Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood

APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD   ***

Richard Linklater

2022

IDEA:  A young boy in Houston, Texas circa 1968-69 dreams of himself being recruited by NASA to fly to the moon.

BLURB:  For much of its runtime, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood tends to play like your garden-variety Baby Boomer nostalgia trip. Linklater wastes precious little time getting to (and through) the requisite hits of late-60s American culture, with major sociopolitical events and pop-cultural artifacts alike condensed into rapid-cut montages. Attended by the ubiquitous narration of Jack Black as the adult version of our prepubescent protagonist, these parts of the film evoke the digestible, somewhat didactic historical summarizing of The Wonder Years, including that show’s distinctly white, middle-class perspective. And yet, without completely dispelling the sense of banality, Linklater makes Apollo 10 ½ into a uniquely affecting, often startlingly tactile memory piece, overflowing with a reverence for the physical details and sensations of a time and place long gone. While his cultural reference points are contemporaneous television shows, movies, songs, and sites - all conjured with the awestruck thrill of rediscovery - other elements resurrect more timeless childhood pleasures, such as the infantile contentedness of being carried to bed after falling asleep in the backseat of the car. As in Linklater’s Boyhood, these moments accumulate into a bittersweet portrait of youth as a fleeting dream, an idealized mirage that never quite existed the way it does in memory. The rotoscoped animation enhances the quality of vague unreality, real life literally embellished in retrospect. Linklater may view the past with a certain measure of melancholy, but he doesn’t fall prey to reactionary eulogizing. His emphasis on the promise of the once-thriving American space program reveals his thesis: that the seemingly lost excitement of the past is merely dormant, waiting to be reignited in new forms.