‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’: SXSW Review

Dir/scr: Richard Linklater. US. 2022. 97 mins.

Writer-director Richard Linklater has occasionally looked to the past, drawing on childhood memories to craft stories rich in nostalgia and insight. For his latest, he weaves together reminiscences and flights of fancy, retelling the 1969 US moon landing from the perspective of a middle-aged man recalling the young man he once was. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood is a slight tale that leans heavily on viewers’ familiarity with the pop culture of the 1960s, and its central conceit — in the child’s fantasies, he is selected by NASA to serve as an astronaut — proves only marginally affecting. But the laidback warmth of this animation offers modest rewards, reflecting the optimism of an age that now feels far out of reach.

 Linklater asks little of his audience other than to enjoy this fond look back at the pop-culture ephemera and signature moments of the sixties.

After premiering at South by Southwest, Apollo 10 1/2 will come to Netflix starting April 1. Although Linklater has worked in animation before, the new film lacks the philosophical bent of Waking Life or the jittery paranoia of A Scanner Darkly. His last two dramatic features Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019), which took a modest $11m at the box office, and Last Flag Flying (2017), which took less than $2m, made little noise. Consequently, Apollo 10 1/2 is most likely to appeal to American viewers wanting another excuse to relive the triumph of the Apollo 11 mission. 

The picture is narrated by Linklater veteran Jack Black, who voices the grownup Stan, the youngest of six children living in Houston during the 1960s as NASA works feverishly to put an American on the moon by the end of the decade. Adult Stan recounts the period in vivid detail — the television shows the family watched, the lazy summer days at the public pool — but we also see young Stan (voiced by Milo Coy) as he engages in a prolonged daydream in which he tests the capsule that will send the Apollo 11 astronauts into space. 

In Dazed And Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater effortlessly conjured up precise periods in America’s past, while also capturing the mindset of young people during, respectively, high school and college. Apollo 10 1/2 is ostensibly about the moon landing, but more broadly it is a salute to the sixties, which saw an explosion in mainstream culture while maintaining the conservatism and naivety of an earlier era. Drugs and rock ’n’ roll were changing the world, but Stan’s suburban neighbourhood was still a place where young people played out in the streets and innocent childhood rituals like broken bones were common occurrences. 

Black’s narration sports a folksy tone, echoing the film’s overall approach as Linklater asks little of his audience other than to enjoy this fond look back at the pop-culture ephemera and signature moments of the decade. To his mind, the transition from rotary-dial telephones to push-button models is as important as the Vietnam War — a parallel that is not meant to be glib but, rather, suggest how the intensity of childhood memories can be deceiving. 

Apollo 10 1/2 treats Stan’s fantasies that he has been recruited by NASA seriously, presenting these interludes as a top-secret government mission that is only now being revealed. Regrettably, though, the novelty of the premise does not last, underlining the fact that the main character in the film is not especially dynamic. Indeed, the adult Stan we hear on the soundtrack is more compelling than the young man in front of us.

The animation, which incorporates some performance-capture, favours 2D more than Linklater’s previous animated pictures, a strategy that helps give Apollo 10 1/2 a handmade, throwback feel. Likewise, the period-specific rock songs lend the film a time-capsule quality. But while Apollo 10 1/2 is certainly nostalgic to a fault, Linklater occasionally undercuts the amber glow by pointing out the less-romantic aspects of the age — for instance, that many criticised the moon launch, arguing that all that money could be better spent on underprivileged American communities. 

Even so, the filmmaker, now in his early 60s, seems less interested in dissecting the societal currents that shaped Apollo 11 — instead, he simply wants to take a trip down memory lane, reflecting on the songs he heard and the board games he played. By this point, the 1960s have been sufficiently chronicled and celebrated, but the specificity of Linklater’s portrait nevertheless has a poignancy to it. For all the listing of beloved film stars and local landmarks, such as the Astrodome, Apollo 10 1/2 is ultimately about how individuals filter historic events through the prism of their own experience. Stan didn’t actually walk on the moon, but often it is how we remember things — whether or not those memories are accurate — that matters most of all.