‘First Man’: A galactic disappointment from Damien Chazelle
In 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the real Buzz Aldrin makes a cameo meeting Optimus Prime to discuss moon landing/Autobot conspiracies. As I endured 141 minutes of First Man, surely one of the dullest films ever made about space exploration, I longed to return to the crass, tasteless world of Michael Bay’s robot punch franchise for just one minute. At least, in Dark of the Moon, Buzz Aldrin was enjoying himself. There is no enjoyment being had in First Man, a stunningly humourless effort that follows Neil Armstrong, a man with negative personality, through a decade of preparation for Apollo 11 with nary a glimmer of romance nor life in anyone’s eyes.
The brutal energy Chazelle brought to his back-to-back masterpieces Whiplash and La La Land is totally absent; the script by Josh Singer (The Post) has been constructed to give the audience minimum satisfaction from watching our heroes succeed. Jammed into every sequence of triumphant innovation and adventure are cliched references to Armstrong’s dead child and/or Malickian footage of his surviving sons running around the garden. When he reaches the moon, he stands staring sadly into a crater. In theory, it’s an existentially grand idea for a scene; in practice it’s utterly miserable. Interstellar this is not; there is no magic or mystery in First Man; it’s a by-the-numbers historical biopic directed by a man who should be working on something much, much more interesting.
What First Man does have in its favour is the stellar cinematography of Linus Sandgren, who has somehow made Chazelle’s images look straight out of a 1973 35mm release. For the first 10 minutes, you feel like you could be watching Paul Newman and Faye Dunaway instead of Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy, but even that novelty soon wears off. Justin Hurwitz’s score is entirely misjudged, sounding more like a pleasant tribute to The Water Babies than the soundtrack to a NASA mission.
Despite my issues with the last hit 60s space drama Hidden Figures, that film was packed with distinct personalities. For his team of engineers and explorers, Chazelle has cast a who’s who of Hollywood’s most boring white men: Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke, Corey Stoll, Pablo Schreiber, Brian d’Arcy James, Lukas Haas. It’s frankly a miracle Joel Edgerton and Jai Courtney weren’t involved. Gosling himself is more neutered and generic than you could possibly imagine; there are flashes of his charm but Armstrong is simply too vapid to make a likeable leading man.
To conceive of how tedious First Man becomes with an endless selection of trial launches and rocket tests for its middle act, you have to imagine Zero Dark Thirty but with 100% less Jessica Chastain and absolutely no intrigue; we’ve all seen the moon landing depicted in movies. Chazelle does nothing special with these scenes. It’s hard to tell if he’s being reined in or simply lacking in ideas; the odd moment his love for movies filters through it’s miraculous: the film peaks during several montages of news footage when we don’t have to watch Gosling playing a wooden door.
It’s heartbreaking that Chazelle, who was one more film away from becoming my favourite filmmaker, wasted 2 years of his career on this. Not since Inception > The Dark Knight Rises have we witnessed such a drop in quality between a director’s films. There are obviously technical elements in this film that deserve praise, but I don’t wish to offer it. I genuinely found almost no enjoyment whatsoever in watching First Man.
