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There is a good movie, "Apollo 13" (1995), about not going to the moon and not coming back. There is another film, "Apollo 18" (2011), much less interesting, that talks about going to the moon in secret and finding something unfriendly already in residence. There is a delightful movie, "A Grand Day Out" (1990), about going to the moon and coming home safe and sound, even though pedants may say it lacks historical roots, since astronauts are Wallace and Gromit. There is a cult film, "Capricorn One" (1977), about not even trying to go to the moon but to simulate it instead: from the manna of heaven for those who are starving to the plot. There is an old film, "A Journey to the Moon" (1902), in which the moon takes a rocket in the eyes and begins to moan. As for the documentaries on the moon, make your choice. But something is missing. There has never been a feature film about the first man to walk on the moon. Madness.
Here is finally this film, whose title is "First Man". The director is Damien Chazelle and the main role is Ryan Gosling. They recently collaborated at "La La Land" (2016), in which Gosling and Emma Stone danced in the air in a planetarium, among the stars – a rehearsal for the new film, even though the audience hoped that Neil Armstrong ( Gosling) and Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) will waltz on the Sea of Tranquility in the arms of each other, rather than embarking on small solo jumps, should prepare for the disappointment . Nobody either gets involved in a song. Yet there is a good time when Armstrong and his wife, Jan (Claire Foy), wander through their living room to listen to a favorite disc, "Lunar Rhapsody", and that he wears a cassette, dotted with chords from theremin, play in the space.
"First Man" is written by Josh Singer and builds on Armstrong's biography of James R. Hansen, although, for obvious reasons, the film covers much less ground. It must have been tempting to take a look at the youth of Armstrong, Ohio – on the prophetic day when, according to his father, "we missed Sunday school and took our first flight" as if a wing and a prayer were interchangeable. But life is long and short films, although they are rarely as short as they should be, and Chazelle begins with grown adult Armstrong, who became a test pilot, zooming in on the controls of an X -15 not quite controllable, an ambitious plane. to be a rocket. As it goes up, the nose cone shines like a fire of hell. A word of caution comes from the guys on the field: "Neil, you bounce on the atmosphere." Cool.
The next craft we see is not a spacecraft, but an x-ray machine, directed at her daughter Karen (Lucy Stafford), two years old, who has an inoperable brain tumor. The juxtaposition triggers an agreement that resonates through the film: our hero will boast in adventure, beyond the limits of the Earth, and he will mourn his child as she also leaves this world. Hence the lullaby that he gently sings to her ("I see the moon, the moon sees me"), and a much more unpleasant parallel: Armstrong holding Karen while she pukes and, for a moment Armstrong later stained with vomit after a gyroscopic swirl in a multiaxis apparatus indicating the punching power that he can withstand before losing consciousness. "We're still going," he said, asking for a last rotation, like a child in a fairground.
To date he has been selected for training in the space program. "Another hound," murmurs someone while he arrives for the interview. It is the egg, as much as anything else, that has pushed Armstrong to the heights; He had an aeronautical engineering degree and, in the words of a colleague, "a mind that absorbed everything like a sponge". With astronauts seated for a basic rocket propulsion course, Chazelle allows us to take a look at the upcoming document. they are six hundred and four pages long. For Armstrong, this is not a problem. Doing his homework one night (still at the desk), he describes a technical solution to his wife as being "pretty neat". "Very neat," answers Jan, and the echo is less mocking than a magnet. She gets he, the sponge and everything else, and Foy, mixing anxiety with steel, derives all the value from his few big scenes, including an explosion at Mission Control. "You are a group of boys making wooden balsa toys," she says. Time and time again, the film suggests that the pillars of the Apollo project – intelligent, courageous and overflowing with aspiration, with their eyes on the extraterrestrial price – are not entirely mature.
The "First Man" flight sequences have a considerable debt to "The Right Stuff" (1983), Philip Kaufman's masterpiece – both epic and fictional – about the Mercury astronauts who lit up the program space. The semi-abstract light shows what greeted Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) in this film as he crossed the sound barrier and approached the threshold of space. They look like those that revolve around Armstrong in his X-15 and the closeup of his The Exhilarated Expression, later, as the sun, then the moonlight, flood the tiny window of his Apollo capsule, is a nod to all the smiles of Mercury's boys as they flew over the rainbow. Each of them was clearly drawn as a character, while I was out of "First Man" with the finest hold of Armstrong's comrades. (The exception is Buzz Aldrin, who is made to sound impolite and insensitive: what the heck is this Chazelle, faithful to the title and more intimate in its dramatic range than Kaufman, is consumed by the curious case of Armstrong, abandoning all others. Long before becoming the only man on the moon, he looks like the most lonely man in America.
"First Man," of course, is where "The Right Stuff" can not go boldly – where Armstrong, that is, plants his boot on the gray stuff. Much of the lunar activity will seem familiar to anyone old enough to remember it. (Frankly, for those of us who went down in pajamas to watch the landing in 1969, it was all kind of a paradox: a life spent respecting gravity: what a nuisance.) If you're a novice, however, in the Apollo saga, Chazelle provides a skilful and detailed introduction to the company's otherness, as well as its mortal risks, and honors this strangeness of space by reducing its lunar compositions to monochrome. Only the golden protective hue of the astronauts' visors adds color to the desolation. However, it is here that the failure of the film's mission is realized, even as the great human goal is reached.
If Armstrong is only a name for you, take a look at the true Neil: these indescribable broad features, the undemanding firmness of the look and a happy mouth, if conditions are favorable, to bend into a smile. Now let's look at Gosling, the sad-eyed actor, a veteran of "The Notebook" (2004) and a tender presence that can not help but draw us into his trials. Can we imagine it struck with love or grief? Sure. But get up for a moonshot? Please. (If Chazelle wanted an actor who looks like Armstrong, he should have interpreted Steve Zahn.) To be fair, Gosling manages to portray Armstrong as a learned science, doing everything written, even in the privacy of his home ; Asked by one of his two sons when he would come back from the space, he reassures them and adds, "Do you have any other questions?" Still, the film refuses to take a such plainspokenness. Recruiting Gosling for his emotional cause, "First Man" assumes that modest people who display their feelings, like Armstrong, must by definition be deeply repressed and forced into indescribable misery. But they are not. They are simply modest.
Armstrong was a Midwestern soul, one of the many boys from the small town who ended up in the space program. Of the twelve people who walked on the moon, eleven were Scouts, and Armstrong was still watching and ringing the room. "I remember thinking, well, I would like to stay outside for a little longer," he said of his visit to the lunar surface, as if it were a soft summer evening up there. If you need someone for the most exciting work of history, you must choose the least excitable person on the planet. NASA have the good guy. But "First Man" can not cope with this Armstrong – the one who called the moon "an interesting place to be in. I recommend it." Instead, the film seeks to reshape its protagonist in the picture of our own time, it tells us more about us than about him.After a near-fatal collision at the training, Armstrong returns home with his head bloody, takes a drink and leaves stunned, in obvious distress, in fact, he only bit his tongue, and the whole story is shaped around the death of his daughter, he has visions of her when he least expects them, even when It's really a tear that we see inside his helmet, which slips on his cheek? Read all about it: "Man Weeps on Moon! "This film may be clever and convincing, but if Neil Armstrong had been the type to cry on the moon, he would not have been the first man chosen to go there He would have been the last. ♦
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