First Man

The film opens inside a helmet. It is 1961, and Neil Armstrong is a research pilot in the Californian desert, flying an experimental rocket plane so high that the sky outside the window turns black. Something goes wrong on the way down: the aircraft skips off the top of the atmosphere like a stone off water, and he has to fly a long, careful arc back to a dry lake bed. The camera almost never leaves the cockpit. We see rivets shaking and a strip of desert through a small window, and we hear metal under strain.

Then he drives home. His two-year-old daughter Karen has a tumour in her brain. He is an engineer, so he does what engineers do — he keeps a notebook, plots her treatments, tries to think his way to an answer. There is no answer. She dies. He shuts himself in a room alone, and the next morning he goes back to work.

Not long afterwards he applies to the astronaut programme. At the interview someone asks whether his daughter's death will affect what he does up there; he replies, flatly, that it would be unreasonable to assume it would not. That is very nearly the last time he mentions her out loud. The family move to Houston, to a street of identical houses full of other test pilots and other wives, and the funerals begin: a friend killed in a training flight, and then three men, including the neighbour across the road, killed in a fire during a ground test of a capsule that never left the pad.

Armstrong is given command of a two-man mission whose job is to join two spacecraft together in orbit for the first time. The joining works. Minutes later the two craft begin to roll, and when they separate, the roll gets worse — not better. His capsule starts to spin, faster and faster, until the stars smear through the window and both men are close to blacking out. He shuts the whole steering system down and uses the small thrusters meant for coming home, spending most of that fuel to stop the spin. The mission is over almost before it began. Back on Earth some engineers wonder aloud whether the pilots caused it.

Then a second accident, this time a few metres above the desert: he is hovering in an ungainly training machine built to imitate a landing on the Moon when the controls give out. He ejects, the machine falls and burns, and his parachute puts him down in the dust a short walk away. He goes back to his office the same afternoon and carries on with the paperwork.

The hardest scene in the film is not in the air at all. On the night before he leaves for the Moon, Janet — who has watched him pack a bag and walk out towards the car without saying anything to their sons — makes him sit down at the table and tell the boys, properly, that he might not come back. He does it badly and formally, like a man answering questions at a press conference, until one of them asks whether he is going and he simply shakes his hand.

July 1969. The last twenty minutes of the film are a landing. The lander drops towards the surface with alarm codes flashing on the computer; the ground tells them to continue. Out of the small triangular window Armstrong can see that the machine is flying them into a field of boulders around a wide crater, so he takes the controls himself and flies on, low and flat, looking for anywhere clear, while his crew-mate reads out speed, height and — eventually — how little fuel is left. Dust boils up. A light says contact. The engine stops. There is a long, strange silence before anyone speaks.

Outside, the film does something quietly astonishing: it drops most of the sound. The famous words are said. The flag stands on the surface. And then Armstrong walks away from the lander, alone, to the edge of a small crater — and here the film makes its boldest choice, having him take out his daughter's bracelet and let it fall into the dark.

He comes home to a hero's welcome he never asked for, and to weeks of medical isolation. The last shot is not a parade. It is Janet and Neil facing each other through a pane of glass, unable to touch, saying nothing at all — and putting their hands up to the window instead.

On 16 March 1966, Armstrong and David Scott achieved the world's first docking of two craft in orbit, joining Gemini 8 to an unmanned Agena rocket stage. Then a thruster on Gemini's manoeuvring system stuck open — later blamed on an electrical short — and the joined vehicles began to roll. Undocking made it worse: the capsule's spin approached one revolution per second, vision blurred, and the two men were close to losing consciousness. Armstrong shut the whole manoeuvring system down and used the thrusters reserved for coming home, burning roughly three-quarters of that propellant to quell the spin. Mission rules then forced an immediate return: they splashed down in the western Pacific just 10 hours 41 minutes after launch. Scott's verdict on his commander was blunt — he knew the system so well that he found the solution and acted on it under extreme conditions. Armstrong was, incidentally, NASA's first civilian astronaut to fly in space.

Two years later, on 6 May 1968, he was hovering in the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle — an open framework on legs, built to fly like a lander — when a loss of helium pressure drained the propellant feeding the backup attitude thrusters. He ejected at roughly 200 feet; the machine hit the ground about four seconds later and burned. He was back at his desk the same day. The film's version is not a computer effect: the production built a full-scale replica of the training vehicle and deliberately crashed it.

On 20 July 1969, during the final descent, the guidance computer threw 1201 and 1202 program alarms: it had more work than it could finish in real time, so it restarted, shed the low-priority jobs and kept flying. Engineer Jack Garman, working from an alarm-code list he had prepared beforehand, told guidance officer Steve Bales the alarms were survivable — and the descent continued. Seeing the computer heading for boulders strewn around a large crater (later called West crater), Armstrong took semi-manual control and flew on to clear ground. Touchdown was at 20:17:40 UTC.

Now the number everyone repeats. How much fuel was left is genuinely uncertain, and it is worth knowing why. In real time the callouts implied only about 25 to 30 seconds of flying left before they would have had to land or abort. But as Armstrong pitched the lander over to fly past the crater, the propellant sloshed in its tanks, and the low-level sensor latched roughly thirty seconds early — the gauges were simply not telling the truth. Post-flight analysis put around 770 pounds of propellant still aboard, of which about 100 pounds could never have been used, leaving perhaps 45 to 50 seconds — and some of that had to be held back for an abort. So "25 seconds" and "50 seconds" are both defensible: they answer slightly different questions, and the honest version is "somewhere in that range, and nobody in the cabin knew which".

And the line itself. Armstrong always said he intended "one small step for a man" — without the article it means the same thing twice over. The "a" is not audible in the transmission. A 2006 audio analysis by Peter Shann Ford claimed to find it, and Armstrong called that persuasive; a 2013 study of speakers from his part of Ohio found that they routinely blend "for a" into a single sound. It has never been settled.

Karen Anne Armstrong was real. Born on 13 April 1959, she was diagnosed in mid-1961 with a malignant tumour in her brain stem and died on 28 January 1962, three months short of her third birthday. Armstrong applied to the astronaut corps a few months later. The film builds its whole emotional arc on that loss, and on the fact that he almost never discussed it.

The bracelet at the crater, however, did not happen. James R. Hansen's authorised biography lists what Armstrong carried to the surface — medallions, a piece of the Wright brothers' aeroplane, his wife's jewellery, his fraternity pin — and records Armstrong saying he brought nothing else for himself. NASA's then chief historian, Bill Barry, stated plainly that the scene was created for the movie and that there is no specific evidence Armstrong left any memorial item on the Moon. Hansen, who worked on the film, conceded it was dramatic licence "and it's a fairly big one", arguing that we cannot know for certain what Armstrong did in those minutes. What is documented is that he walked alone to a small crater away from the lander — the walk is real; the bracelet is the invention. Elsewhere the film adds tension with invented cockpit warnings and makes the lunar craters deeper and more dramatic than they really are.

One last row worth knowing. Before release in 2018, the film was attacked — including by Senator Marco Rubio and by President Trump — for not showing the American flag being planted. What the film actually shows is the flag standing on the Moon, in several shots; it simply skips the moment of planting to stay inside Armstrong's private experience. Armstrong's sons Rick and Mark, together with Hansen, issued a statement pointing out that "there are numerous shots of the American flag on the moon" and that "we do not feel this movie is anti-American in the slightest". Ryan Gosling's defence was about character rather than politics: he did not think Armstrong saw himself as an American hero, and the film was made to reflect the man.