First Man

Damien Chazelle’s 2018 film opens Neil Armstrong’s decade with his daughter’s death and refuses to stage spaceflight as triumph. At the 91st Academy Awards it took four nominations and won one: Visual Effects, for Paul Lambert, Ian Hunter, Tristan Myles and J.D. Schwalm. Production Design, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing stayed nominations. Justin Hurwitz won the Golden Globe for the score. Linus Sandgren shot intimate scenes on Super 16mm, wider coverage on 2 perf Super 35 Techniscope and the lunar surface on 15 perf IMAX 65mm, so the frame widens as the hatch opens. Instead of green screen, a curved wall of roughly a thousand LED panels at 2.8mm pitch ringed the capsule, so the Earth in Gosling’s eyes was caught in camera. The moonscape was sculpted in a quarry outside Atlanta to match the Tranquility Base landing site. A row over the flag preceded release. Chazelle said the flag stands on the lunar surface in the film, only the planting is not shown, and the choice was not political. Senator Marco Rubio called it total lunacy. Gosling, at Venice, called the landing a human achievement. A good fit if you want the exterior withheld until the hatch opens and the image to widen into IMAX then. Not for anyone waiting on the flag going in and scenes of celebration.