First Man (2018, Damien Chazelle) (Patreon)

41/100

No shortage of screen stories about the Gemini and Apollo missions—there's even an entire 12-part miniseries chronicling mankind's journey from the earth to the moon, though I'm blanking right now on what it's called. [rimshot.wav] Unless you're stoked to see how advances in F/X tech can more accurately/immersively simulate space travel (about which more below), there's little new ground here [rimshot.wav]; this seems like at least the fourth time I've watched Grissom, White, and Chaffee die, for example. First Man's ostensible raison d'être is its portrait of Armstrong, and what we get, courtesy of the guy who wrote The Fifth Estate and The Post (okay, and Spotlight, but I choose to credit Tom McCarthy with that film's comparative intelligence) is Reductive Biopic Cliché #1, the formative tragedy that underlies everything. Suggested tagline: "He traveled 225,000 miles to escape...himself." Gosling used blankness to good effect in Drive, but that's a genre exercise about a cipher, with mood doing all the work; his interpretation of Armstrong as monomaniacally driven to compartmentalize the loss of his daughter comes across as labored and affected, especially compared to the real man's perfectly affable public image*. Chazelle, very much a gun for hire here (Eastwood was attached to the project ages ago), seems most interested in First Man as an exercise in limited perspective, forever providing only the sliver of a view available to test pilots and astronauts. Admirable in theory, but a bit tedious in practice—this is the dream movie for anyone whose favorite part of 2001 is the endless shuddering shots of lights reflected on Bowman's visor as he goes through the Star Gate. That sequence is wholly responsible for my having allotted Kubrick's film 99 points rather than 100, so.

DISCLAIMER: I watched this on my smallish TV set, so any sense of awe or majesty that relies on the big screen and/or IMAX was lost on me. Don't think it'd have made much difference, but one never knows.

* Generally speaking, I'm not someone who insists on accuracy in docudramas. Rather the opposite, in fact. If it works, and it isn't irresponsibly false (e.g. turning Fred Rogers into a pedophile or something), who cares? But I confess that I kinda snapped during the pre-Apollo 11 press conference, during which Armstrong responds to every question in gruff, fuck-you monosyllables—even following Aldrin's crowdpleasing anecdote about his wife's jewelry with a robotic counterpoint about bringing additional fuel. That struck me as so phony, as such blatant bad-screenwriting bullshit, that I paused the movie and watched a little bit of the actual press conference, just to see if my instinct was correct. Didn't find the corresponding moments (which may well be verbatim), but Armstrong has the crowd laughing within the first minute. No resemblance whatsoever to Gosling's tortured, brooding asshole; whatever may have been eating at him, he didn't wear it on his sleeve like this.