First Man  Reviews Time 

Attention Spoiler Alert! Don’t open the links and don’t read below if you don’t want to be spoilered.

Here’s a bunch of First Man Reviews links from the most Important American Cinema resources. In my opinion the movie deserves great Reviews

• Collider
• Variety
• THR
• The Playlist

Damien Chazelle’s First Man, with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, has opened the seventy-fifth Venice Film Festival, and it’s being greeted with a solid first round of reviews. This is Chazelle’s fourth feature after Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), Whiplash (2014), and La La Land (2016)—for which he won a best directing Oscar—but the first he hasn’t written himself. Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post) has based his screenplay on James R. Hansen’s 2005 biography and, writing for IndieWire, Michael Nordine sums up the overall critical reaction well by calling First Man “an anti-thriller of rare intensity.”

Apart from an evidently riveting opening scene, in which Armstrong pilots an experimental aircraft so high in 1961 that NASA tells him he’s “bouncing off the atmosphere,” and a finale capturing that history-making first step on the moon, Chazelle has tamped down on the histrionics and patriotic fervor often associated with the Apollo 11 mission. “Wisely,” writes the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, “Chazelle has opted to leave spectacle to the blockbusters and instead aims for awe—which is related, but different, and harder to pull off. The former shows you something you haven’t seen before. The latter involves showing you something you see every day from a perspective that makes it newly strange.”

At the Film Stage, Leonardo Goi adds that First Man “unmistakably” bears the marks of Chazelle’s previous work. “Gosling’s Neil Armstrong fits nicely in the universe of career-driven, uber-determined workaholics the thirty-three-year-old director has been following since Whiplash. But in its tragic undertones, complex psychological edifice, and claustrophobic visuals, First Man stands out, in both content and form, as a remarkable, jaw-dropping departure from anything Chazelle has previously made.”

Gosling is winning plaudits for his portrayal of a man who, as the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw puts it, lacks “what no one in the 1960s called emotional intelligence. The film suggests that this absence of a normal human boiling point is vital to his success: he stays cool and focused in the spacecraft under conditions that would reduce most people to a blinding panic.” Claire Foy (The Crown, Unsane) plays Armstrong’s wife with, as Time’s Stephanie Zacharek notes, “a great deal of astronaut-wife fortitude,” and Corey Stoll is scoring special mentions for his turn as Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. “Stoll has droll moments as the bluntly opinionated Aldrin, who keeps a sufficient lid on the showboating to allow him to remain likable,” writes David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. “But the large, predominantly male ensemble generally works more as a cohesive unit than as individual characters.”

For Jessica Kiang at the Playlist, the “absolute knockout performance” actually comes from cinematographer Linus Sandgren (American Hustle, La La Land), who shoots “in deliciously grainy 16 mm and 35 mm and, when we finally get to the moon, cracking open the widescreen glory of 70 mm IMAX.” Sandgren’s work, combined with Tom Cross’s “hypnotic editing,” makes First Man “so immersive in its glitchy, hurtling, melting-metal authenticity,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, “that it makes a space drama like Apollo 13 look like a puppet show.” And back to Michael Nordine: “Space Force notwithstanding, we tend not to look at the night sky the way we used to; Chazelle restores some of that wonder.”

Damien Chazelle’s First Man, with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, has opened the seventy-fifth Venice Film Festival, and it’s being greeted with a solid first round of reviews. This is Chazelle’s fourth feature after Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), Whiplash (2014), and La La Land (2016)—for which he won a best directing Oscar—but the first he hasn’t written himself. Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post) has based his screenplay on James R. Hansen’s 2005 biography and, writing for IndieWire, Michael  Nordine sums up the overall critical reaction well by calling First Man “an anti-thriller of rare intensity.”

Apart from an evidently riveting opening scene, in which Armstrong pilots an experimental aircraft so high in 1961 that NASA tells him he’s “bouncing off the atmosphere,” and a finale capturing that history-making first step on the moon, Chazelle has tamped down on the histrionics and patriotic fervor often associated with the Apollo 11 mission. “Wisely,” writes the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, “Chazelle has opted to leave spectacle to the blockbusters and instead aims for awe—which is related, but different, and harder to pull off. The former shows you something you haven’t seen before. The latter involves showing you something you see every day from a perspective that makes it newly strange.”

At the Film Stage, Leonardo Goi adds that First Man “unmistakably” bears the marks of Chazelle’s previous work. “Gosling’s Neil Armstrong fits nicely in the universe of career-driven, uber-determined workaholics the thirty-three-year-old director has been following since Whiplash. But in its tragic undertones, complex psychological edifice, and claustrophobic visuals, First Man stands out, in both content and form, as a remarkable, jaw-dropping departure from anything Chazelle has previously made.”

Gosling is winning plaudits for his portrayal of a man who, as the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw puts it, lacks “what no one in the 1960s called emotional intelligence. The film suggests that this absence of a normal human boiling point is vital to his success: he stays cool and focused in the spacecraft under conditions that would reduce most people to a blinding panic.” Claire Foy (The Crown, Unsane) plays Armstrong’s wife with, as Time’s Stephanie Zacharek notes, “a great deal of astronaut-wife fortitude,” and Corey Stoll is scoring special mentions for his turn as Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. “Stoll has droll moments as the bluntly opinionated Aldrin, who keeps a sufficient lid on the showboating to allow him to remain likable,” writes David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. “But the large, predominantly male ensemble generally works more as a cohesive unit than as individual characters.”

For Jessica Kiang at the Playlist, the “absolute knockout performance” actually comes from cinematographer Linus Sandgren (American Hustle, La La Land), who shoots “in deliciously grainy 16 mm and 35 mm and, when we finally get to the moon, cracking open the widescreen glory of 70 mm IMAX.” Sandgren’s work, combined with Tom Cross’s “hypnotic editing,” makes First Man “so immersive in its glitchy, hurtling, melting-metal authenticity,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman,“that it makes a space drama like Apollo 13 look like a puppet show.” And back to Michael Nordine: “Space Force notwithstanding, we tend not to look at the night sky the way we used to; Chazelle restores some of that wonder.”

Ryan Gosling on the Movie First Man and his character:

“I don’t think he saw himself as an American hero,” Gosling explains about the legendary astronaut he plays in Damien Chazelle’s period drama.
The American flag barely makes an appearance in Damien Chazelle’s First Man, the biopic about astronaut Neil Armstrong that opens the 75th Venice International Film Festival on Wednesday night. And Chazelle’s portrait of the first man on the moon, starring Ryan Gosling as Armstrong and Claire Foy as his wife, Janet, is more of an intimate character study than patriotic tub-thumper. That, says Gosling, was deliberate.

“Full disclosure, I’m a Canadian, so this might be some form of cognitive dissonance, but I think this achievement was widely regarded not as an American, but as a human achievement, and that’s how we chose to view it,” Gosling said at a press conference in Venice on Wednesday. “I don’t think Neil viewed himself as an American hero, quite the opposite” he added. “Neil was someone who was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts…the way we made the film was to honor the way Neil viewed himself.”

Chazelle, noting both his approach to Armstrong’s character in the film as well as his decision to go with a very rough and realistic style in shooting the movie — often using restrictive point of view, blurred images and a disruptive soundscape — said the goal was to “try to make it feel like a family documentary, a home movie. that happens to include going to the moon.”

On the technical side, Chazelle noted that the film used 1960s-era NASA equipment to create the authentic look and sound for First Man. “Whenever you hear Ryan’s breathing in the space suit, it’s through a real lunar helmet, through (Apollo 16 astronaut) John Young’s helmet…. If you do the leg work [and] get the real things, I think it always looks and sounds better than what you would make on your own.”

Chazelle and Gosling, along with fellow castmembers Foy, Jason Clarke and Olivia Hamilton, as well as First Man screenwriter Josh Singer, praised the generosity and cooperation of members of Armstrong’s immediate family, as well as those close to the other astronauts involved in the Apollo 11 mission. Foy said Armstrong’s two sons with Janet — Rick and Mark — were key in helping her create an authentic depiction of “how they saw their mom and dad. [Because] their dad wasn’t an astronaut. To them, he was their dad.”

For Chazelle, following Oscar best picture nominees Whiplash and La La Land, the story of First Man was, he said, his first opportunity to make a movie that “wasn’t my own experience.” Adding, “The era, the scope of this, it was all very alien to me. I had to find ways to relate to the story.”

Growing up in the post-moon landing world, Chazelle said, made it easy to take Neil Armstrong’s achievement for granted.

“We grow up with the moon landing already [having] been a fact, with the iconic images and the archival footage,” he noted. “But the more I learned about it, the more fascinated I became in what went into it and, of course, what the costs were of that process. Because they were enormous.”