First Man Isn’t Religious. It’s not Spiritual. But It Is About Faith.

Last updated on: October 12, 2018 at 2:35 pm by Paul Asay

First Man Isn’t Religious. It’s not Spiritual. But It Is About Faith. 2018-10-12T14:35:58-06:00 Paul Asay

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Ryan Gosling in First Man, photo courtesy Universal Pictures

To shoot for the moon must’ve felt incredibly audacious back in the day. And honestly, the whole enterprise looks even more outlandish now. Back then, most computers were people. The smartphone in your pocket is, literally, millions of times more powerful than NASA’s combined computing power in 1969. And yet it was enough to send Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins 240,000 miles through the void of space. Most of us can’t drive across town without Google Maps.

The spacecraft in First Man creak and groan like old cargo ships. No fancy Star Trek sheen here: We can see each screw and rivet meant to hold the thing together through unimaginable conditions. Throughout the movie, we feel how dangerous each flight and test must be. We see the crashes and sometimes the tragedies that unfold. We follow Armstrong (played by Ryan Gosling) as he and his family attend the funerals of his co-workers. The movie helps you wrap your mind around just how terrifying each mission must’ve been. When Armstrong slices through the atmosphere in an experimental jet, we can almost feel the heat and G-forces as Armstrong rattles around his claustrophobic cockpit. When he and his fellow astronauts roar off the landing pad in their Saturn launcher, it feels like they’re riding a kraken.

Both science and technology needed to take significant, unprecedented bounds forward to make it to the moon. No one had mapped the way to such an achievement. And even as the date for the Apollo 11 launched edged ever closer—as science and technology closed the necessary gaps—some still believed that it couldn’t be done.

Armstrong, and the thousands of men and women in the space program, trusted the science. And yet, in the end, the mission was still an act of faith. Armstrong, whatever else he placed his faith in, certainly believed in the science and the machines, the men and the women who would make the mission possible.

He didn’t know he’d make it to the moon. But he believed he would.

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