‘I see the moon, and the moon sees me…’
The first thing we see in First Man is Neil Armstrong in the rattling interior of a test cockpit, fighting against gravity to break Earth’s atmosphere, then fighting against the push of the same atmosphere to go back home. The footage, shot on 16-mm film to mimic photographs from the 1960s, is almost incomprehensible: streaks of light etch the image with afterglow, while grainy shadows threaten to swallow the details in deep blues and greens.
First Man depicts Neil as a spare, quiet man, flying away with nothing but thin sheets of metal to protect him from the extremes of space travel, and nothing but his work to shield him from the grief of losing his small daughter to cancer.
Neil sees the possibility of spaceflight as a chance to change perspective, ‘to see things maybe we should have seen a long time ago’. The film is concerned with the eyes: what we see from our limited view inside the cockpit, and where we look when we’re in pain. It’s punctuated by shots of the moon, first a speck, then a fuzzy dot, growing sharper as the feasibility of a moon mission grows. When Neil takes his first step onto the moon, the film shifts aspect ratio and format from grainy film to breathtakingly sharp IMAX, his reality finally hard and clear.
Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face.
– Sarah Welch-Larson
- Directed by: Damien Chazelle
- Produced by:
- Written by: Josh Singer
- Music by:
- Cinematography by: Linus Sandgren
- Editing by:
- Release Date: 2018
- Running Time: 141
- Language: English
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