"First Man"

When the Oscar nominations are announced and when the awards themselves are passed out, you are going to hear the movie "First Man" mentioned a lot, and rightfully so.  Saw this one this afternoon, and it is a terrific movie.

It is the story of Neil Armstrong and the journey to his being the first man to set foot on the moon.  It begins with a scene of test pilot Armstrong flying an X-15 over the Mojave desert in 1961, and the story then follows the Armstrongs losing a child (something that I never knew about), his selection as a Gemini astronaut (the sequence of Armstrong's and David Scott's Gemini 8 mission is thrilling and harrowing), the tragic deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts in a training exercise, and, of course, the historic mission of Apollo 11 in July, 1969.

This is not only a terrific story, but it is great movie making.  The scene of the lunar landscape after the LEM lands and the musical score that accompanies it is breathtaking.  And director Damien Chazelle puts you inside a cramped spacecraft and lets you know how really, really hard it is to be an astronaut even better than such terrific past movies as "The Right Stuff" and "Apollo 13" did.

The movies stars Ryan Gosling as Armstrong and Claire Foy as his wife, Janet.

Both are terrific. Gosling plays Armstrong as the reserved egghead (as described by a fellow astronaut) engineer that he was, not as a rowdy space cowboy, but as a guy whose reserved nature can be traced back to the personal tragedy of the death of a child.  Foy, best known as the young Queen Elizabeth in "The Crown" is fabulous as Janet, who has to deal not only with the loss of her daughter, but with raising two rowdy sons, dealing with NASA bureaucrats, and being married to man who every day runs the risk of not surviving his job.  The scene where she forces Neil to talk to the kids before he leaves for Cape Kennedy and the Apollo 11 mission is the clip that you will be seeing when they  show why she received her Best Actress nomination.

The movie is directed by Damien Chazelle, an Oscar winner for "La La Land" and has a screenplay by Josh Scott, an Oscar winner for "Spotlight".   Add that pedigree to great acting performances, an exciting and true story (yeah, it's edge-of-the-seat stuff even though you know how it ends), and you have what just might be the best movie of the year.

Four stars from The Grandstander, plus a tip of the space helmet to the man who inspired the whole story.

Neil Armstrong

The First Man