Thursday 1 November 2018

An Unconventional Review Of First Man

The following is an unconventional review of First Man, a movie directed by Damien Chazelle which stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. This review is less about the abilities of the crew to create a cinematic experience and more about how that experience became something more penetrating to the following viewer.


Let me begin by saying that I am not trying to exaggerate when I say just how powerful the following experience was to me. Whether I have chosen to or not, the emotions I have felt and the thoughts that I have dispelled have a degree of insincerity compared the reality of my being. There is no way for me to convey the strength that I felt that will not come off as incredulous. For my experience was aided by a psychedelic enhancement. I went about this journey of the self in the most contrived and intolerable manner. So I understand if all that I evoke is sneers and if what I represent is a pretentious intoxicated fool. I cannot fully comprehend your understanding of the world and meld myself well enough to build the gateway between our selves to a mutual reality. For that I am sorry. But so much of our matter is the same that I may still be able to relate what I felt to some degree.

As you can already tell, this review of First Man will stand to be more literal than other iterations. What I aim to achieve with this piece is to replicate the altered state that I was in upon viewing the film to the best of my linguistic and creative ability. Though film criticism is generally a subjective matter, one can hope to inject some objectivity by relating it to schools of thought and common approaches that have shown to be successful. To focus on First Man in any objective terms will be near impossible. For it in conjunction with the sedative sensations brought about spiritual passion. Passion has no place in objectivity, but I was so overwhelmed by it in the moment that I cannot help but speak about it. Absurd as it all may seem, the journey of one man to the moon dramatized by Hollywood artists provided an understanding deeper than the darkest depths of the oceans.

I went in, expecting nothing more than a bit of fun. So often I heard that anecdotal rubbish of enhancements to your media-viewing experience. That whole line of “gaining a better understanding of your fellow man” felt like posturing from lowlifes that had thrown their life away to loaf about. But given that I had a chance to indulge, I opted to explore the possibilities. I did not feel it so much to discredit them as I did not think to even consider the potential effects. It was more an experiment. So I went in, securing my treat, and consumed it right from the start.

At first, I thought I had made a mistake. The movie opened with a heavy dramatic sting of Neil Armstrong struggling to maintain control of the world around him. Death was a common visitor and his aspirations of becoming the first intergalactic pioneer dwindled with each day. The discrepancy between my childish expectations and the intense reality being presented felt comical to me, but no humor should be derived of a man suffering from a loss of a child. So I focused in on the movie, absorbing its beautiful, haunting visuals and sublime musical score. Every motion felt disorienting, every sound locked into a collective harmony. The dialogue and performances all felt so pointed, so carefully designed. But it did not feel relevant to the larger context this movie was framing.



Midway through the film, something unlocked in my head. I had become so glued to the narrative in front of me, I did not bother to check on my self. When I did, my vision contorted into fish eye lens. My hands had shrunk and would do so even more as I extended them outwards. Each motion I took was sluggish, without concern for gravity or speed. I began to feel as though the film I was seeing was tangible. It wasn’t physically speaking – I could not pluck out the moon from the sky and crumble it with my hand. But I could feel its pulse, I moved along with the movie in such a profound way, that each beat that it took was not only logical but enlightening.

We often perceive ourselves as minimal. As such, we believe we are only capable of minimal thought. Sure, we think more than any other animal in the world, but fundamentally speaking we are limited by size and scope. We inhabit only three of the possible dimensions out there. Bats hear more than us and shrimp see more than us. So as such, the idea that we are even capable of extending our minds far beyond the stars is one that is scoffed that. Indeed the movie presents how dismissive everyone is sending a man to the moon when there is more important matters to attend to. Important meaning within our own control. We are minimal, so we think minimal. That assertion is immensely flawed and demeans humankind, equating ourselves to tortoises without the reflexes to avoid a sledgehammer dropped from fifty stories above it.

If we are truly so worthless to be as a species, then how can we bring ourselves to reach further from our current capabilities? Why did we flirt with oblivion to establish ourselves as beyond the scope of a blue marble sitting above the dustbowl of darkness? Are we just simply unable to admit to the awesome might we possess and instead meander about with squabbles so granular that they slip from the seams of time like sand in a sieve? We could truly ascend if we took a collective pause and fused our potential together to piece the void with colorful force. First Man made it so clear that our potential is hypergalatic.



However, it was only the moon that we went to. No more beyond that. My claims of the experience with a cinematic masterpiece appear more as deceitful incomprehension and incredulous hyperbole of our proportion to the universal populous. But what I found from my stay in the delicate machinations of Damien Chazelle’s making and what befell to my greater senses is the important of Armstrong’s journey to that silver satellite that circles our world. Him analogous to him and his team and all who assisted them. They all sliced through that stable flux that we had of our own understanding. That our own eyes brought about a massive lie. They proved that we can derive order more grand than the glands inside our brains. They brought us clarity and introduced us to the third eye. It is the eye that we all share, one that sees the galaxy for the attractive desolation that it is.

For Neil to peer out to the far side of another celestial body, for them to view a new horizon was a risk so high it would be like pleading for success from rolling the universal die. The gamble stacked against us to lose smashed out all existing expectations and deserved more elation that in got. In one moment, Neil was every possible permutation bound by reality of a person that could come to be. Our whole kind streamlined to a synecdoche of an Ohio astronaut. Collective deaths, stresses, worries, concerns, pains all burdened upon Neil, forming courage for the path ahead. With that, the glass of our cosmic creation shattered and charged through to reach to the edges of one of its cliff sides. And there in the emptiness of space, we were reminded of our plight. Of what should be our true goal.


(closest image to a scene in the movie)

The whole performance was empowering, the viewing of our self confronting reality and acting as it were in our grasp to control it so hopeful. The sets so real made even more by what affected my system. It only seems more bittersweet how fleeting it was that it was just scraping the confines we were in. We have not yet slipped through the holes we made and journeyed any further. When Neil stepped on the moon, that step was into a new realm. And much like his step, Neil was frozen, overwhelmed by the success of this grand experiment. The moon was nothing more than grey powder, but stepping on it was pressing down on space itself. But the significance of this achievement was ignored, as we ignore our miracle of our unique existence. All the odds that we beat to be so unimpressive to us, we collective mope and double down on crawling into the crevices we made to cope with a growing human misery.

Amidst melodic visuals and striking melodies, First Man erases concepts of humanity and instead imposes exposure of us at our most finite of molecular congregations. We are dried and hung up by the universal thread of our existence. Every concept that we’ve concocted fades away into the odyssey as the fuel for our prodigy against the solar systems’ forces. We tore a hole for insight into our whole – the whole of our meaning.

Immediately after viewing the film I eased my way home, owning up to my existence and doing my best not to be overwhelmed. Here I was, a singular individual with their minuscule concerns still fortunate to carry along with a multitude of seconds allotted to me. But with an experience that had left me with a sentiment so impactful, majestic and cryptic, I could not let it fall to the wayside. I wrote eight pages of what was on my mind. It could not compare to what I thought up while in the theatre and even what is on here now is not what was on the page. It is the modification of a recollection of the echolocation of the mental dictation that took place. What has resulted is a riddle that is both trying to be established and trying to be solved at the same time.

The difficulty is that there does no exist a logical system to formulate the question that was posed to me in my viewing of First Man. Nor does there exist one to solve it. The words that I write are incapable of the emotions and the realizations that were so visceral that I felt them as a waterfall of my soul. Awash with confusion, my hands helplessly articulate my efforts to defeat this intellectual incompetence. Alas, all I can muster that is properly comprehensible is my adoration for the movie and the experience. With the right combination of entertainment and recreation, it seems one can discover a greater understanding of us as a whole. First Man was a beauty beyond compare, far ahead of 2001 for bringing a more personal touch and adding our amazing potential for the greater good. If I ever return to that warped perception into greater self-realization, I hope I amass more of a better understanding of our state. Perhaps then I can improve in how to communicate the awe of sinking between dimensions.



I know that this is not something to play around with. These things are not meant to be abused. They have a time and a place. Additionally, what I saw in the film will not be what I may see in the film, nor what you may see. So I cannot encourage the experience outright as much as I give it glowing praise now. Instead I can offer an imitation of a fraction of the emotion I felt overall. There’s a song in the film, Quarantine. It plays right around the end of the film. There, a harp plays softly as one listening can imagine a silence of sight. A theremin looms over as the bright edge of a new celestial body. The two waltz together and a new body is formed. In there, a new understanding is made that relaxes the tensions of everyday grievances. Confidently we must continue into this illusionary stabilization that we’ve developed to fight against the cosmic truth. One’s spirit can take a deep breath, alleviating pressure caused by the current disease we’ve afflicted on ourselves. This is the only thing that can remind me of the epiphany I had: the paradox of our lives is how we futile beings have the immense ability to give purpose to our being.