Surprisingly ready to suggest that the mission WAS greater than the men

Rating: 8/10 (17 August 2019)

While Damien Chazelle's "First Man" is definitely an interesting and even important film - as befits its "anniversary" status, it may not quite be the film most were expecting. This has its good and bad sides - good, because a straight telling of the true-life experience might have lacked depth and artistic merit (which the movie has); bad, because this presentation does not do "First Man" Neil Armstrong many favours, and appears to do "second man" "Buzz" Aldrin almost none at all!
As rendered here by Ryan Gosling, Armstrong is naturally and understandably overwhelmed by the death from cancer of his young daughter Karen, which is portrayed close to the start of the film (the very start features Armstrong in a semi-disastrous X-15 mission).
These two plot items are salutary in themselves, reminding us that cutting-edge high-tech of the late 60s (yes, I remember that quite well, kid though I was) was hardly good enough for space travel and not good enough to cure many (even most) diseases. And - as we are regularly reminded - it was far, far below the tech present today in one's mobile phone! The dialogue also comes back twice to the matter of the relatively limited interval in years that separated first aviation of any kind and travel to the moon. (We of course know, with some discomfort, that it was two awful wars which propelled that development along).
Anyway, what happens to Armstrong does not quite make him a bad husband to wife Janet (an entirely Americanised and 60s-ised Claire Foy) or a bad father to two remaining kids, but it does make him look sullen, moody, difficult and reticent - to the point where he rarely gives a straight or meaningful answer to any question, be this posed by family or NASA. As a result, Neil "one small step" Armstrong is muted as a hero. And, as noted above, Aldrin (in the hands of Corey Stoll) is made to look grasping and cruelly/crassly over-competitive, albeit transformed rather magically when finally on the July 1969 mission.
And so to the mission, which does gain effective presentation here, including with the various mishaps and problems that preceded it. Kennedy is shown telling us how we do this because it is hard, not easy ... and indeed it looks it. Above all, we are left convinced that these really were three guys sitting cramped up, cooped up, above a giant bomb. We do get more than a hint of the discomfort and the ever-present danger, and in this dimension almost as much is achieved as with "Gravity" - with the difference that here we are referring to real-life science and technology and engineering.
The "Last Man" on the moon was Eugene Cernan, and he was there just 3 and a half years after Armstrong and co., in December 1972. This bizarre reality is the backdrop to "First Man", and makes the work more thought-provoking than it even deserves to be. The technology of the late 1960s and early 1970s was indeed strained to its limits (one reason why conspiracy theorists doubt the veracity - though there is no hint of that in "First Man", thankfully); and hundreds of thousands of people made the amazing missions happen. The world gasped at them, while the astronauts doubtless breathed many a sigh of relief. Heroes they were, carrying the torch for many of us. But just part of a larger team, and - in this take at least - by no means the real-life "supermen" we thought they were. The movie is likewise less gung-ho than we might have imagined, and the pleasing soundtrack from Justin Hurwitz is mostly more thoughtful and delicate than triumphalist.
Such are the achievements of "First Man", and they have changed a little my perspective on an event of key significance in my life, given the landing coinciding with my 5th birthday. I'm grateful for that, and doff my cap to Chazelle and writer Josh Singer for it.