Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy
First Man (based on the authorised biography First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen is a beautiful film that focuses mostly on Neil Armstrong’s life during the period when he got involved with NASA’s plans to reach for the moon to eventually taking the giant leap for mankind. We get to know more about him - the first man on the moon - from the loss of his daughter, friends and colleagues to his withdrawn attitude and eventually what was really consuming him. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the film was not riddled in dialogues. Instead, the emotions and psychological agony skilfully portrayed by its very capable cast spoke wonders.
Besides that, the film briefly explored some very interesting questions - was the space project so important that it’s worth sacrificing lives and investing huge amounts of money? Was it truly for the sake of humanity or was it just to satisfy a nation’ pride in a space race against its biggest rival? Would it be done differently today where human rights are supposedly uphold above all else?
One major qualm that I have, though I never doubted the movie was filmed by a director with great taste, was I found it rather nauseating when the camera had to shake every so often in a big chunk of the scenes. Well, on the bright side, while I had to walk out of Cloverfield I was thankful I still managed to sit through this one so it was still tolerable.
If you have some time to spare, I would not hesitate to recommend that you catch this longish movie. Although it may be slow moving at times coupled with vomit inducing camera movements, I never found the need to drift off into space. It was an engaging journey into humanity’s first round trip to the moon and the lost that came with such a historical achievement.
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