First Man

A couple of weeks ago Republicans starting screaming about a movie none of them had ever seen: First Man, a film about Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Since this is actual history, I can't actually spoil it, but I won't ruin the ending for you.

Republicans were angry because the movie, which came out yesterday, did not have a scene with Armstrong erecting the flag on the moon. The only reason that this fact impinged upon the Republican consciousness was something that Ryan Gosling, the actor who plays Armstrong, said back in August:

“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.”

Now, there is a flag raising in the movie: Armstrong's son raises the flag in front of their house when his dad is going into space. And flags appear on space suits and space craft and buildings all the time.

But is Gosling right about Armstrong not considering himself an American hero? It seems like it. Read articles that were published at the time of Armstrong's death in 2012:

Armstrong would doubtless have been uncomfortable with all the tributes. People who knew him said he was not a recluse, but he was a private man who quickly deflected credit to others. He described himself, more than once, as a "nerdy engineer." He often protested that while he and Aldrin made the first lunar landing, they merely piloted a mission made possible by thousands of others.

Consider what was written on the plaque left on the on the lunar excursion module's leg: Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.

Consider what Armstrong himself said when he planted his boot on the gray powdery surface of the moon: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Incidentally, the movie kept the quote as recorded, rather than correcting it to "one small step for a man," which Armstrong had intended to say, and was certain he had said. Subsequent analysis appears to prove Armstrong's initial claim correct: the lost "a" was due to a communications dropout.

Clearly Armstrong, and the program itself, wanted to be seen as representatives of all of humanity, not flag-waving American braggarts.

Now, I watched the entire moon walk, live, in the middle of the night, as an 11-year-old child, and I can tell you that the flag planting was not a momentous occasion. It was boring. It was more fun watching them hop around.

You can see Armstrong and Aldrin set the flag up on the moon yourself in the video below, starting at about 46:00. They do it mostly silently and without ceremony or fanfare. It takes them five minutes of fiddling around, trying to unfold it and then making the pole stay in the lunar soil. Armstrong took a couple of pictures of Aldrin with the flag, without comment. Then Aldrin started talking about his gait in lunar gravity.

Armstrong was undoubtedly proud to be an American, glad to be from a country that had the foresight, grit and determination to go to the moon in the face of so many setbacks. But he wasn't a jingoistic blowhard. He was first and foremost an engineer who got the job done. That is the point of the movie.

After Republicans started their tirade Buzz Aldrin also blasted the movie, posting the picture that Armstrong took. Aldrin, a former Air Force pilot, said saluting the flag was his proudest moment.

Well, good for you, Buzz. I'm sure that's how you feel in retrospect. But you didn't say that at the time: you were all about the mission, not puffed-up patriotism. You did your job professionally, as befitting an astronaut.

The movie depicts Aldrin (played by Corey Stoll) as kind of a dick; unfairly, I think, but someone in the film had to tell it like it was. Is Aldrin's ire directed at First Man really because it omits flag-waving or because it doesn't flatter him?

First Man deals with a lot of grief. Armstrong's daughter dies of brain cancer early in the film. Fellow astronauts die in training accidents.

The film examines why these men keep going, and what it takes to keep their cool in life and death situations, when everything is literally spinning out of control and billions of dollars worth of hardware and thousands of man-years of effort are on the line.

First Man, as the title implies, is about the man, not the mission. There are several harrowing scenes where rocket planes, space capsules and LEMs are about to crash or run out of fuel. These all focus on Armstrong and what he sees, or can't see.

We never really see the X-15 he's in when he bounces off the earth's atmosphere. There are very few exterior shots of rocket launches, Armstrong's gyrating Gemini capsule, the Apollo 11 liftoff and the moon landing itself. Even when Armstrong is on the lunar surface, we mostly see it reflected in his gold-plated visor. The movie gives short shrift to all the bombastic aspects of the space program, not just the flag planting.

For a movie about space, First Man must have had a relatively small special effects budget. Because that's not what the film's about. It was about what motivates modest, ordinary men like Armstrong to do mind-bogglingly dangerous and extraordinary things. It's all about Armstrong's reactions and perspective.

We've had hundreds of rah-rah epics about flag-waving hot-dog pilots, from the Right Stuff to Independence Day. Can't we have just one movie about a quiet engineer who did something no one else did before?

First Man comes to an emotional conclusion that several critics and Armstrong acquaintances disagree with. If you're going to argue with the film, that's the argument you should pick with it.

Not the omission of some boring, perfunctory flag-raising.