First Man attracted controversy before its release when Dumb Actor Ryan Gosling made a Dumb Statement about omitting the historic flag-planting on the Moon. Director Damien Chazelle made it worse by saying something other than "We're making a movie about Neil Armstrong, not about the First Lunar Landing." That was a terrible opening move.
And, given Chazelle's obsession with portraying Armstrong's grief over the loss of his two-year-old daughter Karen to a brain tumor, I'm amazed he didn't juxtapose the flagpole being planted in the soil with Karen's coffin being lowered into the ground. (As it is, yes, they do show the flag on the Moon, just not the planting itself, and I wouldn't have missed it if not for Dumb Actor Ryan Gosling's Dumb Statement.)
To get the nice stuff out of the way: every Apollo Program Nut (hi)* knows that Neil Armstrong was socially awkward to the point that they'd suspect him of being slightly autistic except for the fact that NASA subjected their astronauts to rigorous psychological scrutiny. Chazelle posits the theory that Armstrong's behavior stems from his inability to deal with his grief over his daughter's death. In that way, the film actually manages to tell a new story rather than just hit all the beats we're all familiar with: the Gemini 8 disaster, the Apollo 1 fire, Eagle coming down in a field of boulders, the error alarms during Eagle's descent, "the Eagle has landed."
*And I have to admit that things that I assumed were artistic license - like Elliot See being assigned to the Gemini 5 backup crew with Armstrong, or Buzz Aldrin sitting in the center seat** during Apollo 11's liftoff - turned out to be historically accurate. So it has that going for it.
**In my defense, it was not standard procedure for the LMP to sit in the center seat. Aldrin had also trained as a CMP. Sucks to be Michael Collins.
And the film is, for the most part, visually stunning. During the Gemini 8 sequence, I found myself wishing that Stanley Kubrick had access to these sorts of effects back when he was
Having said that, though, unless you're desperate to see about
And as for the flag, it's fine to have a movie called "First Man" focus on Armstrong personally. Indeed, about the only other thing a movie called "First Man" could be about would be Bill Clinton in a freakish alternate universe that doesn't have the Electoral College. But the movie can't decide whether it wants to focus on those famous beats I mentioned above or if it wants to be about Armstrong's domestic life.
The biggest problem I had with the film going into it was the cast. Canadian Ryan Gosling (whose very presence, by the way, screams "CHICK FLICK") plays Neil Armstrong. British Claire Foy plays his wife Janet. Australian Jason Clarke plays Ed White (and is, to put it bluntly, too heavy to believably play an astronaut)*. What, you couldn't find any American actors to play some of America's greatest heroes? It's like remaking Godzilla, complete with setting it in post-War Japan, but casting Chinese and Korean actors. Irish Cirian Hinds plays
*Clarke also played Ted Kennedy in Chappaquiddick, a film that could not stop reminding you that it takes place at the same time as Apollo 11. I found that incredibly distracting in both films. Having said that, Clarke is a fantastic actor and probably the best member of the cast.
That brings me to my second (and more serious) point. Aside from Neil and Janet Armstrong, Ed and Pat White, Elliot See, Dave Scott, and (maybe) Buzz Aldrin, none of the other players in this film are anything remotely approaching properly introduced. Even Armstrong's two sons are completely interchangeable.
When Armstrong is selected to join NASA as part of the second astronaut group, we're introduced to two of the other eight: Elliot See, who will die in a T-38 crash, and Ed White, who will die in the Apollo 1 fire. SPACE TRAVEL IS DANGEROUS OKAY? The others are relegated to background faces: that one might be Jim McDivitt, because he kinda looks like him.
When Gemini 5 goes up, someone makes a comment about things being quieter on the ground now. This is a clever allusion to the fact that Gemini 5's crew, Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad, were two of the biggest jokers in the astronaut corps. And that's the total amount of characterization that the other six astronauts in the New Nine get.
(Again, the film is called First Man, so relegating the other New Niners to background is fine. But Slayton and the guys at Mission Control? Michael Collins? Really?)
Neil's training is contrasted with his domestic life, which could basically be summed up as "he can't connect with his wife or kids." He does manage to open up to Ed White very briefly, shortly before White is killed in the Apollo 1 fire.
Speaking of Ed White, when he's assigned to Gus Grissom's Apollo 1 crew, Armstrong and Scott surmise that Deke Slayton wants Grissom be the first man on the Moon, so White's got a good chance of being on that first landing. The real Deke Slayton insisted that there was no master plan as to who would be on the first landing, and Apollo 7 commander Wally Schirra has said that there was a published rule that nobody would command two Apollo missions.* I think the whole "Gus would have walked on the Moon" thing was one of those stories that was invented after his death.
*Having said that, at different points both of the prime commanders of Apollos 15 and 16 were the backup commanders for Apollo 17 (all the other active astronauts were training for Skylab missions). Had anything happened to Gene Cernan, somebody would indeed have commanded two Apollo missions.
Moreover, had Grissom and White been assigned a lunar landing together, it is extremely unlikely that White would have walked on the Moon. This is because the second-most-senior crewmember of an Apollo mission was the CMP, staying in lunar orbit while the other two landed. The only way White could have walked on the Moon on a mission flown by Grissom is if another astronaut with more seniority had been on that flight, and as far as I know, the only astronaut with more seniority than White and who'd consent to fly second-seat would be John Young, who did fly second-seat on Apollo 10, but was in hot water with Grissom because he'd smuggled a roast beef sandwich aboard Gemini 3. (The only other possibility - indeed, the only other Apollo astronaut to accept a demotion* to CMP after commanding a Gemini mission - is Jim Lovell, who in real life would have been Armstrong's CMP, but Michael Collins had to drop out of Apollo 8 for surgery, and Lovell and Collins wound up swapping flights.)
*Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 commander Jim McDivitt point-blank refused to fly a Moon mission he wasn't in command of, causing him to miss out on Apollo 14. The remaining living New Niners - the most senior astronauts once the Seven were gone - were Frank Borman (retired after Apollo 8), Tom Stafford (became Chief Astronaut after 10), Neil Armstrong (too valuable to send back after 11), and Pete Conrad (moved over to Skylab after 12).
And... well, I'm glad this film flopped, because my reaction to the Fire's depiction was to laugh, and I'm glad nobody was sitting close enough in the theater to take offense. The buildup to the Fire is well done - if you know what's coming, it's downright painful watching Ed White stow the wrench-like mechanism he's supposed to use to unbolt the hatch. But the execution of the Fire itself is... not good. Now, I've done an incredibly stupid thing and listened to the final transmissions between Apollo 1 and the flight controllers. I recommend you don't listen to the whole thing, because the final scream will give you nightmares, but you can find it here if you are so inclined. There are a lot of creative liberties taken in this scene, starting with the fact that in real life, no transmissions were made for a full minute prior to the fire. (The fire starts at 1:05 on the clip. Grissom asks a question at the beginning, and then there's a full minute of static before Roger Chaffee reports that there's a fire.) The astronauts certainly did not have time to wonder about a power surge; even if it had been reported to them, the spark would have been instantaneous.
The film implies the astronauts burned to death; they were asphyxiated. And the sequence ends with an exterior shot of the CM "popping" under the pressure. This is what caused me to laugh, because it was just so anticlimactic and wrong. In real life, one side of the CM ruptured so violently that it injured pad team members. Le sigh.
Rushing through some other problems now: much is made of Janet Armstrong's squawk box being cut off when Gemini 8 runs into trouble, and she complains to Slayton about it, but this is never followed up on during, for example, Eagle's tense landing. The hazards of spaceflight are well depicted with a Gemini 8 launch sequence designed to either give you an epileptic fit or an anxiety attack, but no reentry is ever shown. And during Apollo 11's launch, in real life the Saturn V goes supersonic before jettisoning its first stage, but you can still hear the roar of the engines in the film until staging.
Most baffling of all is Chazelle's decision, in a film called First Man, to not show the chain of events that led to Armstrong being named the commander of the first lunar landing. In real life, when the first batch of flight assignments were made in October 1967, everyone could see the writing on the wall. Going by the three-flight rotation established in Gemini, whoever was the backup commander for Apollo 8 would command Apollo 11 - the first landing, if nothing went wrong. That person was... Pete Conrad. When the prime crews of Apollos 8 and 9 swapped flights, their backups swapped places too. Conrad was furious. Not only did he have more LM sim training than Armstrong did, he also had more spaceflight experience: 262 hours in Gemini compared to Armstrong's 11. None of this is mentioned. It just sort of falls in Armstrong's lap. Nor is any mention made of Buzz Aldrin (here portrayed inexplicably as a bald asshole - seriously, most of his lines are him badmouthing dead astronauts See and White) attempting to rewrite the mission rules to allow him to set foot on the Moon first.
First Man is very pretty to look at; it's just a shame that Chazelle chose to shoot about half the film in extreme close-up. Also, and genuine praise now, the sound design is truly out of the world; during both launches, it sounds like the spacecraft is in the jaws of some angry hellbeast. On the whole, you're left with a feeling of a missed opportunity, and a desire to revisit From the Earth to the Moon.
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