First Man is a 141-minute commercial for a uniquely American brand of determination and achievement. It provides a tour of increasingly advanced engineering: We join Armstrong in nerve-wracking, claustrophobic rides aboard an X-15 plane, a Gemini capsule, a lunar-landing simulator, and then, finally, the Apollo spacecraft. It depicts years of extensive training: We see astronauts braving the physical rigors of spaceflight firsthand, their bodies bruised, bloodied, singed, and burned. And it shows the intense resolve to continue in the face of loss: We grieve with Armstrong at the funerals of astronauts whose missions ended in tragedy.
Such moments clearly illustrate the stakes of what the United States was trying to do and the sacrifices it had to endure, which makes its ultimate success that much more triumphant.
If critics want explicitly American symbols, there are plenty. The flag appears on space suits and in archival news footage of elated crowds, and on the surface of the moon as the Apollo spacecraft departs after a successful mission. A creatively shot scene takes the viewer up a tall elevator on the launchpad, revealing each letter emblazoned on the side of a rocket as it goes: U-N-I-T-E-D-S-T-A-T-E-S. John F. Kennedy makes an appearance on a television screen. The camera lingers on the quiet moments in which Armstrong gingerly climbs down the ladder of the lunar module, presses his boot into the soil, and tells mission control about his one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, with such similar tone and inflection as the real Armstrong did that the sound of the transmission gives you chills.
First Man does take a subtler approach compared to other films about significant achievements in the American space program, like in
Apollo 13, the harrowing tale of an in-flight malfunction and the effort to return astronauts safely to Earth. The flight controllers, the heroic protagonists of that film, are minor supporting characters in
First Man. But that’s the point.
First Man is based on a biography of Armstrong, and the story of the moon landing is told in the confines of his life—the death of his young daughter Karen eight years before the moon landing, the trauma of losing his friends, and the constant current of fear that he may not come home to his wife Janet (Claire Foy) and their two sons. Viewers spend more time in Armstrong’s kitchen than they do in the spacecraft that takes him to the moon.
But you don’t have to see
First Man to recognize that the furor over the film’s perceived lack of patriotism was never about the film itself. It is a sign of the times; the film is a natural target for members of the right who believe that national symbols are
under attack by the left. For some conservatives, a Hollywood filmmaker’s decision not to include the planting of the flag is no different from a football player’s
refusal to stand during the national anthem or a city council’s vote to
remove a Confederate statue or rename a street or even a
mountain peak.
It’s possible to walk out of the movie theater with complicated feelings about some aspects of the American space program, and about whether space exploration is worth it as a national, taxpayer-funded effort when so many problems back on Earth require political will and attention. In one scene, a black performer sings Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon”: “I can’t pay no doctor bill / but Whitey’s on the moon / Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still / while Whitey’s on the moon.” In another, Robert Gilruth (Ciarán Hinds), the director of nasa’s Manned Spacecraft Center, now the Johnson Space Center, growls at Armstrong over a failed test flight that could have killed him. “At what cost?” Gilruth asks him. “Don’t you think it’s a little late for that question?” Armstrong replies coolly.
In terms of portraying an American triumph and the indefatigable astronauts and engineers who made it happen,
First Man is more than adequate.
