Dads In Space: Why?
Christine Smallwood writes: ‘Damien Chazelle’s First Man takes us back to a time when Americans were so convinced we would live forever that we spent billions of dollars sending three men on a tour of the lifeless rock known as the moon. Released the same week as a UN climate change report that forecasts world crisis by 2040, the movie made me ill. But the political context is not entirely to blame. Chazelle favors a shaky camera and extreme close-ups of whatever crosses its path—a control panel, a dining room table, Claire Foy’s eyes. This is supposed to put us in the moment, strip away the grand historical dressing, and help us find in this most familiar TV spectacle something intimate and human. It made me feel what the astronauts do in the multi-axis chair: nausea. I left the IMAX theater with a splitting headache and took immediately to bed.’
