What is wonderful about the film 'First Man' is that it is minimally romantic. A simple raw kind of action movie - the kind that, rather like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly has the camera linger on faces that don't say a lot - and it lets the dramatic situation flourish in your own mind. It's the direct opposite of a Quentin Tarantino movie. It doesn't talk its way forward.
I noticed that so many times when the protagonist had to deal with a mercilessly difficult time, I was cursing in his stead. But he didn't curse. He didn't complain. He overcame, and there were no words to describe his overcoming - just the evidence of triumph. It's the best kind of stoic victory, and yet I cannot come up with a film in long memory save that of Russell Crowe's Gladiator when I was so moved by an actor grieving over the death of a loved one. When Ryan Gosling's Neil Armstrong cries, it is crushingly honest.
While this isn't a talkative movie, it is not spare. The music and sound effects are rich, epic and vital. It makes you reconsider all prior films about spaceflight through the dimension of sound in the same way Saving Private Ryan rewrote the book on the sound effects of war. With something as simple and brilliant as the sound of rivets being torqued in steel you think might buckle any moment, the fragility of massive rockets becomes eerily immediate. I have a friend who was a test engineer for SeaLaunch and the violent vibrations depicted in this movie brought his testimony to mind. There was no jawboning about g-forces, you could just feel yourself gripping the seat.
The fascinating aspect of this film to me is how frankly and simply it dealt with the period. It did so in a way that appealed to my growing up memories of the time. I was the kid who wanted to go out and play only tangentially understanding how Mom and Dad were getting along - but definitely understanding what each of them wanted from me individually. I understood the difference between a handshake and a hug, and what it meant to have a responsibility and how little tolerance there was for excuse making in certain endeavors.
It's difficult to say with any specificity how clear everything was in the pre-multicultural America. I think it is fair to say that there was a lot more silence into which everybody let various dramatic interpretations flourish in their own minds. But those interpretations, in the mainstream, were no more complex then than they are now. Today, everything gets said, whether or not it is useful or polite to be said out loud. So I perceive that words keep speaking louder than actions and that our most outstanding achievements revolve around words. If only the inviolate rules of physics forced us to deal with the consequence of mistaken words.
And so there is no romance with spaceflight. Everyone wished that there was poetry in Neil Armstrong, but he even botched his line stepping off the LEM. We all know that it should have read, "One small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind." Even knowing that I know he missed the vowel is testimony to the stickiness of words, the phrases and memes that plaster our minds to static conceptual worlds in which we rarely put our physical selves. You can say 'Tranquility Base', but can you get there? Only in your romantic mind.
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