Armstrong

Armstrong

To truly appreciate David Fairhead’s documentary about Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, fans of American space program films will have to indulge in a little thought experiment.

It is a sleek, intelligent and reasonably comprehensive movie which has the added draw of home movies provided by Armstrong’s family, some of which have never been seen before. But it can’t help being somewhat lost in the wave of material that washed ashore to cash in on this year’s 50th anniversary of the moon landing not when two such bold efforts as Damien Chazelle’s “First Man” and Todd Douglas Miller’s “Apollo 11” are still fresh in memory.

The former used subjective filmmaking techniques to convey how Armstrong could feel things (especially after his daughter Karen died at 2 years old from a brain tumor) without expressing them due to social conditioning grasped only retroactively. The latter took an even more wide-angle (or split-screen mosaic) view, showing that hundreds of people were working on getting an American spacecraft onto the lunar surface, then reconceiving an already grand-scaled endeavor as a bigger sound-and-light show for moviegoers.

“Armstrong,” by contrast, is far more conventional; it uses the moon mission as present-tense framing device it occasionally returns us to. Flashback material starts at the very beginning with Armstrong’s childhood, follows him through combat duty as an Air Force pilot in Korea; then tracks his career as a test pilot extraordinaire before he rejoined the space program where he suppressed deep personal trauma and made history.

The filmmaker gets many surprising interviews considering so many of these important figures in Armstrong’s life are now octogenarians who’ve been well plumbed elsewhere.

Most touchingly there is his widow Janet telling charming stories about their courtship etc.; Harrison Ford reads personal writing by Armstrong much of which hasn’t been filmed before but his warm yet unsentimental voice, while a pleasure to listen to and suggestive of so many heroic movie roles, doesn’t really match the earthier archival Armstrong material. This is a good solid work but not an inspired one: With a few exceptions it doesn’t give you much that other Armstrong / space program documentaries or even decent nonfiction books haven’t already.

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