First Man (2018) Review: I Wish We Were All Talking About This Movie
*spoilers? I guess? But not even really*
OK, yes, I’m a bit late in talking about this one, but it’s not like I missed the discussion. No one was talking about this. And if they did, it was for like 5 minutes.
First and foremost, @Mr. Chazelle, please take care of yourself, physically/mentally/emotionally/spiritually. I have prepared myself to enjoy a lifetime of work from you, and won’t be able to bear it should something terrible befall you. You are younger than me (and yes, that makes me question my life choices, daily), so I have every expectation that I will still be enjoying new work from you on my deathbed.
First Man does so much right. That sounds like a precursor to a list of its faults, but it really isn’t. I really loved this. I really appreciated Chazelle’s commitment to the tone and his loyalty to it throughout, especially concerning his direction of Gosling and Foy as Neil and Janet Armstrong. While I am all about Apollo 13 and can easily find myself getting amped on Ron Howard’s drama, our director here was going for something altogether different. To paraphrase my favorite podcast guys, this was about a guy who did a thing.
While I don’t inherently hate tropes, there is something refreshing when we watch a movie that seems to be deliberately avoiding them. Chazelle does that with First Man, and I don’t think it’s for trope-less’s sake, but rather a commitment to tell the story he wanted to tell. We don’t see Jan Armstrong clutching the TV during the perilous moon landing, just as we don’t see outside the space shuttle. We experience the event as Neil Armstrong experienced it because, again, this is about a guy who did a thing. It would seem that history has hero-fied Armstrong, rather than him claiming that title for himself. Gosling’s portrayal is so understated you wonder if Armstrong even knew the implications of his life at all. And I love it.
But Chazelle does not deny his audience the money shots we would crave in a space movie. There are several jaw-droppers that we would hope to see in a movie about the first men on the moon, complete with some swells in the score and everything. I fear for most of you reading this, it will be too late to see this on the big screen but man, I think I gasped several times. And Chazelle’s shot choices are so immersive, you forget hundreds of millions of people are actually also watching this event at home on their TVs. And while I won’t waste time discussing the stupidest controversy in the history of controversies, I will say that this movie had me feeling proud of and in awe of the potential of human achievement.
So, let’s muse on why this was an overall box office disappointment. Sure, “the controversy” probably cost the studio some tickets, but this still missed overall in terms of making a pop culture splash. So why? Did we not need another biopic? Was it too long at 2hr 21min? Is Chazelle not enough of a household name yet? I’m not sure, but I hope I can convince even one person to see this who will tell some of their friends about this awesome (*eh hem* Oscar-winning) director whose name everyone should know.
9/10 for me in terms of directing, acting, cinematography, and overall vision. Possibly could have been a bit shorter, but I didn’t really feel that in the theater.
