Mark Reviews Movies: APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 31, 2022

Writer/director Richard Linklater's Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is likely autobiographical—in somewhat the same way its central character goes to the moon just before the Apollo 11 mission. It's all a dream in a certain way, and while some dreams have more of a foundation in reality than others, all dreams feel real in some form or fashion.

Linklater was born in 1960, which would have made him about the same age as his child protagonist at the time of the moon landing in July of 1969. Like the kid in this film, he grew up in the Houston area. The space center there would have been such an integral part of the community that NASA's endeavor to land a man safely on the moon and return him home probably felt very personal.

The boy here remembers astronauts flying jets over their subdivision and the loud boom of the planes breaking the sound barrier. That almost certainly happened, but he also recalls when two men in suits arrived at his school during recess on day. They had seen him playing kickball, and clearly, that kind of skill on the playground would easily translate into getting an accidentally miniaturized version of the lunar lander on the moon's surface. This definitely didn't happen, but wouldn't it have been nice if it had? Why couldn't it have happened? If you take that question to equally mean that the kid wanted it to happen and that his imagination made it so, you get a sense of the mode in which Linklater's animated memoir is working.

His point isn't the authenticity of specific events. Instead, it's the mood of childhood in general and of a childhood in this place, at this time, and with this sense of history in the making amidst so much else that seems and was so very ordinary.

All of our childhood memories are probably like that in some way. There'll be some vague sense of one thing—or many things and separate events merged into one in the mind—or another that felt normal, and then there's the direct memory or awareness of something pivotal occuring.

For Linklater's generation, it's the moon landing, which our protagonist may or may watch live on television, since he's so worn out after a day of some other important but relatively normal event that happened directly to him. For another generation (specifically this critic's generation) in terms of the space program, it might have been watching or believing that one watched the tragedy of the Space Shuttle Challenger. How much of these memories are actually memories, and how much it is simply the retrospective knowledge that such events are important pieces of the history through which we lived?

The fascinating thing about Linklater's film is how long it takes for a moon landing—both the kid's imagined one and the one that actually happened—to figure into this tale. It's mostly about day-to-day life for Stanley (Milo Coy), his family, his friends, and the neighborhood in which he lives. As narrated by an adult Stanley (voiced by Jack Black), there's almost as much significance to the games played in the backyards and parks, the special trips to certain locations of interest, and the foods being eaten as there is to Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the lunar surface for the first time in human history—well, the second, if you believe the kid's tale.

In a way, it's a bit odd, considering how the story begins with Stanley being recruited by those be-suited men (played by Glen Powell and Zachary Levi) for a top-secret mission. Through some kind of design or manufacturing error, the lunar lander for the upcoming Apollo 11 mission was built into something child-sized, and instead of letting the expensive thing go to waste, they ask Stanley to become an astronaut and make sure the real, adult-manned mission to the moon will actually succeed. He can't tell anyone, even the members of his big family.

The narrative literally stops as Stanley trains for the mission. From there, it goes backwards and sideways and laterally.

Linklater's screenplay takes us through a sort of stream-of-consciousness remembrance of what it was like to grow up in a house with six children of various ages—and interests—and two parents from a working-to-middle class trying to spread a dollar as far it would go, in this suburban area with a kid's imagination having to a long way to make fun, and in this specific time when, in retrospect, it's kind of a miracle that children survived some of those games and other things of the era. Stanley is the overlooked kid with five older siblings, and his parents have them doing a lot of chores around the house. It's impressive how many games they do play, considering all those chores, as well as the amount of television and the number of movies they watch. One of those games results in a kid getting a compound fracture, and that doesn't take into account how the neighborhood children would follow the DDT truck on their bikes.

All of these memories are rendered in a rotoscope style of animation (in which live-action footage is traced and colored over). While Linklater has used this method before, it imbues this reminiscence with the bright, lively colors and fully recognizable but somewhat imprecise imagery of a memory or a dream—if there's even much of a difference after a certain amount of time has passed. Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is about living through a moment in history, but more to the point, it's about acknowledging that, at a certain point, everyone's childhood becomes history.

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