Like space flight, filmmaking is created to take people beyond what they already know to see what they don’t. With stunning realism and detail, the astronaut blockbuster “First Man” does just that. It shows us the commitment, traumas and almost insurmountable challenges of the most dangerous missions ever attempted. 
 
 After successes in entirely different arenas with the tense music school drama “Whiplash” and the symphonic love story “La La Land,” director Damien Chazelle has created another remarkable adventure. With tremendous personal insight, it re-creates the story of Neil Armstrong, who commanded 1969’s Apollo 11 lunar landing and made the first human footprint on the moon. 
 
 Ryan Gosling portrays Armstrong as a strong, silent, no-nonsense workaholic, in a deeply internal performance that digs down to the man’s bone marrow. From his origin as a test pilot, through his years of training as NASA’s first civilian astronaut candidate, we see him as a man who reacts to endless work and near-disaster setbacks with spartan stoicism. Stresses that would drive most people to exhaustion and burnout powered Armstrong. 
 
 While other names from NASA history appear in the film, notably Corey Stoll as fellow Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Kyle Chandler as spaceman turned administrator Deke Slayton, Gosling’s Armstrong is something of a lone wolf. Aldrin tells jokes at press conferences; Armstrong remains aloof. He’s even an arm’s length away from his wife, Janet (Claire Foy of “The Crown,” who’s excellent), and their two young boys. 
 
 The only moments we see Armstrong relaxed are when he thinks of his daughter Karen, who died in 1968, less than 3 years old, of brain cancer. The little girl’s death is undeniably a tragedy that made him suffer deep anguish, but not a thing he could express openly. Gosling, who is as revealing in suggestive silence as he is in energetic dialogue, handles Armstrong’s terse personality with unspoken understanding. 
 
 As the spirited Janet, Foy is more demonstrative. She offers a key to understanding what brought these two forceful personalities together and kept them united when it was clear that space flight might make her a widow. 
 
 First Man ★★★★ out of 4 stars Rating: PG-13 for some thematic content involving peril, and brief strong language. 
 
 In parts, this is familiar ground. The space race of the 1960s, with the United States working full speed to surpass the Soviet Union’s early lead into orbit, has already given us two suitably epic fact-based feature films: Philip Kaufman’s “The Right Stuff,” which Tom Wolfe adapted from his bestseller, and Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13.” 
 
 “First Man” repeats some commonplace details but takes the saga further. It adds to the story’s bravery and horrific accidents a sense of emotional intimacy to the people committed to the program. It has, in its narrative, deep-space destinations. 
 
 The film is a masterpiece of visual design and sound engineering, making viewers feel as if they are right there in the shuddering rocket as it pushes itself beyond gravity or uncontrollably rotating as an accidental thruster blast makes it a violent hyper-speed gyroscope. Its stark imagery of the moon’s endless gray isolation is haunting. 
 
 But the movie’s real achievement comes through the moments in the Armstrong home. So much is expressed through so little being said. Perhaps the most outstanding scene comes when he packs to leave for the moon mission without telling his two boys that their daddy might not be coming back. It’s amplified by a parallel passage where Ciarán Hinds, playing space center director Robert Gilruth, reads a solemn eulogy prepared for the president to present if the nation’s goals and dreams only yield two lifeless men on a distant rock. 
 
 The film has earned some detractors’ criticism by neglecting to show the American flag being planted on the moon. That specific moment isn’t needed for “First Man” to stir patriotic feelings. It features President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 challenge for the nation to send humans to the moon and safely back: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” 
 
 The film shows how hard it was to develop the program that enabled us to travel that amazing long road, what it cost in terms of funding and heroism and lives. In that moving context, waving a banner seems superfluous. 
 
 Twitter: @colincovert ||||| (CNN) If stoic heroism sounds pretty good right about now, "First Man" lands at a welcome time. The "La La Land" reunion of Ryan Gosling and director Damien Chazelle produces a soaring, IMAX-worthy look at Neil Armstrong's life in the decade leading up to the moon landing, providing a reminder that fulfilling John F. Kennedy's vision was as much about grit, guts and determination as any feat of engineering. 
 
 Owing a considerable debt to "The Right Stuff," the 1983 movie about the Mercury 7 astronauts, "First Man" introduces Armstrong as a steely test pilot, albeit one who is at a bit of a crossroads when he's accepted into the astronaut corps. After the devastating loss of a child, the change could offer "a fresh start," his wife ("The Crown's" Claire Foy, regal in an entirely different manner) tells him. 
 
 What ensues from there, though, is a tale of trial and error, of additional death and quiet grief as these men in their not-always-magnificent flying machines try to break Earth's bonds. The misfires, the taciturn Armstrong notes in a rare display of emotion, serve a purpose -- "We need to fail down here so we don't fail up there" -- which doesn't make the casualties any less devastating. 
 
 Perhaps foremost, Chazelle (working from a script by "Spotlight's" Josh Singer, adapted from James R. Hansen's book) seeks to bring a sense of awe, of wonder, to what these men braved. As a consequence, many of the flight sequences are shot in dizzying closeups, capturing the physical impact on the astronauts, before pulling back to reveal the gaping majesty of space. 
 
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 Technically, "First Man" is a dazzling accomplishment, from the cinematography to the musical score by another "La La Land" alum, Justin Hurwitz, which is alternately haunting and stirring. Chazelle clearly wants to put the audience in Armstrong's shoes -- both on Earth and the Moon -- to provide a taste of the adrenaline rush and terror these endeavors required. 
 
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 First Man - Official Trailer 
 
 Starring Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll and Jason Clarke. Directed by Damien Chazelle. Opens Friday at theatres everywhere. 133 minutes. PG When the Eagle finally lands on the moon in First Man, the picture truly soars. Director Damien Chazelle puts us inside the cramped lunar module with Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll), as the spindly spacecraft hurtles towards the crater-pocked surface in what appears to be an imminent crash. Red computer lights are flashing danger warnings that the astronauts have chosen to ignore. 
 
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 This heart-stopping scene caps a tremendous achievement by Chazelle and his crew. They vividly and realistically bring the historic 1969 lunar landing to the IMAX screen, along with gut-wrenching depictions of the ingenuity, determination and sacrifices needed to make it happen. The nearly two hours prior to the Eagle’s descent in First Man present a different challenge: Seeking the soul inside the machine that was moonwalker Armstrong, the calm American hero with the most right stuff. The task is that of turning a cipher into a character. Armstrong was chosen to be the first man on the moon in large part because he was an anodyne American resistant to drama, stoic as well as heroic. This may explain why it took 13 years since the publication of James R. Hansen’s biography of Armstrong, and six years after Armstrong’s death at age 82, for the film adaptation to arrive. Gosling, who previously co-starred in Chazelle’s musical reverie La La Land, plays Armstrong not as the smiling flying ace of NASA-approved profiles. We see him instead as a deeply private man, one whose robotic self-discipline masked the pain of family tragedy that followed him to the moon and back. It’s a bit of a thankless task for Canadian actor Gosling. His resemblance to Armstrong isn’t great and his utterances of such famous lines as “The Eagle has landed” and “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” can easily be compared to the real thing via YouTube. 
 
 Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstron in First Man. ( Universal Pictures ) 
 
 But his serious portrayal of Armstrong seriously impresses nonetheless, as he endures setback after setback — including near-fatal mishaps with jet planes, the Gemini 8 space-docking mission and a lunar landing test vehicle — on the long road to the moon. The flying machines he climbs resemble bolted-together boxes, with doors that clang shut with funereal solemnity. 
 
 In 1962, shortly before the Korean War vet and test pilot applied to be an astronaut, Armstrong and his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), lost their 2-year-old daughter, Karen, to complications from a brain tumour. Chazelle and First Man screenwriter Josh Singer (Spotlight) posit, stretching the known facts for the sake of drama, that the burden of Karen’s death contributed greatly to Armstrong’s solitary nature and his single-minded dedication to his work. First Man finds its beating heart in Foy’s emphatic portrayal of Janet Armstrong, the long-suffering spouse Neil left to raise their two young sons as he trained to roam the cosmos. There’s a real “Oscar moment” in a scene where Janet demands that Neil tell his sons Rick (Luke Winters) and Mark (Connor Blodgett) that the moon mission he’s about to embark on is fraught with danger and that he might not be coming home. 
 
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 There are other performances of note in the film. Kyle Chandler plays Deke Slayton, NASA’s unflappable director of flight crew operations, who is seen casually informing Neil in the men’s room that he’ll be the commander of Apollo 11. Jason Clarke takes on square-jawed Ed White, who many thought might become the first man on the moon, before he perished in the tragic Apollo 1 launch pad fire (recreated in the movie). Corey Stoll succeeds as blunt-speaking Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, managing to be more than Armstrong’s sidekick despite his lack of screen time. (Pity Lukas Haas as Michael Collins, Apollo 11’s command module pilot, who barely has a speaking line.) Chazelle never lets us forget that this is a movie about the moon: his camera frequently tilts skywards, as composer Justin Hurwitz’s score envelopes the action in a dreamy aura. But Chazelle favours claustrophobic close-ups and jittery ShakyCam over revealing wide shots until we get to the moon. Then there’s the grace, calm and near silence of observing a fantastic new world with the rapt eyes of the explorers whom First Man thrillingly recalls and honours. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm 
 
 Read more about: ||||| Damien Chazelle, director of the macho-jazz wingding Whiplash and a floaty modern musical about a great American city, La La Land, is a flashy filmmaker of great ambition. You don’t scale a movie about the first guy to walk on the moon if you’re not. Chazelle’s fourth feature, First Man—which opens the 75th edition of the Venice Film Festival—tells the story of astronaut Neil Armstrong, one of the unflashiest heroes of NASA, if not of the whole last half of the 20th century. In 1969 Armstrong took the first step onto that strange, powdery surface and uttered a few simple words that captivated people all over the world. But in the years that followed, he largely retreated from publicity. In 2005, at the time James R. Hansen’s biography, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, was published, the former star astronaut was living quietly in a Cincinnati suburb. In 2001, while helping to conduct interviews for the official NASA oral history, professor and writer Douglas Brinkley met Armstrong and asked him if he’d ever gazed at the moon before that historic Apollo 11 flight. “No, I never did that,” he said. 
 
 Armstrong died in 2012, and it’s hard not to wonder what he’d make of Chazelle’s version of his story, adapted from Hansen’s book by screenwriter Josh Singer. This is a respectful movie, even a genuflecting one; there’s never a moment when Chazelle fails to let you know he’s doing important, valuable work. But that’s the problem: The movie feels too fussed-over for such a low-key hero. Its star, Ryan Gosling, turns in a discreet, sensitive performance, almost too sensitive for the movie around it: Minute after minute, Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren are right there with the (often) handheld camera, coming in tight for allegedly meaningful closeups or jiggling hard to connote, say, the brain-rattling feeling of being an astronaut leaving the Earth’s atmosphere in a space capsule. The wriggly camera work doesn’t make the jostling more dramatic. If anything, it makes the proceedings seem inconsequential, no-biggie events that need to be jazzed up visually with excess technique. 
 
 On the heels of their six-time Academy Award®-winning smash, "La La Land," Oscar®-winning director Damien Chazelle and star Ryan Gosling reteam for Universal Pictures’ "First Man," the riveting story of NASA’s mission to land a man on the moon, focusing on Neil Armstrong and the years 1961-1969. Universal Pictures 
 
 That’s a drag, because Chazelle and Singer have taken visible care with some of the movie’s dramatic details. First Man doesn’t have the jaunty spirit of Philip Kaufman’s great 1983 Tom Wolfe adaptation, The Right Stuff, which focuses on the original Mercury astronauts, the precursors to Armstrong’s group, who flew the Gemini and Apollo missions. That movie’s cheerful casualness actually enhanced the sense of danger surrounding those early missions. Chazelle chooses another path, and his instincts aren’t inherently wrong. It took a long time for the Gemini astronauts, and later those of the Apollo missions, to reach the moon, and men died trying to get there; in the movie’s best moments, Chazelle makes you feel that weight. He succeeds in making the events directly preceding that first lunar landing, a mission undertaken by Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and Mike Collins (Lukas Haas), seem suitably tense, even though we all know how it turned out. First Man also helps you imagine the grief Armstrong must have felt when his close friend and colleague, Ed White (Jason Clarke), was burned to death—along with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee—during a pre-launch test for Apollo 1. Gosling is sensitive enough as an actor to understand Armstrong’s devotion to science, to the point where he must have preferred its language of numbers and facts to the murkier arena of feelings. 
 
 There’s a lot of science in First Man. You hear plenty of important-sounding men intoning stuff about vectors and coordinates and the like—a space movie needs that. But there are also a lot of feelings—too many feelings, even for those of us who like them. Chazelle and Singer seem to want to balance the greatness of Armstrong’s achievement with his own personal tragedy: He and his wife, Janet (played, with a great deal of astronaut-wife fortitude, by Claire Foy), lost their young daughter to a brain tumor in the early 1960s; shortly thereafter, Armstrong signed on to become an astronaut. Chazelle seems desperate to link these two events, as if you couldn’t make a pretty good Neil Armstrong movie without doing so. Losing a child is a devastating experience. But in First Man, Gosling’s Armstrong is tasked with reminding us of his pain in practically every other scene: As his daughter is dying, he holds her and gazes at the moon, singing a lunar-themed lullaby. After her death, he has a hallucinatory vision of her playing with some other little kids. Immediately after the funeral, he solemnly slips her little beaded bracelet into a drawer. (Keep an eye on that bracelet—it’s going to make a dramatic return.) Janet reveals to a friend that Armstrong never talks about his daughter; that’s a believable, searing detail. It’s Chazelle, with his constant stream of movie language, who can’t stop jabbering about her. 
 
 In 2018, we generally feel bad for men who can’t express their emotions, and most of us are rightly happy that more men have learned it’s OK to do so. But does it really serve men of Armstrong’s generation to have young filmmakers applying Psych 101 principles to their emotions some 60 years after the fact? Chazelle dramatizes several instances in which Armstrong’s background as an aeronautical engineer—and his overall quick thinking—helped prevent disaster, showing that there’s joy in science and exploration by themselves. But too much of First Man made me feel protective, posthumously, of Armstrong’s emotional privacy. Armstrong must have been lying when he told Brinkley he’d never gazed upon the moon—come on, we all look at it from time to time. It belongs to all of us, as a song once said. But Armstrong’s answer indicates that there were some things he just didn’t want to talk about, especially to a stranger. Life, and its loss, is its own mystery. There’s no explanation, and no cure, for the moon inside.
– Ryan Gosling is back under the direction of La La Land's Damien Chazelle, this time as Neil Armstrong in First Man, based on James R. Hansen's biography of the astronaut. Also starring The Crown's Claire Foy, the film has won over critics, who give it an 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. What to expect: At CNN, Brian Lowry calls First Man "a dazzling accomplishment, from the cinematography to the musical score" and one of the year's best movies. "The buttoned-up nature of the character puts Gosling to the test, but he conveys a great deal with mere glances and expressions," he writes. Chazelle, meanwhile, "keeps the focus squarely on the protagonist and the mission." Gosling "turns in a discreet, sensitive performance" that might fit his character, but "the movie feels too fussed-over for such a low-key hero," Stephanie Zacharek writes at Time. There are "too many feelings, even for those of us who like them," continues Zacharek, who felt Chazelle's emphasis on the 1968 death of Armstrong's 2-year-old daughter from a brain tumor didn't mesh with the astronaut's private nature. On the opposite side of the fence, Colin Covert at the Minneapolis Star Tribune applauds the "tremendous personal insight" given to Armstrong, aided by Gosling, who "digs down to the man's bone marrow." Foy is just as "excellent" as Armstrong's wife, Janet. Together, they add "a sense of emotional intimacy to the people committed to the [space] program." While Gosling "seriously impresses," First Man "finds its beating heart in Foy's emphatic portrayal of Janet," Peter Howell writes at the Toronto Star. He describes a scene in which she demands her husband be the one to tell his two sons he might not come home as "a real 'Oscar moment.'" With the later lunar landing, the film "truly soars," he adds.