WordJam Review: Zygon: When Being You Just Isn't Enough (d. Bill Baggs, 2008)

Disappointed there won't be any new Doctor Who this year? Nah, me neither. Instead, why not join WordJam as we check out a real curio from the darkest corner of the Whoniverse...

Back in the mists of ancient time (well, the early 1990s), Doctor Who's future was in doubt. With the programme left in limbo by a cash-strapped and largely indifferent BBC, Virgin books stepped in to carry the torch with their officially licensed novel range. Ben Aaronovitch (author of the splendid Rivers of London series) appalled us with his William Gibson-esque Transit, Andrew Cartmel (latterly of underrated Vinyl Detective fame) bored us with his War trilogy, Mark "Oooh, I've seen more classic sci-fi/horror films than you" Gatiss did his best to prove he'd seen more classic sci-fi/horror films than us, while Lawrence Miles (whatever happened to him?) laid the foundations for a renaissance in Who literature that sadly never happened. But despite the highs and, let's be honest, frequent lows of the good Doctor's adventures in print, fans still wanted more. Would we ever again see our favourite Time Lord back on-screen where he belonged?

Our prayers were sort-of answered when a number of independent, unofficial fan films began springing up, made by well-connected aficionados and starring the show's more celebrated alumni (and Colin Baker). Some got the rights to use companions or monsters direct from their creators, but naturally the Doctor, the TARDIS, Daleks and Cybermen were strictly out of bounds. It goes without saying, most of these stories were utter crap (coughs - Downtime - coughs), but better an amateur, Doctor-lite adventure than nothing at all. The Paul McGann TV movie provided some succour that maybe the show could return in one form or other, but this was quickly followed by yet more low-budget fare now featuring lesser Who actors with nothing better to do, as well as a funny little bald chap who specialises in silly voices.

It's a different story now, of course. In the fourteen years since the programme made its triumphant return to TV, there just isn't the demand for these DIY jobs anymore. In addition to the Doctor's small screen adventures we've got the Big Finish audio dramas, BBC novels (now with reduced word count!), video games, toys; what more could you possibly ask for?

...How about a straight-to-DVD sci-fi horror/soft-porn psychological thriller featuring '70s favourites the Zygons before they made their official comeback in the 50th anniversary story "The Day of the Doctor"?

 

From my exhaustive, peerless research (all right, Wikipedia), I understand this bizarre, utterly unexpected addition to the fan film canon went into production a full two years before Russell T Davies had every man, woman and child up and down the country engaged in feverish discussion about the significance of Bad Wolf. The fact that Zygon didn't emerge for another five years is unfortunate since the utterly woeful and hopelessly misguided Torchwood ended up stealing its thunder in the 'adult Who' (ie. horny adolescent) market. Director Bill Baggs, however, should take some small comfort in knowing he's produced the only spin-off of the world's longest-running sci-fi series to feature both male and female full-frontal nudity.

Zygon: When Being You Just Isn't Enough (very '60s Esquire) opens with Michael Kirkwood (Daniel Harcourt) visiting psychiatrist Lauren Anderson (Jo Castleton) and describing a recurring nightmare he's actually a shape-changing alien. When Lauren invokes Freud and suggests this is most likely a power fantasy, Michael (or rather Harcourt) manages to keep a remarkably straight face with the reply: "I'm an electrician; I spend all day working with power. You don't mess with it." This bizarre non-sequitur appears to make sense to Lauren, and as Michael leaves it's kind of implied from their awkward eye contact - a result of clumsy performances and editing rather than, y'know, character or careful direction - that there's a sexual chemistry between them that'll perhaps justify the film's 18 certificate.

A short time later, Lauren is accosted by a mysterious older man (Keith Drinkel) with the distinctly Hill Street Blues-ish name of Bob Calhoun. He curtly instructs her to help Michael discover his true identify before vanishing down one of the clinic's strangely labyrinthine, identikit corridors. Lauren is visibly shaken by this encounter: so much so, in fact, that in the next scene she finds herself staring at fellow doctor Joanna's breasts while using the staff changing room, presumably hoping to find the meaning of the mystery man's words in her colleague's ample cleavage. After gently reprimanding Lauren for this unwanted attention, Joanna (Becky Pennick) acknowledges that, yes, she does have a nice bosom and they have a conversation about breasts and sex. Baggs, however, soon realises that he isn't Fellini or Tinto Brass, so the dialogue abruptly shifts gear and they start talking about Michael instead. Lauren is convinced she can help him, Joanna says she obviously fancies him and... Well, I dunno, really: I drifted off a bit at this point. All I know is we get a bit more psycho-guff with Michael, Bob pops up again spouting portentous, threatening nonsense, and the script suddenly evolves into an episode of the BBC daytime soap opera Doctors when Lauren gets put on forced leave by a Jeremy Corbyn lookalike. This turns out to be a stroke of luck for Lauren since it allows her to sidestep the thorny issue of professional misconduct by accepting Michael's offer for a date. Before you can say 'cack-handed montage', the well-lubricated couple are back at Lauren's apartment where her flatmate Ray (David Roecliffe) has helpfully pre-empted the next plot development by taping a condom to her bedroom door.



The first sex scene is a low-key, tastefully shot affair, reminiscent of those Lover's Guide videos that were all the rage back in the early '90s. It almost made me feel bad for writing this whole enterprise off as an exploitative, soft-porn job; but then we get the morning after, and Baggs wastes no time filling the screen with dangly, wobbly and hairy bits, almost as if to say, "LOOK WHAT I DID! I GOT PEOPLE BONKING IN DOCTOR WHO!" Thankfully, though, the skin parade gets cut short when Michael has a flashback to his dream and attempts to strangle Lauren. She fights him off, and a despondent Michael is left to put some bloody clothes on and leave while Lauren seeks comfort from the not-at-all camp Ray. 'Course, she soon discovers the real Ray has been violently murdered, and the person she assumed to be her flatmate suddenly morphs into Bob, who knocks her unconscious. When she wakes up, she finds a small biomechanical device attached to the back of her neck. Bob reveals he's actually a Zygon called Torlakh and he's been sent to Earth on a special mission (although, strangely, he doesn't actually tell her what it is, which you'd think would be at the forefront of Lauren's mind at this point). He then offers her the chance to become a shape-changing, starfishy creature like him. Oddly, Lauren jumps at the chance, and before you know it she takes on the form of a wealthy businessman, goes on a spending spree using his credit cards, and ends up shagging the guy's wife. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

In contrast to the previous sex scene, this one is shot much more like a Television X production: soft electro-jazz on the soundtrack, bobbing heads, sweaty hands clawing at lingerie, groaning and gasping... Strange, then, that it's not in the least bit erotic. Framed from the perspective of Lauren masquerading as the businessman, it almost brings to mind those obligatory work-out sequences in Jean Claude Van Damme movies; we're asked to admire the bulging veins and rippling muscles, but the exercise equipment itself is entirely ephemeral. Having said that, we could get into a whole discussion here about the Male Gaze and how Baggs sort-of subverts it by having a woman disguised as a man engaging in heterosexual sex, which in actuality makes it homosexual, yet still focusses itself through the prism of male hetero-normative desire by suggesting traditional sexual morés and girl-on-girl action - but I suspect that wasn't really a serious consideration when the scene was carelessly grafted onto Lance Parkin's and Jonathan Blum's original script. If it had been Michael or Bob disguising themselves as a member of the opposite sex and getting it on with someone else's husband, now that would've been interesting.

Michael! God, we forgot all about him, didn't we? Don't worry, he's still here: delivering ridiculous lines and having a moody conversation with Lauren when she gets back. In her new form, Bob hopes that she'll be in a better position to get her confused beau to discover who he really is. As it happens, though, it ends up being Bob who does that. In a sequence that's more Highlander: Endgame than The Third Man, Bob takes Michael up to a rooftop and explains that the hapless electrician is really Kritakh, part of a Zygon taskforce who landed on Earth over twenty years ago as the advanced guard for an invasion. (Whether or not they're connected to the cell that the Fourth Doctor encountered in 1975's Terror of the Zygons is left unexplained, but it's enough Baggs managed to licence the monsters from their creator Robert Stewart Banks without having to work in all that tricky continuity stuff. Besides, it saves more time for the knobbing.) The plan, it seems, was to pollute the Earth with chemicals and make it more like the Zygon homeworld - until Michael went rogue and forgot his real identity. Bob does his best Darth Vader/Satan impression, offering Michael unimaginable power if he comes back to the fold, but the latter just wants to have a quiet life with Lauren and rejects the offer. Naturally, this makes Bob angry. So angry that he lets Michael go and decides to get Lauren out of the picture by taking her form and killing her friend Joanna (the one with the nice breasts), videotaping the whole thing for the police to find.

At this point, I couldn't help wondering why Torlakh continues to use Bob Calhoun's identity when he freely admits that the real McCoy is actually a wanted killer. Surely he'd choose another form - say, someone who isn't a known murderer - so he doesn't have to skulk around in the shadows the whole time, trying not to get caught. But then, as we've already seen, logic clearly isn't his strong suit. His scheme to frame Lauren works, sending the police on a wild goose chase after her, but then there's that pesky problem of her shape changing abilities to deal with, which wouldn't have even become an issue if he hadn't inexplicably given them to her in the first place and then shot his mouth off at Michael before Lauren had a chance to work her psychiatry skills. I can't say I understand Torlakh/Bob's thought processes as a villain, unless he's so bloody desperate to get the plan for world domination under way that he's just happy to be doing something - anything - to set the wheels in motion, no matter how idiotic.

In the meantime, Lauren and Michael discover the unconscious bodies of the real Michael Kirkwood and Bob. This section of the plot is ultimately pointless because we know that despite Lauren's suggestion that Kritakh let the innocent Kirkwood go so he can have an ordinary life, she's not going to want to shag her Zygon paramour if he takes Bob's form instead. So, of course, Kritakh has no choice but to stay on as Michael (them's the breaks!) and promptly disappears from the narrative with the real Bob's body in time for Lauren's final confrontation with Torlakh. This takes place back at Lauren's flat, where our incompetent bad guy offers her the chance to take Michael/Kritakh's place in the invasion plan. Lauren refuses, prompting Torlakh to mock her by taking on her form. This, of course, turns out to be another bad move as Lauren then shoots him dead with a gun she acquired earlier in the story in a scene I can't quite recall, leaving Torlakh's corpse locked in her identity. The film ends with Lauren slipping away into the crowd after watching the police remove 'her' dead body, prompting us to reflect on the irony that after all that pointless nudity and bonking  we at least got to see one stiffy, even if it wasn't the kind we were expecting.

You know, as a sometime Doctor Who fan myself - at least, until Steven Moffat wrecked the show with his own special brand of wibbly-wobbly, gimmicky-wimmicky, intolerably taciturn fan-wanking - I admit there were times I'd look at Jo Grant, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, Mary Tamm's Romana, Rose Tyler, Bill Potts and now Jodie Whittaker's Doctor and find myself wondering what other, erm, 'functions' the sonic screwdriver has. The fact is, though, I've never wanted to see those fantasies enacted on-screen because Doctor Who, by its very nature, is a celebration of innocent wonder. It can be heroic, action-packed, scary, thought-provoking, joyful or tragic, which means it can also, to a certain degree, actually be quite sexy - but not sexualised. There's a big difference between the two, and this, in my humble opinion, is where Torchwood went wrong in its cynical assumption that forcing two characters together in the middle of a jam and getting one of them to comment about feeling the other's hard-on pressing into them is in some way overtly dramatic or 'adult'. It just doesn't fit into the Doctor Who universe, which is exactly the same problem we find with Zygon. You've a classic monster, a fairly interesting (sub-)Kafkaesque/Cronenbergian concept about the fluidity of identity, and yet the film seems a lot more interested in selling itself on the characters' pink bits. That said, if there is a Who-fetish subculture out there, they'd probably be better off sticking to the straight-forward porn of Abducted by the Daloids; now there's a fan film that knows exactly what it wants to be without tying itself in knots over its genre pedigree.

Buuut, despite the cack-handedness of its execution and the entirely ephemeral nature of the production, I can't bring myself to write Zygon off as an abject failure. For 58 gloriously loopy, sometimes even infuriating minutes we find ourselves watching a genuine phenomenon: fans of varying professional status taking it upon themselves to add a little something to one of the world's most popular, most beloved franchises. In many ways, Zygon is a swansong to the so-called 'wilderness era' of Doctor Who where, free from the restraints of television production, no new direction was unwelcome, and every attempt at a continuation was treated with the same gravity. True, Wartime, Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans, Downtime, Auton and Zygon were never going to be nominated for Hugo Awards, but that wasn't really the point. If it wasn't for Baggs and co. keeping the dream alive, we wouldn't have had "Dalek", "The Empty Child", "The Waters of Mars" or "The Doctor's Wife" to show the nay-sayers and critics that Doctor Who still had the inventiveness and originality to entertain audiences well into a new century. For that alone, Zygon deserves at least some respect.



Are You a Threat to National Security?

As the old saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price we pay for freedom. Easiest said than done, of course - especially when you can't be sure if you're the one putting everyone else at risk. In these days of social media, fake news and satirical blogs, the chances of being politically compromised are higher than ever. That's why WordJam has set up this little quiz for you to gage just how much of a model citizen you really are. Just answer the following questions as honestly as you can and check your score. It really is that simple. So, you know, just drop whatever it is you're doing and step to it, okay? (God, this was so much easier with Google Plus.)

* * * * *

1. Babushka is:

a) Russian for grandmother

b) a song by Kate Bush

c) a lady’s front bottom


2. The President of Venezuela is:

a) Nicolás Madura

b) Juan Guaidó

c) Donald Trump


3. Trade wars are:

a) a product of aggressive capitalism

b) necessary so those rag-heads and Chinkies don’t get above their station

c) when two male prostitutes have a cat fight


4. Socialism is:

a) a political and economic theory of social organization advocating workers’ control over the means of production, community control over the environment and state ownership of industry

b) worse than the c-word

c) when you go out a lot and meet people and that


5. Covert surveillance is:

a) an infringement of basic civil liberties

b) good for catching paedos and terrorists - just so long as no one’s watching me, thank you very much

c) when two birds get it together on a webcam


6. Fake news is:

a) an invention of Western governments to deride journalism that doesn’t fit with their political narrative

b) a diabolical scheme by that nut job in the Kremlin to undermine basic Western values of liberty and democracy

c) buggered if I know


7. Western intervention in the Syrian Civil War is:

a) an excuse to affect regime change

b) important for stabilizing the region as it endures the worst humanitarian crisis since the Holocaust... Plus there's loads of oil there, too

c) what do you want from me?


8. Allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election are:

a) a way of exonerating the American public for voting in a boorish, brain dead arsehole by pretending it wasn't their fault

b) 100% true, and Mueller's gonna prove it one way or another, just you see

c) shut up, I'm trying to watch this


9. North Korean nuclear disarmament is:

a) possible, but only if the US honour their side of the agreement

b) naive bollocks. Dream on, chum

c) LOOK, I WON'T TELL YOU AGAIN


10. Should the UK have a second EU referendum?

a) no

b) yes

c) all of the above

 * * * * *

So, how did you do?

Mostly a): Bloody hell, son - you better curb all this thinking for yourself lark and quick! If you're not careful you'll find yourself in a detention centre somewhere off the Isle of Wight with big, burly men shining lights in your eyes and shouting. Give Keeping Up with the Kardashians a go: that'll kill a few of those overactive brain cells.

Mostly b): You have a limited capacity for original thinking which, strictly speaking, isn't a problem, but it could land you in serious difficulties if you attempt to share your views in everyday conversation. Have you thought about a job at News Corp? Just think of all those op-ed pieces you could pour all that bile into.

Mostly c): You really are a model citizen. Do you have a pulse?

New Year, New WordJam! (Reprise)

Well, 2018 certainly was a hell of a year, folks! Let's see, we had talk of Cold War II (again); a hostile nation adopted a policy of détente with... well, another hostile one; a rich, inbred moron got married to a minor TV star; Hollywood finally did something about casting couch culture; a small, increasingly insignificant European country continued to entertain everyone with its farcical attempt to turn its back on its neighbours while maintaining a pretence of importance in the global community; and, on top of all that, DC Comics openly admitted their movies are shit. Seriously, what more could any semi-professional writer and humourist ask for?

Looking ahead over the next twelve months, though, it's hard to say exactly what 2019's going to bring us. Perhaps we'll see the nightmarish conflict in Yemen finally get the coverage it deserves instead of the usual partial silence from western media, but somehow I can't help wondering if that's just cloud-cuckoo-land.


Click to enlarge

 

Still, at least we'll continue to be kept abreast of events in Syria by responsible, respectable and - above all - professional news agencies whose only interest is bringing us The Truth, no matter how unbelievable it may be.

As above

Either way, here are some cast iron predictions for the year ahead:

1. The Gilet Jaune movement crosses the English Channel and finds popular support among the hopeless and desperate.

2. As the UK gears up for a General Election in the wake of the Brexit debacle, centrists in the Labour Party begin to worry that Corbyn's revised manifesto is pushing their policies too far towards the Left.

3. John McCain makes a surprise return to politics and challenges Trump's Presidency once and for all.



4. Harvey Weinstein's crack team of defence lawyers invoke the little-known 'Scout's Honour' clause in a last ditch attempt to ward off a conviction.

...Remember, you heard it here first, folks.

But on a serious note, glancing back at my posts this year it's probably about time I stopped pretending WordJam is apolitical. That doesn't mean I'm about to start beating you over the head with my personal opinions, of course: it's just we're at a point where hiding from what's going on in the world won't do us any good. Besides, there's nothing wrong with having a good chuckle about it from time to time. As Peggy Noonan once said: "Humour is imagination operating on good nature". Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, there's a lot to be said for that.

Anyway, as this site idly cruises towards its third birthday and 20,000 hits, I'd like to take this opportunity once again to say a great big thank you to all my readers. Just make sure you stay tuned to WordJam: the greatest blog on the ethernet.

But, again, don't take my word for it. Perhaps the following endorsement will convince you:

Click, etc.

Onwards, folks!





Anger is an Energy (or something)

I'm a poet of obscenity, I love to swear and curse:
"You cunt," I shout, "You wanker," and 'fuck' brings up the verse.

I always swear in public places at people standing by,
The prim just stand there open-mouthed, the proper no reply.

Sometimes they say "Charming!" or "The family must be thugs,"
Then other times it's "Shut your mouth!" or "He must be on drugs".

I spray rude words with aerosols (I call it my Paint Glock),
Write the discourse in foot-high murals and illustrate my cock.

'Jesus was a homo,' or words to that effect,
Decorate the football stand through years of sad neglect.

I could be David Mamet or some modern-day James Dean;
I'd write, "You're tearing me apart!" - it's just the words aren't that obscene.

But some days when I'm feeling lonely or doubt,
I mouth the words I really mean, and nothing ever comes out.

An Ode to Theresa

There once was a PM called May,

Who proved to have feet made of clay.

She said, "I won't budge

Despite how hard you nudge,"

But we'll see by the end of today...

WordJam Review: First Man (d. Damien Chazelle, 2018)

Three weeks ago, the world watched with baited breath as the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft was forced to make an emergency landing after experiencing booster failure. Once it was confirmed that pilots Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague were safely back on terra firma, media outlets across the globe did what they do best, and dutifully dusted off stories about the fatalities and near-fatalities of Soyuz-1, Apollo 13, Soyuz-11, Challenger and Columbia in an attempt to feed the public's collective imagination about the perils of space flight.

Considering this remarkable event occurred just two days before First Man was due to begin its theatrical run, one might safely have assumed that Damien Chazelle's latest offering would be flying high at the box office right now. (If anything, timing has been central to this film; not only has it been released at the tail-end of 2018 to act as a kind of flagship event for the moon landing's 50th anniversary celebrations next year, the fact that it's opening at the start of the awards season suggests the high hopes Universal have for its success at the 91st Academy Awards in February.) With this in mind, it's strange that the film should've fallen $9 million short of its projected $25 million North American opening weekend gross. Various factors have been suggested, including the 141 minute running time and the emphasis on character drama above fist-pumping spectacle, but these speculations are somewhat suspect considering the success of similar, more cerebral 'epic' productions in recent years such as Interstellar and The Revenant. Could it be, then, that the much discussed American Flag 'controversy' really is behind this apparent under-performance?
 

Putting aside for a moment the enormous scientific achievement of the moon landing, for almost half a century now we've been conditioned to think of Apollo 11 as a political slam-dunk for the United States. Turning to the present time, whether or not you agree we're currently engaged in what some pundits have referred to as 'Cold War 2.0', it's undeniable that tensions between East and West are the highest they've been for a good 40 years. Furthermore, it's becoming increasingly apparent that a second Space Race, this time based on economic competition rather than ideological conflict, could be just around the corner. Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, recently accused the Pentagon of hiding payments to Elon Musk's SpaceX to price Russia out of the space launch market (the company in question allegedly charging $40-50 million per launch while receiving upwards of $150 million from the US Department of Defence to cover the full cost). If this is true, it neatly undercuts the US's current reliance on Roscosmos to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station since the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Then, of course, we have the Trump administration's proposal for a Space Force, which Vice President Mike Pence has said will counter "threats" from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran in what Defence Secretary James Mattis has described as a "developing, war-fighting domain" (contrary, it should be noted, to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967). In another incredible piece of timing - the day after First Man opened - Trump appeared at a rally in Richmond, Kentucky, and claimed that Russia and China currently have a head start on the US in establishing their own Space Forces, which is why he's so keen to sink $81 billion of tax payers' money into this new initiative. (It goes without saying, he neglected to mention that both the US and Russia already have their own Space Forces: the former was merged with STRATCOM in 2002, while the latter was recently integrated into the Russian air force to become Aerospace Forces.) Whichever way you look at it, First Man was always going to carry the baggage of the past as well as the assumption it would shine a light on today's increasingly polarised world.

The fact is, though, Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer have delivered a film that has absolutely no interest in engaging with the politics of the Cold War or the geopolitical situation today. True, there's a scene where Deke Slayton (one of the Mercury Seven astronauts, who later became NASA's inaugural Chief of the Astronaut Office) explains to his recruits how the USSR's achievements with Sputnik, Laika and Yuri Gagarin have left the US in the shade, but apart from a brief reference to Werner von Braun and astronaut Ed White's anger at Alexei Leonov beating him to conducting the first spacewalk, that really is all we get. These references aren't heavy-handed or pointed in any way; they're just there, and clearly designed for us to take them or leave them if we so choose. This is ultimately why Chazelle chose not to show the flag being planted on the moon's surface: instead of First Man making a statement about American Exceptionalism, it celebrates the Apollo 11 mission as an achievement for all humankind, and one that built on the work of the pioneers who came before.

This approach is admirable, and if the filmmakers' decision to adopt a politically neutral stance is the reason why North American audiences haven't been so to eager to flock to theatres then that's deeply unfortunate. It must be said, however, that the nobility of this gesture does have a detrimental effect on the film's narrative. By underplaying the political climate of the Cold War, the film never quite reconciles its depiction of the feverish urgency to get a man on the surface of the moon with the actual event itself. A couple of days before I went to see First Man, a good friend told me she had no interest in watching the film because she expected it to be another case of "white man does stuff, everyone applauds." Almost anticipating this attitude, the penultimate act, so to speak, features a recitation of Gill Scott Heron's poem "Whitey on the Moon" set to images of Civil Rights activism and protests against the Vietnam War. It provides some historical context, yes - but as with the aforementioned references to the Soviet Space Program, it doesn't really engage with the period. As a result, when Armstrong finally descends from the Eagle module and surveys, in Aldrin's words, the "magnificent desolation" of the lunar landscape, it's tempting to write the whole scene off as an anti-climax because it doesn't feel as though it's earned our investment over the last 120 or so minutes. It's almost as though Chazelle is embarrassed to invest too deeply in the subject matter for fear of an imagined reprisal.

 

Other critics who've picked up on First Man's curious emotional detachment have posited that it's as a result of Ryan Gosling's portrayal of Armstrong: a man who was, by all accounts, a reserved, softly-spoken individual who found it difficult to express his feelings to friends and family. Admittedly, there are times when this sense of the character being so locked into himself makes it almost impossible to read his reaction to events - most notably the tragic deaths of the Apollo 1 crew, which we see harrowingly (but tastefully) dramatized here - but then the film also takes great care to flip this on its head to show Armstrong as a more complex human being than his placid, outward appearance would suggest. Two scenes in particular stick out here: the first being Armstrong's private grief at the loss of his daughter Karen, and the second when his wife Janet practically begs him to explain to their children there's no guarantee he will return from the lunar mission. Chazelle and Singer pitch these character beats, and others like them, at exactly the right moments in the drama so we don't mistake Armstrong's emotional aloofness with the false image of the stoical, all-American, square-jawed hero of lesser biopics. What we're presented with in the end is a man whose sense of duty, both in his home life and working life at NASA, is borne out of a silent yet palpable vulnerability that subtly informs every frame of the film.

 

 

It must be said, though, that if there are scenes where we struggle to identify with Armstrong, we find a recognisable, emotional counterpoint with his wife Janet, beautifully played by Claire Foy in a performance that I for one would certainly like to see recognised by the Academy when the January shortlist comes around. Comparisons between First Man and Apollo 13 are ultimately pointless because both productions use contrasting styles to tell different stories, but consider the way Jim Lovell's wife Marilyn (portrayed by Kathleen Quinlan) is presented in Ron Howard's film. She's the dutiful wife and mother who loves her husband and supports his work, but that's it as far as her character goes. With the exception of a completely unnecessary and wholly manipulative nightmare sequence, at no point do we see her express any measure of concern for her husband's safety or the well-being of their family prior to the ill-fated mission. (This job is taken by Lovell's infant son, who, without wishing to sound facetious, seems to have a precocious talent for coaxing exposition-heavy, emotionally-wrought dialogue out of his father.) Even when Marilyn's listening in to the NASA radio link with the stranded Apollo crew, all she's required to do is sit there with her hand over her mouth and occasionally hold her daughter close. Foy, on the other hand, plays a fully-rounded character. She asks the right questions (which, to be fair, are there to help facilitate exposition, although Singer's screenplay does a good job of masking this), reacts to unfolding events in ways that don't short-change our emotional intelligence by going directly for glib sentiment, and generally presents us with an independent, multi-faceted character who seems a lot more 'real' than the supporting nature of her character would have a right to be in any other production. Foy carries Janet with dignity and grace, never leaping on a line that makes our job of deciphering her thought processes just that little bit easier, but searching for nuance that resonates long after we've left the auditorium.

 

To be fair, it's in these masterful performances we see the hand of the director at work. Chazelle's exploration of the contrast between public and private worlds through the oppositions of extravagance and sparseness - fast becoming a visual and narrative trademark - is still there, but the emotional resonance is more finely tuned. Consider, for example, the opening scene where we find Armstrong in an X-15 hypersonic plane as it rattles and creaks while tearing through the upper-reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. Note the way we cut between tight close-ups of the pilot, his POV out of the cockpit window and a long-shot of the aircraft. We're not just there with Armstrong, we join with him: the camera bridging his interior world with our near-objective view of the physical reality as the roar of liquid nitrogen thunders in our ears. As the film continues, we constantly shift between viewpoints, whether it's Armstrong's perception, those of the people around him or our perspective, allowing us to walk alongside these characters as they attempt to achieve the impossible or take a third-party view of this moment in history.

 

 

When I heard about First Man this time last year I was deeply sceptical what the end result would be. I am willing to admit, however, this was purely a knee-jerk response to the news that Chazelle was at the helm. To his credit, he is a competent, perhaps even talented filmmaker, but Whiplash and La La Land seemed me to be the work of a director far more interested in superficial homage - or mimicry, if I really wanted to be unkind - than exploring his own creative impulses. (Besides, it's almost criminal how he's been lauded for borrowing stylistic techniques people such as Stanley Donen and the late, great Albert Lamorisse pioneered over 60 years ago.) On this occasion, stripped of his cinematic makeup box, Chazelle has delivered a film of great integrity and intelligence that sees him growing out of his adolescent need to bask in the shadow of other people's achievements and find his own place in the sun. (Although, it must be said, the wonderfully executed Gemini 8 docking scene does owe more than a small debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey... Mind you, which space exploration film doesn't?)

 

Nevertheless, First Man is not quite the film it should've been. It isn't cold or wilfully oblique in the way that, say, Kubrick's or Tarkovsky's great space epics are (which, ironically, makes them thoroughly engaging), neither is it overlong or too bogged down in Armstrong's personal life to sustain interest - but its unwillingness to take that extra leap of faith and position itself both in the period it's depicting and in the here-and-now makes it easy to dismiss or brush aside as just another biopic about just another guy who did something really extraordinary that we've all heard plenty about over the years. Perhaps this is the real reason why audiences haven't quite greeted First Man with open arms: not the flag, not the falsely perceived 'anti-American' bullshit, but because it's a story we already know - or think we do. I just hope this lukewarm reception doesn't spill over into the 50th anniversary celebrations next year. No matter what the popular feeling is today, the past is just as important as the present, because without it we can't move forward into tomorrow. And that's the truth, folks.



INF Treaty Remembered

 

Later at the White House:

 

Meanwhile, at the Kremlin: