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When asked about why that moment isn’t depicted in the film, Gosling specifically said that it doesn’t appear because First Man chooses to cast the moon landing both as an American achievement and a “human achievement.” The actor also noted that Armstrong (as revealed in the authorized biography on which the movie is based) didn’t see himself as “an American hero,” and so the filmmakers opted to focus on “the way Neil viewed himself.”
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It’s a stunning portrait of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, as he both trains alongside his fellow Project Gemini astronauts and grapples with his more private grief over the death of his daughter.įollowing the film’s Venice premiere, some comments by its star, Ryan Gosling (who plays Armstrong), set off a firestorm of controversy over whether the film is anti-American, unpatriotic, and “total lunacy” for not explicitly showing the iconic, familiar moment in which an American flag is physically planted on the surface of the moon.
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I’ve seen First Man now, on an IMAX screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, two weeks after it debuted at the Venice Film Festival. The controversy around First Man is sharply undermined by the film itself - but that won’t matter to those who’ve bought into the outrage When the First Man controversy broke over Labor Day weekend, I thought a lot about Noah. (Beck said on his program that he “hates to give Hollywood a dime.”) It didn’t matter one bit that the film clearly believes God is real, that humans are created, and that man’s wickedness is bad whatever Noah’s faults as a piece of filmmaking, it never deserved to be co-opted that way. Noah - a movie too weird and challenging to have ever really become a box-office hit, but that’s beside the point - had been crudely fashioned into a blunt instrument for culture warriors. That was the first time I’d ever seen an echo chamber constructed so rapidly and distressingly, right before my eyes. And because they already believed something untrue about it, they declared they would never go see it, which means they would never be challenged in their belief. Nothing I could write would convince certain people - who, again, hadn’t yet seen the film - that Noah did, in fact, contain plenty of references to God (though some of my colleagues tried).
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If any mention or notion of God truly had been eradicated in Noah, or if the film’s protagonist was just worried about the environment (rather than mankind’s sinful destruction of all life, including human beings), this particular controversy may have had some legs.īut by the time I saw the film and wrote my review, the damage was already done. On the same day the Breitbart story ran, Glenn Beck - whose star was much brighter in 2014 than it is now - also picked up on the story, citing McCarthy’s review alongside a common complaint that the film’s interpretation of Noah was merely worried about “environmental issues.” Noah, to these observers, was just another example of liberal, godless Hollywood’s attempts to destroy religion and goodness. It turned out that, in his review of the film, the Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy made a passing comment about the specific word “God” not actually being used, and that detail had been picked up and spotlit by Breitbart. Russell Crowe played the titular character in Darren Aronofsky’s 2014 film Noah. There had to be a patient zero somewhere. I knew the claim that the movie “didn’t even mention God” wasn’t true. But calling God by various other names isn’t considered strange or aberrant to conservative Christians - in fact, Christian bookstores have long sold posters celebrating God’s many monikers. They don’t use the name “God” they talk about “the Creator,” a reasonable thing to do for people who are meant to be, at most, about 10 generations removed from the actual act of creation. People are always talking about God in Noah. Almost everyone had a similar complaint: The movie “didn’t even mention God.” What was strange was that the emails were coming from people who couldn’t possibly have seen Noah, since it hadn’t hit theaters yet I had seen it at a pre-release screening for critics. Almost instantly, I was informed by a flood of emails and comments from readers that my opinion was wrong. I liked the movie, and I gave it a positive review. When Darren Aronofsky’s movie Noah came out in 2014, I was the chief film critic at Christianity Today.