BEFORE: OK, I'm back in NYC, where things are still crazy but they're so crazy that I think they kind of loop back around and make sense again. Took the Acela back from Boston and was in my office shortly after noon. My boss was traveling back from France, so everything was still pretty quiet.
I'm getting very close to the documentary chain now, just a couple of days. Today's film and tomorrow's will sort of provide the perfect lead-in to the topics of space flight and politics. I'm working this one in here for that reason, plus also the fact that the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission is coming up next month - perhaps HBO or Showtime will run this film then, they would if they were smart, anyway - but I want to get a jump on things, I don't want to wait. That's my way of saying I couldn't find a way to schedule this one in July, and this was the best that I could do.
First he was Bad Brad in "Molly's Game", then he was Sheriff Johnson in "1922", and tonight he plays Joe Walker - this makes three appearances in a row for Brian D'Arcy James.
THE PLOT: A look at the life of astronaut Neil Armstrong and the legendary space mission that led him to become the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969.
AFTER: You can now add manned spaceflight to the list of things that I find endlessly fascinating - along with high-stakes poker, the organization of rock concert tours (like, who decides the order of the cities the band is going to play in? who buys all the plane tickets, or do they use a private plane?) and why a boy would suddenly give up boxing to dance ballet. The problem is, I'm really far behind on my NASA history - you see, at the time of the Apollo missions, I was busy being born, and at the time of the moon landing, I was only 9 months old. So I didn't appreciate all the news that was written about it at the time, and by the time I was old enough to get interested in things like the Space Shuttle or a possible manned mission to Mars, landing on the moon was old hat. Been there, done that.
Last year, I started taking steps to rectify that - we did our second BBQ Crawl across the south, from Dallas to New Orleans, and we made sure to stop in Houston, home of the Johnson Space Center. You know, as in "Houston, we have a problem..."? Yeah, that one. We took a bus tour of the city that ended with a trip to the old NASA center (we had to get off one bus and transfer to a different bus, for some reason...) We saw uniform patches from all the different missions, a variety of capsules from different decades, a real plane that used to transport the space shuttle (with a FAKE shuttle mock-up perched on top, which made me wonder why they couldn't get a real one...) and various lunar modules and Apollo rocket pieces - I think the best stuff probably goes to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, I went there when I was a kid.
But the highlight for me was getting to sit in the "red room", the holding area for visitors that was used during the Apollo 11 launch and flight. Through the glass we could see the banks of computers and telephones used by the control room technicians 50 years ago. Now, it didn't look EXACTLY the way it did in 1969, because they were in the middle of a restoration project to make it look more like it did back in the day, in anticipation of all the crowds that would want to see it during the 50th anniversary year. So we were there one year too early - that seems about how my vacation luck usually runs. (My wife and I also visited the Panama Canal in 2013, when it had been in operation exactly 99 years...) Now, if you think too much about it, you may realize that a restoration project is a lot of bunk, because you can't CHANGE the room to be what it used to be, then was no longer. Anything you do to it is going to get it further away from what it was in 1969, or even if you can get it to look exactly the same as it once did, now you're talking about fakery, you're just making a mock-up. The only way to get the room to BE exactly the way it was would be to NOT CHANGE IT in the first place. Right after the Apollo 11 mission, they should have hermetically sealed the room and never changed one computer or moved one broken pencil, and kept it just the way it was in July 1969. What's next, are you going to re-build the log cabin that Abe Lincoln was born in, with modern materials, and tell me that it's exactly the same as it was in 1809? Or tear down all the buildings in San Antonio around the Alamo so people can get a better idea about how big that mission really was? Come on, don't restore it, don't fuck with it, just try to keep it intact as best you can. Hey, maybe I was among the last few people to see Mission Control before they turned it into just a mock-up of fake props that kind of look the way that we think it used to look...
Anyway, my point is that I've got a lot to learn about the Gemini and Apollo missions, including which astronauts went on which missions. I know cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the the first man in space, and John Glenn was the first American in orbit, and obviously Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins went to the moon as part of Apollo 11 - but beyond that my knowledge gets a little foggy, I'll admit. I might have become more of a NASA geek if I hadn't gotten distracted by "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" and found the fiction more appealing than the facts. So now I'm trying to make up for lost time - obviously I've seen "The Right Stuff" and then "Hidden Figures" about two years ago, but those are only going to get me so far. So let the learning begin.
First there was Project Mercury - this was the first U.S. spaceflight program, and there were 7 astronaut candidates - using the Mercury-Redstone rockets for sub-orbital flights, and the Mercury-Atlas rockets for orbital ones. Seven Mercury astronauts - M. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Donald "Deke" Slayton. Ah, how did I forget that Alan Shepard was the first American in space, and John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth, I guess that's an important distinction. Project Mercury lasted from 1959 to 1963, and was replaced by Project Gemini, 1961-1966, called that because of the two-man crews. Deke Slayton was grounded but was put in charge of the astronaut program, and four men carried over from Mercury: Shepard, Cooper, Grissom and Schirra. This is where Neil Armstrong entered the picture, along with Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Ed White, Michael Collins, and several others. How am I doing so far? Highlights of the Gemini program included the first U.S. space walk (Gemini 4), the first space rendezvous and docking, and set notable endurance records for the astronauts.
Since this film follows Neil Armstrong, mostly, it picks up with Gemini missions and leads into Apollo missions (1966-1972). This was where they determined that the best way to get to the moon was with a multi-stage rocket - so that's one rocket to get the craft out of Earth's orbit, and then a smaller rocket inside to dock with the Lunar Exploration Module and get that to the moon, then the small rocket would stay orbiting around the moon while the LEM would land on the surface. Inside the LEM was an even SMALLER rocket that would get the astronauts off the moon and back to the slightly larger rocket to take them back to Earth. I can't help but notice the irony that while the U.S. was in the Space Race with Russia, we beat them by using technology that simulated something very Russian, namely nesting dolls, or "Matryoshka".
Apollo 1, of course, was a terrible tragedy - it never launched, and a fire prior to scheduled take-off killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. (Sorry, SPOILER ALERT...) The next few Apollo missions were unmanned, but then, god DAMN IT, think of the BALLS it took to be an crewman for Apollo 7, after what happened with Apollo 1. And then Apollo 8 flew to the moon and did not land, just orbited it and came home - I'm not sure I knew that before, that takes cojones too. But we're supposed to be focusing on Neil Armstrong here, the "First Man" to walk on the moon's surface. (You can't even say "first man to land on the moon", or Buzz Aldrin will come to your house and punch you in the face.)
The film follows Armstrong through the Gemini selection process - though everyone in this film pronounces it "Gem-in-EE", which just seems wrong. I always said "Gem-in-EYE", am I way off base here? Was this film made in Canada or something, where they pronounce words differently? What the hell? You ask someone what their astrological sign is, nobody says, "Oh, I'm a Geminee." Especially if they're really a Sagitarri-OOS. Gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, unless someone can prove to me that everyone in the 1960's said "gem-in-ee", which I highly doubt. This was very distracting, so points off for that. It made everyone at NASA sound dumb, which felt weird, because usually "rocket scientist" is sort of the benchmark for "smart", like if you want to call somebody stupid, you'd say, "Well, he's not exactly a rocket scientist..." Even if they did all mispronounce this word, which I doubt, I would still think a filmmaker should correct this. But instead we move on, to where Armstrong and the other astronauts get spun around on that 3-axis machine, and they all puke their guts out, then it's on to physics class.
I also don't understand why, during the selection process, Armstrong here said "yes" to another candidate who asked if he was a civilian. Neil Armstrong had a military background, who flew bombing and reconnaissance missions in the Korean War. After that, he was an ensign in the Navy Reserve. That doesn't sound like a civilian to me, so NITPICK POINT #2. OK, so after the Navy he went to college, played in the marching band, joined a frat and wrote some musicals, I still don't think he'd identify himself as a "civilian", considering his military background, which is why NASA would be interested in him in the first place.
I'd love to learn more about his time as a test pilot, but "First Man" instead skips over all that, and shows us his home life with a wife and two kids, only his daughter has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. It's a dark time, for sure, but I don't really see how that all factors in to his spaceflight career, unless it's there to explain why Armstrong is distant and detached from his sons later on. Or perhaps why he threw himself so hard into astronaut training, because he couldn't handle the sorrow in his personal life? But then maybe this made him exactly the type of emotionless risk-taker that NASA needed for their program? It's a little nebulous here, and I feel like maybe I'm trying too hard to connect the dots of Armstrong's life.
Armstrong was in the back-up crew for Gemini 5, and then flew in Gemini 8, and huh, even Wikipedia says that this mission made him the "first American civilian in space". Again, since he was ex-military I'm not sure that this is the right terminology, as a point of order. But whatever. Gemini 8 was the first planned mission where the space module would dock with another entity, the Agena target vehicle. But at some point in the mission the combined Gemini-Agena spacecraft began to spin out of control, and this continued even after Gemini disengaged from the Agena. But Armstrong regained control of the vessel, stopped the roll and then engaged the Reentry Control System. Protocol dictated that the mission would be cut short, so there were mission objectives not reached, but after an investigation, the mission was not deemed a failure, because of the lessons learned.
Eventually, the film gets to what we came for - Apollo 11. The moon landing, in which, as the movie points out, the capsule had to travel very very very very far - so far that on the blackboard that showed a diagram of the Earth as a small circle surrounded by Russian satellites, NASA wanted to leapfrog so far over the Russians that they'd be on the next blackboard - or probably the blackboard in the next room.
Now, some things the movie got wrong - for one, there was no transmission delay in the conversations between the astronauts and Mission Control. But no doubt this was done to make the movie easier for audiences to watch. In a similar fashion, the trip from Earth to the moon should have taken days, right? And that's a whole lot of nothing, so imagine how boring a film depicting this in real time would be. Also, imagine how tedious the trip to Mars is going to be for some poor sucker some day soon. (How do you find the right person who wouldn't go all looney-tunes inside a floating coffin surrounded by an infinite amount of nothing for over a month?).
One other thing the film got wrong - when the Apollo 11 astronauts look up from their launch, the moon is directly above, as if the rocket is aimed right at it. Again, this seems like a truncation or an over-simplification. The thing about space travel is that you don't aim your rocket at where your destination IS, you have to aim it at the place where it's going to be when you get close to it. Because if you shoot your rocket at the moon, it takes so long to get there that you'll find it's moved since you started. There's another little tip for whoever flies to Mars someday.
I guess there was some controversy about not showing the astronauts planting the U.S. flag - again, this leads me to think this film was made by Canadians or somebody who would have an interest in leaving that out, because they want everyone to think the moon belongs to everyone on Earth. Ha ha, no way suckers, USA got there first and we left TRASH there, so it's totally ours. We also left trash in orbit (those discarded rocket stages) and when we get to other planets, we'll leave our trash there too. Heck, maybe we should be launching all of our trash into space, so we can claim the whole galaxy for Amurica.
Now, as for Armstrong's infamous first words on the moon - we should all know by now that he meant to say "One small step for A man..." and he either left the "A" out, or it wasn't transmitted, so the resulting phrase is a conundrum - because "man" without that as a lead-in is a synonym for "mankind", so thus he said that one small step for mankind is also a giant leap for mankind. Which is more contradictory, and somewhat less poetic. My theory, after viewing this film, is that there was a problem with the lower part of the ladder reaching the moon's surface, so I think that he was maybe warning Buzz Aldrin that on his way out of the capsule, he'd have to take one small step, followed by a giant leap over the busted part of the ladder. You see how that's possible, right?
Finally, I wonder if there was any irony felt when they were making this film in a movie studio re-creation of the moon's surface, when some people still believe that's what really happened in the first place. But you watch and decide with an open mind.
Remember, this was ALMOST my Father's Day film, I had it planned for that day, before shifting things down one, and allowing "1922" to land there. There's so much here about how Armstrong was a distant father, concentrating on his (admittedly important) job as an astronaut. Since most fathers probably have to find that difficult balance between work and family, I could have worked with this a Father's Day film - so let's assume that I meant to keep the theme going for an extra day.
Also starring Ryan Gosling (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Claire Foy (last seen in "Season of the Witch"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "Chappaquiddick"), Kyle Chandler (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "Gold"), Gavin Warren, Pablo Schreiber (last seen in "Nights in Rodanthe", Christopher Abbott (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Patrick Fugit (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Vice"), Cory Michael Smith (last seen in "Carol"), J.D. Evermore (last seen in "The Paperboy"), John David Whalen, Ethan Embry (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Skyler Bible, Ben Owen, Olivia Hamilton (last seen in "La La Land"), Kris Swanberg, Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Shawn Eric Jones, William Gregory Lee, Steve Coulter (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Leon Bridges (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Choppy Guillotte, Brady Smith, Matthew Glave, Luke Winters, Connor Blodgett, with archive footage of John F. Kennedy (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and the voices of Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Eric Sevareid.
RATING: 6 out of 10 warning lights during descent
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