Entire generations have grown up knowing that humans have successfully walked on the moon, and its difficult, now, to imagine what it must have been like to do that for the first time. How do you calculate failsafes for the million things that can go wrong in space? How do you convince a group of people to try in the first place, without knowing for sure whether theyll come back? Damien Chazelles new movie First Man charts the years before Neil Armstrongs mission to the surface of the moon, and the first trailer shows all the drama that happens behind the scenes before NASA can put their rockets into space.
First Man stars Ryan Gosling as Armstrong and The Crowns Claire Foy as his first wife Janet Shearon, as well as Corey Stoll, Jason Clarke, and Kyle Chandler. It focuses on the years 1961-1969, when NASA was planning the Apollo 11 manned mission to the moon, and its based on the 2005 book by James R. Hansen. The trailer feels a lot like Apollo 13 or The Martian or something similar, focusing on the math and the funding and all the not-so-glamorous work that has to go into a project like this before a moonwalk is possible.
Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, where Armstrong gave his “one small step for man” speech. The landing effectively ended the international space race and fulfilled Kennedys prediction that we would send a man to the moon before the decade was out. Or, you know, maybe Kubrick did it.
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