The fact that we liked both of Damien Chazelle’s previous films so much as reason enough to go to the cinema to watch this but privately I suspected that this would basically be a sequel to The Right Stuff and, ‘lo and behold, it was indeed so. Once again it stars Ryan Gosling in the leading role though Claire Foy as Neil Armstrong’s wife is a bit odd and it seems to me that her British accent comes out in one especially emotional scene.

Armstrong is a NASA test pilot who has a brief taste of space while flying the X-15 rocket plane. Despite having to deal with the death of his daughter from cancer,  he applies for and is accepted into Project Gemini. His family moves to Houston and he befriends fellow civilian pilots in NASA Elliot See and Ed White. Despite their best efforts, the Soviet Union beats them in carrying out the first spacewalk. As commander of the Gemini 8 mission, Armstrong does successfully perform the first successful docking of two spacecraft in orbit but equipment failure forces them to undock and abort the mission. Both See and White die due to freak accidents and Armstrong himself narrowly survives an emergency ejection from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle. Nevertheless they persevere and as the whole world knows, Armstrong is selected as the commander of the Apollo 11 mission that would actually attempt to land on the moon.

Technically and visually, First Man is an unquestioned triumph. Some artistic license is taken, such as depicting radio communications as instantaneous, or suggesting in the dramatic opening scene that Armstrong reached the edge of space in an X-15 flight which isn’t true, but nothing too egregious. Chazelle’s directorial choices are truly inspired when shooting the two main space missions. For Gemini 8, he confines the camera almost entirely within the interior of the spacecraft to create a visceral experience from the point of view of the astronauts. You feel the bumps, the jarring vibrations and you get a horrible sense of how fragile all the equipment that they rely on for their survival really is. But then for Apollo 11, the camera is freed to show the frightful power and scope of the rockets in their full majesty. It’s a little conventional that the well known lines are used but they lose none of their impact. I also love how the film manages to convey a sense of technically difficult the challenges are, such that locating another spacecraft in orbit is like finding a needle in a haystack or how the smooth surface of the Moon that we see from far away is actually riddled with boulders and craters that make landing a near impossible task.

Less certain is the way that the director chooses to add a measure of human drama by bringing to the fore Armstrong’s grief for his deceased daughter. The film portrays him as being an intensely private person who keep his grief on the inside but also suggests that it is this loss that motivates him to reach for the Moon. It’s not a bad angle to take but I think Chazelle overplays what feels like a very tenuous connection. As those who have watched The Right Stuff might expect, the danger faced by the pilots and astronauts also figures largely here and though Gus Grissom is only a minor character in this film, his death due to a freak accident is all the poignant given that he was a major character in the earlier film. I do wish that the film had made more of the generational shift from military pilots to civilians. This is a trend that would continue with the later Apollo missions being crewed by scientists.

First Man is a film that is completely unlike any of Chazelle’s previous work but the gifted director proves that he is adept even with this material. Surprisingly however his handling of the human drama is only adequate and I found myself wishing that the Earth-bound scenes would go by more quickly so we could get to the space stuff. Overall this is solid work and a worthy depiction of the Apollo 11 mission but I’d still rank it below both Whiplash and La La Land.