‘Apollo 10 1/2' (2022) Review
‘Apollo 10 1/2' (2022) Review
This complex element of the narration, though, is what makes Apollo 10 ½ impactful. What do you do with nostalgia in the context of what you didn’t, and couldn’t possibly, know as a child? To make a film about a shared culture and its peak event that
Written by Tom Knoblauch
PG-13 - Animation, Adventure (97 minutes)
dir. Richard Linklater
Starring: Glenn Powell, Lee Eddy, Jack Black, Zachery Levi
For pretty much my entire adult life, I don’t know that I’ve felt confident that there’s much of a future ahead for the country–or the planet. Every additional year of experience and time supplies more macro-cynicism as I get an increasingly clearer view of how the world works. Which is to say: it doesn’t work and it’s all pretty scary when you can take off your They Live sunglasses that only tell you one simple partisan story about what the problem is. Having not only hope for the future but also a fairly widespread cultural metaphor for it, something that 600 million people might watch and feel inspired by–-I seriously can’t even comprehend that as a real concept. It feels like a fantasy, like a cartoon.
Why Richard Linklater chose to animate his new film, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, may simply be that even Netflix wouldn’t throw him a budget that allows for photorealistic CGI sequences of space landings or scale recreations of the Apollo missions. But animation fits thematically in a way that works better than if Linklater did get one of those Netflix blank checks. This isn’t quite reality. It’s a dream, much like Linklater’s previous rotoscoped films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, though here it’s less overtly operating on the former’s dream logic or the latter’s drug-induced paranoia. Apollo 10 ½ is a sweet nostalgia trip, and reinforcing its dream-like elements gives it the distance it needs for the more complicated ideas Linklater has on his mind to surface.
On its surface, Apollo 10 ½ is an episodic coming of age movie about a suburban family in Houston in the 1960s during the leadup to the moon landing–specifically following the youngest child of six, Stanley (Milo Coy), who knows the least and dreams the most about the things he can’t understand yet. An older, wiser, and more subtly cynical Stanley (Jack Black) narrates nearly every scene in a voiceover style that evokes the humorous tone of A Christmas Story and the more world-weary contextualization of Beginners. Stanley’s dad works for NASA, but not doing a cool job like building rockets or flying them. This proximity is just enough for him to imagine the possibility of being a part of what he can tell is some kind of monumental piece of human history–even if there’s no way for him to explain what that means or why that might be. All it is is a symbol of an exciting future where technology reshapes lives into some kind of utopian fantasy and where the people are excited and supportive along the way.
Stanley, as you might guess and as his older self occasionally comments on, has access to a very limited number of perspectives here. As far as he knows, the 1960s are this great, unified time for America–where it only makes sense to invest in the space race because every other issue seems to be resolved (or perhaps the better word is conquered) already. Take his neighborhood for example, an almost edenic enterprise where nobody needs God because humans have it under control; all of the trees have been cut down, the native plants replaced with grass on leveled ground, the regional species eradicated, and a suburb erected in man’s image for man alone. Man has it so under control that it’s time for new worlds to conquer–and Stanley daydreams about a secret NASA mission where he alone has been recruited to man the first craft due to an error where they build it too small for an adult to fit in.
Linklater juxtaposes the sweetness of innocence with the adult realization that his trust in the world (and that of his community in general) was so often misguided. Stanley and his siblings would chase cars spraying pesticide, they’d casually rub the oil and tar residue off their feet when they played at the beach, and they’d scoff at counter-cultural cynicism toward their metaphor of American dominance through the Apollo missions. They’re being poisoned, their water is being contaminated, and these aren’t even the Americans fighting for basic rights. They have no idea anything is wrong. And it’s blissful nearly every step of the way. They’re dancing to The Monkees and goofing around–because what else is there to do? To capture this within a surface-level pleasant nostalgia trip is tricky business, and Linklater keeps it subtle enough within the barrage of memories that it may go unnoticed.
This complex element of the narration, though, is what makes Apollo 10 ½ impactful. What do you do with nostalgia in the context of what you didn’t, and couldn’t possibly, know as a child? To make a film about a shared culture and its peak event that’s also about how an event like this is full of fantasy and mythology seems to be Linklater’s answer. It’s simple and easy if you want it to be, difficult and complicated if you widen the scope of your viewing just a bit more. It’s like memories in general–a mixture of real feelings and some degree of what actually happened jumbled up in the sometimes fictional stories we can live with.
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022) is out now on Netflix.