"First man" and the absurd controversy over the American flag



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"It's almost as if they're embarrassed by this American success," said President Donald Trump. "I think it's a terrible thing."

"It's total madness" tweeted Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. "The American people paid for this mission, on rockets built by Americans, with American technology and carrying American astronauts. It was not a UN mission.

"History can be embarrassing when patriotism makes you nauseous," wrote a reviewer at National examination.

A tweet Buzz Aldrin, who joined Armstrong on the Apollo Moon mission, including hashtags "#proudtobeanAmerican #freedom #honor #onenation" also fanned the flames. (A producer of the film told me later that Aldin was frequently consulted during filming and that he liked the finished film.)

The controversy was short-lived and may have even stimulated interest in the film. This could also have been completely avoided if the critics had actually seen it.

First man is a 141-minute commercial for a brand of American-only determination and achievement. More and more sophisticated engineering: we join Armstrong for agonizing and claustrophobic maneuvers aboard an X-15 aircraft, a Gemini capsule, a lunar landing simulator and finally the Apollo probe. It depicts years of intense training: we see astronauts confronting first-hand the physical rigors of spaceflight, the body bruised, bleeding, sung and burned. And it shows the intense determination to continue in the face of loss: we mourn with Armstrong at the funeral of the astronauts whose missions ended in a tragedy.

These moments clearly illustrate the stakes of what the United States was trying to do and the sacrifices they had to undergo, making their ultimate success even more triumphant.

If critics explicitly want American symbols, there are many. The flag appears on space suits and in archival reports of enthusiastic crowds, and on the surface of the moon as the Apollo space shuttle takes off after a successful mission. A creatively filmed scene takes the viewer into a large elevator on the launch pad, revealing every letter emblazoned on the flank of a rocket: U-N-I-T-E-D-S-T-A-T-S. John F. Kennedy appears on a television screen. The camera lingers on the quiet moments when Armstrong carefully descends into the lunar module scale, pushes his boot into the ground and informs the mission control of his first little step for the man , of a big step for the man, with a similar tone and inflection as the true Armstrong did that the sound of the transmission gives chills.

First man takes a more subtle approach than other films on the important achievements of the US space program, as in Apollo 13, the troubling history of a flight malfunction and effort to bring astronauts back to Earth safely. The flight controllers, the heroic protagonists of this film, are minor minor characters First man. But that's the point. First man is based on a biography of Armstrong, and the story of the moon's landing is told in the confines of his life: the death of his daughter Karen eight years before the landing from the moon, the trauma of the loss of his friends and the constant stream of fears that he will not return home with his wife Janet (Claire Foy) and their two sons. Viewers spend more time in Armstrong's kitchen than in the spaceship that takes him to the moon.

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