Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

In his best films, writer-director Richard Linklater has a unique ability to recreate a time period, and transport his audience.  His latest film, Apollo 10 1/2, is a testament to this.  Not only is this perhaps one of his finest works, it's also destined to be one of the finest of 2022.  Using high quality rotoscope animation, a technique that paints 2D animation over live action film (a technique he used previously in his films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly), it adds a dream-like quality to what is essentially a nostalgia piece.

With Linklater having already covered the period that he was in high school with Dazed and Confused, as well as his college years with Everybody Wants Some!!, he now decides to look at the time of his early youth, having grown up in the middle of the Space Race of the 60s.  And while the film is not directly based on himself, he did add a lot of personal elements and has created a loose but engaging time capsule of what it was like to be a child in Texas during that time period.  It's focus is on the Summer of 69, and he takes us through the music, the films, the food, and what kids used to do for fun in that era, which ranged from pinball at the bowling alley, to lighting off rockets.  All of these events are seen through the eyes of 10-year-old Stan (voice by Milo Coy), whose attention is all on NASA and the space race.  And while images of Vietnam occasionally appear on the TV, they are mostly background noise to him, and the possibilities seem endless.

Like most kids in his Houston neighborhood, Stan's dad (Bill Wise) works at NASA in the Space Program, though he doesn't have a cool Astronaut job, he's a pencil pusher.  His mom (Lee Eddy) has to remind him that everyone at NASA is important.  Stan's day to day world of figuring out the trick to score free games of pinball without having to pay like the local hoodlums is interrupted when two NASA scientists (Zachary Levi and Glen Powell) present him with the opportunity to participate in a top secret mission.  They've built the lunar module too small, and need him to start training immediately.  Stan is prone to make history, but that's when the Adult Stan (who narrates the film, and whose voice is provided by frequent Linklater star Jack Black) pulls us back into the mundane of the Texas suburbs of 1969, briefly interrupted by the child's fantasy of far-off adventure beyond the stars.

For most of the film, Apollo 10 1/2 is a mix of the mundane and a child's fantastic imagination, and the skill of the film is just how effortlessly it juggles both.  At home, Stan is the youngest of six siblings, and we see the love and tension within his family, the process of making food last in a huge household, and the everyday events of going to the drive-in movie, or the pain that would set in when the Disney's Wonderful World of Color would air on Sunday evenings, because it meant that the weekend was almost over, and school was tomorrow.  It was a time when parents were much less concerned about the physical safety of their children, and let them launch dangerous rockets or pelt each other with baseballs.  He remembers the local theme park, and the music that shaped his siblings and him.

But even the mundane has a sense of nostalgia-dipped fantasy to them.  This is thanks in part to the animation style, and due also that the movie resembles a series of random memories that the adult version of the main character is sharing with us.  This is how Stan today remembers his childhood, and though we see some of the turmoil of the time, that is not his focus.  He is sharing the world he lived in at the time, both in his head with him going beyond the stars, and in the everyday.  The two combine to create a rich narrative, even though the film never really tells much of a plot.  It is strangely compelling, though.  More than just a mere nostalgia or vanity piece, this is a captivating time capsule that represents how many Stan's age want to remember that time period.  

No matter when we grew up, we remember it as a better time.  Linklater's screenplay especially remembers how just about anything seemed possible, and that there was so much possibility and hope for the future.  Sure, "duck and cover" was still being emphasized in the schools, and there was talk of the world one day being so polluted people would need to wear gas masks to go outside in the near future.  But, everyone was also looking to the stars, and we can understand how anyone at the right age could romanticize that point in time.   We may be looking at a warmly nostalgic view of the time, but it's one that's been carefully constructed, and crafted with heart, humor, and a degree of joy we seldom see in modern film.

Apollo 10 1/2 is warm and nostalgic, which means it will likely be torn apart by the cynical.  It's certainly a movie that you have to just let the passion the filmmaker feels wash over you, and if you let it, it's one of the truly unique film experiences.  Some of Linklater's recent films have found him on less stable ground than usual. (His previous film, 2019's Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, was a shockingly bland misfire.) Aiming for the stars here, he gets to be great once more.

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