New Channel 4 drama series The First is the new show from Beau Willimon, the creator of House Of Cards, and is about the attempt to go to Mars. Whatever Ryan Gosling can do, it seems, Sean Penn can do 142 times further.
At least, that’s what it’s supposed to be about. But watch the first episode and you can’t help but notice the genuine subject matter here: 58-year-old Sean Penn’s insanely ripped body. Seriously: it’s like he’s covered himself in glue and run through a room of balloon animals.
It takes exactly one minute and 16 seconds before we see Sean Penn’s old-man guns. Or, at least, the outline of them, silhouetted carefully in the dark as he sits up in bed, a man with things on his mind and huge bulbous objects poking out of his body. A few seconds later, we get to see them in action as Penn goes running, topless. And yet, he resembles less someone going for a jog as someone running the London Marathon for charity while wearing a sack of potatoes.
The First is set 15 years in the future and begins – mild spoilers – with a disaster, as the team Penn was booted from proceed to launch their spaceship and promptly explodes right after launch. The rest of the series is about the struggle to put another team together that Penn will personally lead.
All well and good. And yet, all this part-mournful, part-hopeful drama and their quest for the stars with the backdrop of tragedy keeps getting side-lined by the show’s real mission: to boldly showcase Sean Penn’s old-man gun show, to seek out new camera angles of them as no camera man has done before.
Case in point: at one stage there is a sombre scene where we see all the wreckage from the crash methodically laid out on the floor of a vast warehouse. It’s a sobering scene, one that speaks to the sacrifice that always comes when mankind has looked to the horizon and asked, “What’s next?”
Except, we linger on this for about three seconds before we’re back to a shot of Sean Penn with his top off. What is he doing? Walking into his bathroom to wash his hands. That’s it. Whole scene. Personal hygiene by way of bulging biceps. Then we cut to the CEO of the private company behind the launch, played by Natascha McElhone, distraught over the wailing families that blame her personally and possibly about to do something drastic. But just when we wonder what exactly, we’re back to Penn, topless, in his bathroom, only this time he’s shot from behind the mirror, so now we can see his muscles front and back. He’s still washing his hands. We then cut back to McElhone as she attempts to kill herself. But right after we’re back to the bathroom, where Sean Penn and his muscles are now shaving.
In its review, the New Yorker said that Sean Penn does a lot of “muscular brooding”, but I suspect this is the wrong way to think about it. It’s more like his muscles that do a lot of Sean Penning.
At no point is it explained why his character is so muscle-bound. We’re just asked to accept that his character, along with being the oldest active astronaut in history, is so gunned up that if the spaceship’s engines fail, he could probably get out and push.
Also, isn’t it just needless weight for an astronaut to have pecs the size of dinner plates? After all, Nasa happily spends millions to shave off a few grams and therefore save tonnes of the rocket fuel required to escape the earth’s gravity, so Sean Penn’s muscles must be costing them a small fortune. Hell, if they ditched Penn’s muscle payload they could probably slingshot themselves all the way to Neptune.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy for him. So what if the combination of Penn’s crumpled 58-year-old face and body with skin as tight as a snare drum makes him look like a live-action version of those fairground boards that you poke your head through. Who cares that, in order to supply the gargantuan amount of blood required for his walloping meat truncheons, his veins resemble peach-coloured hose pipes someone has glued on him. You be you, Sean! Except, it does, you know, get in the way of everything else.
We end the first episode with a voice-over meditation of the nature of discovery, on the nature of mortality, on the ideals of reaching for the stars, and the ultimate costs that reach can bring.
Sadly, the final shot is of Sean Penn jogging again with his top off.
The First starts this Sunday on Channel 4.
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