Review: Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

Image courtesy of Netflix.

A good natured and nostalgic memory piece - sort of similar to a Terence Davies film or Woody Allen's "Radio Days," but animated, set in the late 1960s and populated mostly by young people - "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood" is partially a typical Richard Linklater picture - a hangout movie filled with needle drops and aimless young people; and also rotoscoped, an animation style the director previously utilized with the dreamy fantasia "Waking Life" and the sci-fi drama "A Scanner Darkly" - but also a science fiction fantasy that most likely takes place in its lead character's head.

I say most likely because although the film's finest scenes involve Jack Black narrating the story of a young boy's youth in 1969 Houston, and including incredible layers of detail on everything from the second-rate TV shows the kids watch in the film to the popular snacks or automobiles of the time and, of course, the music, the film's other plotline involves young hero and narrator Stan being chosen by NASA to take part in a test run to the moon prior to the actual July 1969 landing.

The film plays this plotline straightforward, so it's really up to the viewer to determine whether it's all supposed to take place in Stan's imagination or whether we're supposed to extend our disbelief that the boy is picked by two government agents because NASA must first send up a smaller craft to the moon for the test run, and only a child would fit into it. 

The film leads with this storyline, but does a freeze frame - and an almost literal "you might wonder how I got into this situation" piece of narration - and flashes back about a year prior to Stan's trip to the moon. These flashbacks encompass at least half - if not more - of the film, and they are the most delightful. 

In the style of a typical Linklater film, the scenes are almost free-form in terms of narrative. We learn that Stan's father is a paper pusher at NASA, and that his five siblings are all more accomplished or cool in various ways than Stan.

The level of detail about what it must have been like growing up in Houston in the late 1960s is meticulous. Stan seemingly consumes every available bit of the culture, from episodes of "Dark Shadows" and B-level movies - such as "The Frozen Dead" or early Robert Altman effort "Countdown" - to interviews on TV with Janis Joplin and trips to Baskin Robbins, where his sister works and hands out free ice cream to her siblings. 

There are iconic images we've all seen before - troops in Vietnam carrying their wounded out of the jungle to assassinations and clips from famous movies, such as "2001: A Space Odyssey," that give off a dreamy vibe as they are presented in a rotoscoped animated style.

There's a breezy style to these early scenes, and while it's slightly missed when the plot thread involving Stan's training with NASA kicks in, it helps to set a tone that it comes around to again at the end during the moon landing and Stan's family's viewing of it. The picture captures the excitement of the landmark moment, although Stan mostly sleeps through it due to extracurricular activities that stole his energy during the course of that day.

It's almost a throwaway line, but there's a great one late in the film as Stan's parents put him to bed after he drifted in and out of consciousness as the rest of the family watched Neil Armstrong take one giant leap for mankind. Stan's father is disappointed that his son missed the incredible moment that he played a small role in his job at NASA in bringing to fruition, but his mother relays a wise comment: "You know how memory works. Even if he was asleep, he'll someday think he saw it all."

And that's the tone set early on in "Apollo 10 1/2" - that of a lovely dream with snippets of memory filling in for narrative, and the hazy splicing together of pieces of music, news clips, scenes from movies, glimpses of childhood in moments that made great impressions - such as the manner in which some tough neighborhood kids managed to rip off the local arcade - and other fragments of images that we store in our brains and later reflect upon as pivotal moments. Whether everything occurred the way we remember it is beside the point.

Many of Linklater's best films - "Boyhood" and the "Before" films - play with the concept of time, so this one's views on the limitations of memory, which are informed by the passage of time and our dreams and imagination, fit in nicely with his overall body of work. "Apollo 10 1/2" may not be as revelatory as "Boyhood," and while the dreamlike nature of "Waking Life" is hard to replicate (especially for a third film using rotoscope animation), his latest is an obviously personal picture that is often a joy to behold.