Following last week’s excellent A Star Is Born, the equally brilliant First Man (though the two films are as different as chalk and cheese) is a reminder that we are firmly in Oscar season. The biographical film about the first man on the moon is directed by Damien Chazelle, who made the very good musical La La Land (2016) and the simply phenomenal drama Whiplash (2014). First Man is as absorbing as either film, but interestingly enough, feels more detached in a deliberate move by the director to chase authenticity. It’s a decision not embraced by every viewer.

You see, the film is about Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) who, upon becoming the first man to step on the moon, became the most famous person worldwide, with his name forever etched on every human being’s mind. As the film shows, Armstrong faced countless hurdles to get there.

On a personal level, there was his young family, under stress with two-and-a-half-year-old Karen suffering from a brain tumour, and Armstrong himself in a vocation demanding long hours leading to loneliness for his wife Janet (Claire Foy) and anxiety for his sons. There was the pressure of the dangerous job itself, with many dead in the process of perfecting the science and technology, and Armstrong escaping close calls too.

While opinions may remain divided on Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of Neil Armstrong, on a technical level First Man is undoubtedly out of this world

Of course, there was also the international pressure. The United States was losing in the space race with the Soviet Union to be the first to send a man to the moon, and it was a battle based on ideology and nationalism that gripped the world and had far-reaching consequences for the two nations on a global scale.

That’s a lot of burden and then some, especially for one man to carry. Handling it all was Armstrong, a man who typified the strong, silent type of the 1960s. Certainly, the astronaut was known as stoic and calculating. But if Armstrong were a man of few words, Ryan Gosling portrays him as a man of even fewer words. Some have criticised the actor for his often impassive performance here for draining the film of its energy, though I personally found it quite engaging, because it fell in line with what I had seen and read of the astronaut. Countering his matter-of-fact display here is the very good Claire Foy, playing a woman worried about raising children who could lose a father, and frustrated by a relationship with a husband who is about as expressive as a doorknob.

So committed is Gosling to Armstrong’s characterisation here that some of his lines genuinely left me puzzled as to whether the famously dispassionate space hero was offering a piece of dry wit or was simply as calculating as a computer. After the film, I was left convinced that Gosling should play a Vulcan in a Star Trek film, or maybe star in a biography about the equally dry Pakistani cricket captain Misbah-ul-Haq. Admittedly, the Canadian actor’s sober performance also became a little taxing for me in spite of myself, and this is more because Damien Chazelle doesn’t offer other interesting supporting characters to balance the scales.

While opinions may remain divided on the character study component of First Man, on a technical level it is undoubtedly out of this world. The special effects, cinematography and sound effects are quite brilliant and make the process of space travel look and feel as daunting as you’d think. There are many sequences in the film — with the almost haunting sounds of the rocket engines sputtering and roaring, the footage by Linus Sandgren in deliciously grainy 16 mm followed by majestically clear 70 mm IMAX, the camerawork appropriately shaky, the eerie score by Justin Hurwitz humming in the background — that make you feel the demands of space travel in your bones. In that moment you may feel glad that it was a man like Neil Armstrong at the helm.

Rated PG-13 for some thematic content involving peril and brief strong language

Published in Dawn, ICON, November 11th, 2018