When “First Man,” a biopic about Neil Armstrong, was being developed, I was interested. News broke before the release that it didn’t include the raising of the US flag on the moon; this bothered me slightly, but it was the director and main actors looney political statements that caused my interest in the movie to evaporate.
So it’s on HBO now, and I finally watched it last night. On the one hand, the lack of the flag raising makes perfect sense in the context of the film… it covers years of Armstrongs life, and the lunar landing itself is damn near an afterthought. The time spent showing Armstrong bopping around on the lunar surface is minuscule.
On the other hand: Jibbers Crabst, what a *dismal* slog that movie was. It wasn’t so much that it was dull and often rather hard to see; it was that it was little more than a series of Armstrong’s low points. Let’s see if I can recall the main points:
1) It starts with Armstrong screwing up an X-15 flight, making it look like a hypersonic horror movie.
2) Then he loses his baby girl to cancer.
3) Then he goes up on Gemini 8, the launch of which is another horror movie.
4) And then Gemini 8 goes out of control and he nearly dies.
5) But hey, at least he has a friend, Ed! Who then promptly burns to death in Apollo 1.
6) And then he crashes the lunar lander simulator.
7) And then he goes to the moon, which is a difficult to see ride devoid of joy.
8) And then he stands on the lunar surface looking into a pitch-black crater and it all comes back to his dead child.
9) And he finally comes home… to wife who clearly doesn’t like him.
And… that’s about it. The greatest adventure in human history reduced to a series of misery-points.
Now, I’m all in favor of the actual facts of history, warts and all. But far too much of modern western civilization seems to be able to see nothing *but* the warts anymore. The Founding Fathers weren’t great innovative leaders who forged subservient colonies of a distant empire into a proud nation with a history of greatness second to none; they were just slavers to be dumped down the memory hole. Cowboys? Fictional nonsense that didn’t exist. Cops? They’re all corrupt fascists. This fetishizing of self-flagellation has hit the space program hard. Apollo wasn’t the greatest, most inspiring achievement in history; it was “whitey on the moon” (a point driven home explicitly in “First Man”), run by Nazi war criminals. And Armstrong? Not a near-mythic hero to be emulated, but an unpopular man with a crappy family life who underwent fear and terror because he was grieving a dead child.
Bah.
If they’d made “First Man” into some sort of Lovecraftian cosmic horror fantasy… hey, that coulda been kinda neat. *Horror* can be interesting. But *dismal?* Just no.
If you want to destroy a culture, you bomb it into rubble and shoot the survivors. If you want to *ruin* a culture, you take away it’s hopes, dreams, Foundational Myths and Heroes.
