First Man review – an inner space odyssey
In William Peter Blatty's underrated 1980 mystery-thriller The Ninth Configuration, a grounded lunar astronaut played by Scott Wilson (who sadly died last week) delivers a heartbreaking soliloquy that perfectly encapsulates the existential crisis at the centre of much space-travel cinema. "See the stars, so cold, so far and so very lonely," he says, plaintively. "What if I got there, got to the moon and couldn't get back" I'm afraid to die alone, so far from home. And if there's no God, then that's really, really alone."
That sense of cosmic isolation reverberates throughout a range of space movies, from Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris to Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (dubbed "the loneliest adventure of all") and, more recently, Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity. Now it resurfaces in powerful form in First Man, Damien Chazelle's sombre, real-life account of the 1969 moon landing, which turns a spectacular space-race adventure into a low-key study of grief.
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