Space Man, Inside Man
A review of Damien Chazelle’s First Man by Ram Charan
An ambitious space-exploration film, First Man, directed by the 33-year-old Oscar winner Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land), focuses on both NASA’s attempts to reach the moon and the depths within the man who first set foot on it.
The film stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, who delivers a performance as a quiet but determined NASA engineer, mission commander, test pilot
Armstrong only begins to work on the Gemini project following the death of his daughter, Karen. She succumbs to brain cancer when she is 3 years old. While he is personally affected by his daughter’s death, he uses her death as a motivation to go beyond his heartbreaking life, and this means going beyond the stratosphere, going to the moon. It is no surprise that as Armstrong is extremely determined to be a pioneer in space exploration, he ignores his family and the pain at its core as he works to be free of this earth.
Following his daughter’s death, Armstrong progressively begins to isolate himself from his NASA colleagues and his family. There are moments in his life between the Gemini and Apollo programs where he is happy and open to his family. However, although he acts as a loving father in some parts, the pain of the deaths of his daughter and his friends (who are sacrificed as the space race heats up) around him make him more distant from his wife and kids.
This culminates in an encounter between Armstrong and Janet before he leaves for his mission aboard Apollo 11. In the scene, Janet tells Neil that she is frustrated with handling everything that the family faces as a challenge. So at the cusp of him possibly leaving his children behind for good, she demands that he talk to them before he departs. Though Armstrong reluctantly agrees, he is distant and cold–much like his stellar destination–in front of his sons, reciting facts and only admits the likelihood of his death out there in space when his eldest son brings it up.
Armstrong does not acknowledge this cold attitude towards his family until the very last scene of the film where he is kept in quarantine and slowly reaches for his wife’s hand on the other side of a glass panel. This occurs after he lands back to the earth he had always wanted to leave.
When he lands on the moon, the emptiness he feels inside is seemingly mirrored by the immediate silence of the lunar landscape. The vast darkness of space, and the gray and lifeless surface of the moon resemble Armstrong and his struggle to communicate with his family. While exploring the surface of the moon, he drops Karen’s bracelet into a crater, showing he has decided to move past his ambitions in space exploration to settle with his family. It’s as if Armstrong realized his great feat isn’t landing on the moon. It is returning back to the planet where Janet and their sons are. The moon was never his terra incognita. It was his own inner canyons and seas of grief.
Armstrong owns a conflicted and compromised stance on the space program since it becomes a vehicle for his own forbidding regression into himself.
Thus First Man’s treatment of the Apollo and Gemini programs isn’t full on patriotic. The film is determined to show the pain and sacrifice space exploration exacts from astronauts and their families. The film also goes on to show protests of African-American people at Cape Canaveral. Using the song “Whitey on the Moon,” the protesters criticized excess government spending on the space program saying that they had no money to spend because it was all for “Whitey” to go to the moon.
First Man, of course, isn’t the first film that tackles the challenges of space exploration. Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 showcased the exhilaration and brutality of pushing the outside of the envelope. But First Man is unique in detailing–through extreme close-ups, shaky camera movements, first-person perspective and cinematic metaphor–how one’s inner space teems with more mystery, complication and depth than galaxies could ever contain.