Armstorming to Moon!
First Man
The tales of every successful and unsuccessful achiever
intrigues the world over. It is simply human nature to be inquisitive about the
shortcomings and struggles of those who succeed or fail in a Capital way. First
Man as they rightly say is a story of Neil Armstrong the first man in the
history of mankind to set foot on our Moon in 1969. The Film adaptation is
based on his official Biography by James R. Hansen. At the center of all Space
travel is this one thought of being there alone and lonely “What if I got
there, got to the moon and couldn’t get back… I’m afraid to die alone, so far
from home. And if there’s no God, then that’s really, really alone.”
This sense of cosmic isolation echoes throughout a range of space movies. It now resurfaces in powerful form in First Man,
Damien Chazelle’s real-life account of the 1969 moon landing, which turns a
spectacular space-race adventure into a low-key study of grief.
The
first scene is of Ryan Gosling playing Neil Armstrong almost skipping an
experimental plane off into space finally landing it safely back. The film is
all about his love for his dear daughter Karen who leaves him too soon at the
age of 3 suffering from brain tumor, making him desire to leave the surly bonds
of earth. when Nasa is trying to
recruit trainee astronauts, he applies in hopes of a new beginning. Yet he is’nt
able to wipe out Karen’s memory that haunts him throughout training and into
his Apollo 11 mission – a vision of her hair running through his fingers
recurring at key moments of crisis.
The
direction and cinematography is so brilliant as one sees shots of Armstrong
alone in the darkness of his house and same in space. Chazelle describes this tale as existing “between the moon
and the kitchen sink.” he juxtaposes
convincingly evoked Nasa sequences with back-garden scenes of beers and
barbecues in which the moon glimmers distantly through the trees. Clare Foy who
plays Janet Armstrong his wife is actually the real shine of the movie she plays
the silent, smart wife-mother so well and her character is the one that
struggles to keep the connection for Neil for the two worlds open as he seems
to have closed the door for his family post the demise of his daughter. It is
as if the space created in his heart is equivalent to the vast loneliness of
space of universe and hence he is able to drift into the reality of this
universal space as he feels within his heart. There are many emotional facets
to Neil’s story as lots of sacrifice from other astronauts, deaths, accidents
end up to finally a successful landing on the moon surface which was a huge
race between USA and Russia back in those days.
The scenes of the space travel and moon landing
are brilliantly picturized and will remind us of the movie Gravity, but First Man is more than a sci-fi movie,
and lot about the struggle for the project to work successfully and lives
involved with it. I will recommend to watch the film for the story of Neil
Armstrong who I felt was lucky to have had succeeded over many others to
successfully complete the first human Lunar mission.
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