First Man (Quick Review)

To sum the film up: space scenes are cool, personal life scenes not so much.

First Man has the goal of capturing the intensity and dangers (as well as wonder and beauty to a lesser extent) of space exploration—and it does a pretty good job at such.  The film utilizes a first-person perspective for multiple scenes, allowing the audience to see through the astronauts’s eyes as they prepare and experience the best and worst of space travel.  It becomes easy to start feeling the astronauts’s nerves as they stare through a small window with thousands of buttons, protocols, and calculations to remember as the countdown to launch begins or their spacecraft starts suddenly spinning out of control.  It’s quite the impressive feat of movie magic when one realizes these intense scenes come down to some actors sitting in chairs while light blinks, alarms go off and the camera shakes.

The shaky cam is best utilized during these space scenes.  The film goes so far as to risk getting the audience nauseous for the sake of conveying a small portion of what the astronauts experienced.  The shaky cam is worst utilized, however, during the astronauts’s personal life scenes.  Why, oh why the cinematographer felt it necessary to have the camera shake up a storm while a man is walking to his car is beyond me, but this and other similar scenes are absolutely ridiculous, annoying, and take away from when the shaky cam is properly used.  First Man also has this grainy look that often dulls the film’s color palette—possibly to give the film a more dramatic feel, though it really just makes it less appealing to look at (I would have thought the director of La La Land would know how effective some bright coloring can be).

The scenes where First Man explores the astronauts’s personal lives are fairly generic.  The characters aren’t anything new and their conversations are lackluster.  The acting is solid—Claire Foy delivers a rather effective, albeit Oscar-bait-y performance—their characters just offer nothing new, innovative or refreshing to the table.  I really wish First Man hadn’t spent so much time on these scenes as they drag the film on.  If some of these scenes were cut, the runtime was reduced by about twenty minutes, the shaky cam used only for the space-focused scenes, and the film ended at its emotional, wonderous climax with the astronauts on the moon, First Man could have been a really good film.  Where it stands, however, First Man is a decent Oscar-bait drama with some potent space-related scenes pulled down to Earth by banal telling of these astronauts’s lives.