Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
First Man is not a movie about the moon landing.
The Neil Armstrong biopic, opening October 12, follows about eight years of the life of the first man on the moon, and spends about eight minutes depicting the lunar surface.
Instead of the triumphant ticker tape parades that characterize many movies about the space race, First Man focuses on the terror, grief and heartache that led to that one small step.“It’s a very different movie and storyline than people expect,” says James Hansen, author of the 2005 biography of Armstrong that shares the film’s name and a consultant on the film.
The story opens shortly before Armstrong’s 2-year-old daughter, Karen, died of a brain tumor in January 1962. That loss hangs over the rest of the film, setting the movie’s surprisingly somber emotional tone. The cinematography is darker than most space movies. Colors are muted. Music is ominous or absent — a lot of scenes include only ambient sound, like a pen scratching on paper, a glass breaking or a phone clicking into the receiver.
Karen’s death also seems to motivate the rest of Armstrong’s journey. Getting a fresh start may have been part of the reason why the grieving Armstrong (portrayed by Ryan Gosling) applied to the NASA Gemini astronaut program, although he never explicitly says so. And without giving too much away, a private moment Armstrong takes at the edge of Little West crater on the moon recalls his enduring bond with his daughter.
Hansen’s book also makes the case that Karen’s death motivated Armstrong’s astronaut career. Armstrong’s oldest son,…
The post The Neil Armstrong biopic ‘First Man’ captures early spaceflight’s terror appeared first on FeedBox.