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In Underestimated the mystery thriller of 1980, William Peter Blatty The ninth configuration, a lunar astronaut on the ground interpreted by Scott Wilson (who unfortunately passed away last week) delivers a heartbreaking monolith that perfectly sums up the existential crisis at the center of most travel cinemas in space. "Look at the stars so cold, so far away, so lonely," he said plaintively. "And if I arrived on the moon without being able to return … I'm afraid of dying alone, so far from home. And if there is no God, it's really, really only."
This feeling of cosmic isolation is reflected in a series of films from space, from Andrei Tarkovsky to Solaris Douglas Trumbull's Silent race (nicknamed "the most solitary of all adventures") and, more recently, that of Alfonso Cuarón. Gravity. Now, it resurfaces in a powerful form in First man, Damien Chazelle's dark, real-life account of the 1969 moon landing, which turns a spectacular adventure into a space race into a discreet study of sorrow.
Adapted from James R Hansen's book of Projector screenwriter Josh Singer, First manThe story of the 1960s is essentially based on the story of Philip Kaufman's adaptation in 1983 to that of Tom Wolfe. The good stuff. In fact, there is at least one plan that seems very deliberately to quote Kaufman's sprawling masterpiece. But Whiplash The director Chazelle is interested in something more explicitly allegorical, while the islander Neil Armstrong is caught between the interior space and the outdoor space.
From Chazelle La La Land Star Ryan Gosling is the incumbent explorer that we first met, almost jumping from an experimental plane into space. His superiors think he is a danger to himself and the film suggests a link between his desire to slip the unhealthy bonds of the Earth and his mourning after the loss of his young daughter, Karen. When NASA makes a call to trainee astronauts, its successful application seems to offer a fresh start. Yet it is Karen's memory that haunts Armstrong throughout his training and until his Apollo 11 mission – a vision of his hair crossing his fingers recurring at critical moments of the crisis.
Significantly, Gosling's unhurt external antihero seems to be lost in space, even on the ground. Time and time again, cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, frames it in the dark spaces of Armstrong House – the camera looks out through the doors, corridors and hatches that paint a black shroud around its gently illuminated silhouette. Sandgren brilliantly uses 16mm for the personal scenes and 35mm for the industrial sequences of NASA, moving to the impeccable clarity of 65mm for the expansive silence of motionless landscapes where Armstrong can finally face its terrible loss. The cheerleader Donald Trump of the "space force" has perhaps declared (at sight invisible) that the absence of a scene of the planting of the American flag First man is "a terrible thing", all those who have the pulse will recognize that there is more at stake here than some empty gesture of false patriotism. In the space, Donald, no one can hear moaning.
Chazelle describes this narrative as existing "between the moon and the kitchen sink" and, like Ron Howard Apollo 13he juxtaposes in a convincing manner sequences evoked by NASA with scenes of beers and barbecues in the back garden, in which the moon glitters far away through the trees. Claire Foy's Janet Armstrong is adept at keeping the connection between these two worlds open, even when the live signal from her husband's space shuttle is cut off. While Gosling plays close to his chest, it is Foy who invites us to the drama that unfolds with his wonderfully empathic interpretation.
Like Armstrong's live wedding, the spaceships themselves are at constant risk of falling apart, accurately described as an alarming collection of screws and rivets that Janet sees as "balsa wood" boys' toys. . It's not a surprise if someone asks for a Swiss Army knife to make last minute adjustments. Rather than feasting on the majesty of space travel, First man puts her audience in a tin can while she's shaking and snapping her claustrophobic path into the sky. As The good stuff, the specter of death does not even haunt the training missions. The horrors of a fiery disaster weigh heavily on the proceedings, with the shocking loss of friends and colleagues amplified by a dramatic understated euphemism.
Taking the example of Lunar Rhapsody (a much-loved song from Armstrong), Justin Hurwitz's melancholy score incorporates the dismal and melancholy cry of a theremin, formerly a commodity of the genre of science fiction and deployed by Bernard Herrmann in The day the earth stopped. Here, it adds another note of nostalgia and loss to a film that I find both deeply moving and profoundly profound.
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