“Three features in, Damien Chazelle has emerged as one of our most exciting and accomplished filmmakers,” Christopher Nolan writes as part of Variety’s Directors on Directors series. If you remember, last year Chazelle praised Nolan's “Dunkirk.”
Nolan goes on to add that Chazelle's "First Man" is “was never going to be a middle-of-the-road affair. Instead he crafted a masterfully staged re-creation of the space program with utterly compelling physical detail and layers of cinematic immersion that command credence and ensure that the radical and intensively subjective nature of Chazelle’s point-of-view comes as a gradually unveiled shock.”
“By equating our most intimate human moments with the great adventure, the film doesn’t diminish the cosmic, it elevates the earthly,” Nolan writes. “Discussions about the film’s portrayal of the flag on the moon largely missed the point: the choice was not about forms of patriotism, it was about a filmmaker presuming to leap over the collective sense of this great event to land on a genuine understanding of what stepping onto the farthest point of mankind’s reach might have actually felt like to the individual who did it.”
Nolan then praised Chazelle for “[daring] to make an introverted film about the most extroverted moment in the history of the world.” concluding that “‘First Man’s’ true significance, not unlike the momentous events which it dares to interpret, may not come into focus for some time.”