Space travel ain't easy

The reality, however, of space flight is different, especially in its nascent days.

“First Man,” a biopic of Neil Armstrong and his journey from Earth to moon quickly dispels the matter-of-fact perception of space travel, showing how incredibly dangerous and astonishing it was for us fragile humans to go into space.

Early Sixties tech was still stuck at the tail end of the Industrial Age. As Armstrong says in the film, up to that point humans had only started flying 60 years prior. Today’s computer technology was almost unimagined. Silicon Valley was a hallucinatory dream, if even that.

Flying to space and the Holy Grail of reaching the moon was akin to jumping in a metal sarcophagus and being slingshotted via massive explosives upward beyond the reach of gravity. The cockpits looked less like the Millenium Falcon and more like your uncle’s old T-Bird.

Once past Earth’s natural pull, the astronauts and their ground control compatriots would make mathematical and physical calculus to reach their destination.

And hopefully return.

Fresh off an Oscar winning turn as director of “La La Land,” Damien Chazelle significantly alters course with an adaptation of “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong” a book by James R. Hansen.

Chazelle follows the progression of Armstrong (played strongly by Ryan Gosling) as he enters the space program as an engineering-oriented pilot (most came from the military), and ends with (spoiler alert!) him becoming the first Earth creature ever to step on Luna.

The training, testing and flight scenes are full of suspense. The journeys into space are harrowing and nerve-wracking, and the film makes the dangers seen very real. The sound design is superb, lending realism to all the proceedings.

Interspersed between the action are quieter moments illustrating Armstrong’s humanity and relationships with his family, in particular. A tragic loss early in his life informs nearly everything he does from beginning to end. Chazelle spends as much time on these scenes as he does the ones in space.

The dynamic between Armstrong and his wife Janet (Claire Foy from “The Crown”) is important, a typical trope in most astronaut movies that borrow here and there from “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13.” The larger, louder dangers of explosions and suffocation of space are just as important as the intimate perils of leaving your family behind.

The script by Josh Singer (who cut his teeth on television’s “The West Wing” and wrote “Spotlight” and “The Post”) has a constant back and forth interplay between big and small that perhaps affects Chazelle’s ability to move the story along smoothly. “First Man” is thrilling yet lumbering, daring yet staid. It feels a bit disjointed. But maybe that’s what makes it even more realistic - despite Armstrong’s obsessive race to space, the pull of his interpersonal life was just as strong in a subtle way.

The ensemble supporting cast is top of the line. There is a serious authenticity of Sixties-era NASA going on with Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Ciaran Hinds, and Corey Stoll.

There is only one scene that I didn’t like, and it was an odd, tonally divergent bit where they show scenes of Americans protesting the use of taxpayer dollars to fund space flight. In the background plays a performance of an acidic and brilliant Gil Scott-Heron song called “Whitey on the Moon.” Either there was an editing issue, or the filmmakers wanted to force fit a bit of diversity into what is nearly an all-white cast.

Interesting, yes. Necessary? Maybe in another movie.