Well…

I hate space, but I love having this unpopular opinion. So much in fact, that even though I know it’s unpopular, that won’t reverse dissuade the rebel against the rebel inside me for not having it.

I’m nothing if not uncomplex.

Well, grammatically, at least.

So First Man, of course I’m going to not care if Mr. Ryan Gosling gets to the moon or not, and, in an historical first, I’m going to agree with the Wife That Complains, who I was grateful to discover only complain once, and was right.

I’m also going to agree with Mr. Gil Scott-Heron and the protesters outside Cape Canaveral signing a nice little ditty, ‘can’t pay no doctor bills / but Whitey’s on the Moon’. I’m going to agree as well with Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, my hero, when he calls going there a bad idea, as he did his whole life, as he did in Sirens of Titan…

…and as he does in the vintage footage found for this film. Like Interstellar before it, these anti-moonshot scenes and characters are included as inoculation against the colossally boneheaded idea of going into space to get a few rocks. I’m opposed to this idea because it remains exactly what is: running away.

…but I think it was from Un Dimanche à Paris, right?

But putting my views to the side for one brief second – and to take on some other ones – the addition of these critiques serves only to dilute the film, to make it about everything and thus about nothing.

In the anti-space and thereby plus corner, I loved the frightening aspects of the three sequences shown from the POV of Mr. Gosling. It was clear these were naught but tin cans held together with duct tapes designed and built by people who had never seen or heard of ‘space’. Or ‘tin’ or ‘cans’ for that matter.

That was cool. The harrowing and borderline insane (to be clear, it’s on the other side of the border) of space exploration is sold well. But it needs a hero and a motive worthy of the risk.

Unfortunately, and you see this from the beginning, Mr. Gosling’s incarnation of Armstrong is of a semi-autistic engineer, Haunted By His Daughter’s Death. No doubt this is ‘true’, and it makes an interesting anecdote – didja know that Neil Armstrong wasn’t that into going to the moon? And a bunch of people died and billions spent so we wouldn’t have to think about what it’s like to sit still for four seconds?

Sorry. Moving on…

But an anecdote does not a two and an half-hour epic make, and his character, like Ms. Claire Foy’s flat affect wife, is at odds with attempting to make the story compelling. He is not a worthy adversary to the stupidity and threat of space. I loved Apollo 13 And I hate space. That film has those adversaries, and it just assumes going to space is a good idea. A movie with conflicts, heroes and sequences, Mr. Tom Hanks saying goodbye to the LEM is all of us thanking the inanimate objects that protect us throughout our lives, and I tear up each time.

No such frisson, emotion or relatability in First Man. The combination of the wishy with the washy manages to achieve the impossible: making space flight uncompelling.

What am I talking about? I love this movie!