First Man Review

First Man : Lifts off well

Space movies are always a delight to watch, it put the viewers into an art of experience rather than just a mere movie watching. What we all know is about how Neil Armstrong, the First Man stepped on the moon as a giant leap for the entire human race into entering a world of possibilities. What we don’t know is his journey and the twists that took him to take the giant leap promising a door of opportunities to future space enthusiasts.  

Ryan Gosling stars as Neil Armstrong in this story that follows him from his early years at NASA to being commander of Gemini 8 and concluding with 1969’s Apollo 11 Moon landing. The film opens with Armstrong piloting a spaceflight and he’s almost bumped out into space by the atmosphere. This heart-pounding scene set the tone for the entire film. Chazelle puts the audience in the cockpit with Armstrong and other astronauts as they experience the highs and lows of spaceflight.  The sound of heavy breathing and bending metal has never been more terrifying, even with the knowledge that Armstrong survives these missions. That scene and many similar scenes that follow captures how horrifying attempting to fly to space was. The spaceships sound is terrifying, and every landing seems like an almost crash that turned into a landing in the last second. 

Flashes of the tiniest details, such as rows of vulnerable pins on the capsule wall, combine with expertly crafted sound design -- unexplained bangs and terrifying metallic grunts giving way to sudden all-encompassing silence -- to make this an elevation of immersive cinema. 

You feel every nerve-racking moment of this situation you'd never otherwise experience. It's what cinema was made for.  Unsurprisingly, the historic Moon landing that defined a generation before the world lost its interest in the space program is First Man’s crowning achievement. With smart use of sound—and sometimes, lack of sound, like during the seconds that follow Armstrong opening his spacecraft’s door and taking his famous “Giant step”—the film remains deeply immersive, human and personal. The enduring tale of husband and wife duo too is kept to the best admirable level. The first is the relationship between Neil and Janet in the face of a constant roll-call of accidents and fatalities in their lives. Being an astronaut’s wife looks like a thankless role in real life and it’s no great gift to an actress, but Claire Foy approaches the part with a matter-of-fact intelligence and truly is more than just another actress who stays behind a historic man.

Human travel has evolved from a Bullock cart to rockets, the possibility of limitless always starts one brave step. Stepping into the Moon is no joke, it elevates what Man can be capable of after hundreds of years from now, space travel or not. But what the First man signifies is the importance of the journey, it is easy to say that Neil was the first man and then be done with it. But he did not have that fancy life, he had his turns of ups and downs and that is what makes First Man more than just another space flick, took it to a new personal level.

Verdict :  First man elevates the genre of Space movies to a whole new level. Go for this sheer brilliant film that gives you a close to real space experience.