In First Man, Chazelle’s astronauts are tied down in a claustrophobic tin can from whose puny window they see only a slash of sky-when they can focus their eyes. You won’t find many of those flaming sunrises crowning the curved horizon, or the jewel-like Earth suspended in midnight sky that have become the stock images of space films. Still, director Chazelle avoids slipping into outright hero worship and the familiar trap of space romanticism. Gosling, whose unassuming, sad-eyed watchfulness has inspired a “Feminist Ryan Gosling” meme, including a Tumblr blog and a novelty book, evokes the loving, ordinary family man-though one with superhuman willpower and nerves of steel. Armstrong is fearless and self-confident he is John Wayne with a joystick and archaic computing power.

“He had no ego,” Chris Kraft, head of Houston flight operations, once said of the real-life Armstrong. He’s the opposite of the mansplaining, manspreading, entitled white guy of feminist (and often Hollywood) imagination. Marco Rubio even tweeted about it. It’s ironic because First Man is a beautifully made, countercultural movie that should warm conservative hearts.Īs portrayed by Ryan Gosling and imagined by screenwriter Josh Singer, Armstrong is a paragon of nontoxic masculinity, a type as rare as good manners among today’s usual screen buffoons and betas (not to mention the harassers back in the studio offices). Immediately after its Venice Film Festival opening, the movie’s failure to show Neil Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission became its defining feature in conservative chatter.

Ironically, the first (and sometimes last) thing most of the public heard about Damien Chazelle’s F irst Man was that it was un-American.

First man on the moon movie 2016