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“We think that at the time, everybody was all gung-ho, but it just wasn’t the case.”įor Singer, though, the answer to “Is it worth it?” is clear. “That question was much more prominent than people remember,” Singer said. In the same vein, the film shows some of the broader social and political context of the Apollo missions, with protesters criticizing the extraordinary cost of the program when there were so many unsolved problems here on Earth. “They sum up everything that this effort requires.”
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“Those lines are just so powerful,” Singer said. He recalled being a child and hearing Ronald Reagan’s speech after the Challenger disaster, where the president declared, “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted it belongs to the brave.”
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Singer said that the idea of sacrifice has contemporary relevance as governments and private companies plan to return to space exploration. Why was this the greatest generation? Not because they were inherently great, but because they were willing to sacrifice.” In that way, we’re trying to do what Steven was trying to do with ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ show the human side. “The majority of the portraits of these men show the stiff upper lip. “That’s a fairly provocative thing to say,” he argued. But Singer said he wanted to show that “there really was a human cost here.” To be clear, it’s not a wildly revisionist film - I walked out of the theater admiring Armstrong, his colleagues and what they accomplished. In Singer’s view, it was the research that allowed him to write a film that “pushes the historical narrative” around the space program.
#Neil armstrong first man on the moon movie movie#
Similarly, he said that while the crash of the lunar landing research vehicle shown in the movie was real, Armstrong’s actual injuries consisted of “a bloody tongue and trouble talking.” However, to convey that “he really did almost die,” Singer and Chazelle decided to show external injuries, rather than “making Ryan talk funny.”
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On the other hand, they definitely train using the “vomit comet” plane, so why not show that? Ultimately, Singer said they decided to go with the trainer because it “just felt better storywise,” foreshadowing a later scene in the film. In addition, he noted that “anytime you’re treading in territory that’s been written about a lot, you feel that it’s a little bit of a higher bar.”įor example, while the film shows the Gemini astronauts using a multi-axis trainer to prepare for weightlessness and space flight, it’s not totally clear whether the trainer (which is basically a giant whirling machine) was actually used in that program. “We felt a tremendous responsibility to Neil and his family,” he said. But even then, it seems like the moments when Singer made things up or fudged the facts weren’t all that far from the truth. In fact, Singer said that one of the things he tried to do in the annotated screenplay was to highlight the areas where the movie diverged from reality. That doesn’t mean everything in the film sticks to the historical record. Hansen’s biography of Armstrong (who’s played in the film by Ryan Gosling), and Singer said he was also able to pepper Hansen, as well as Armstrong’s sons Mark and Rick, with questions. Most of those details come from real life, according to screenwriter Josh Singer (who won an Oscar for co-writing “Spotlight”). But it’s what comes before that feels revelatory - the film’s fastidious attention to the training, the mistakes and the disasters that all led up to that moment. The film climaxes with an eerie and beautiful dramatization of Apollo 11, and with Armstrong’s famous words about a giant leap for mankind. With “First Man” (which opens today), “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle certainly tries. Can a Hollywood movie tell us anything new about that moment? Even for those of us born decades after the event itself, Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon remain among history’s most iconic and indelible images.