When Richard Linklater set out to make Dazed and Confused (1993), the director claimed his look at high school in the ‘70s was meant to be anti-nostalgic. But has there been a director as obsessed with the passage of time as Linklater? Most of his oeuvre features ruminations on the past, the changes we go through over the years and even the notion of time stopping or bending when we’re dreaming. His latest film, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood fully embraces nostalgia, but in a sneaky Linklaterian way that also incorporates the wide-open world of dreams.
Premiering directly on Netflix, Apollo 10 ½ is a much-needed win for Linklater. His work since the groundbreaking Boyhood (2014) has been spotty. Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) was a lot of fun but felt slight while neither Last Flag Flying (2017) and Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019) felt like a Linklater film, but rather studio claptrap. Apollo 10 ½ succeeds not because of its half-baked plot about a secret trip to the moon featuring a young boy prior to the Apollo 11 mission. Rather, it gives Linklater a chance to explore the Texas of his youth and how the impending reality of man walking on the moon gripped his friends and family.
Linklater, born in 1960, would have been a few weeks shy of his ninth birthday when Apollo 11 carried Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin into space. And that is what Apollo 10 ½ is really about; the idea that his young protagonist goes to the moon is a bit of a lark. Instead, the film allows Linklater to stretch out, sit down and tell us what things were like in Houston for a kid during the summer of ’69.
What is most amazing about Apollo 10 ½ is learning about what still survives in American popular culture and what has fallen by the wayside since 1969. Jack Black narrates as an older version of Stan (Milo Coy as Linklater’s child stand-in) telling us about the records, television shows and movies he and his five siblings gobbled up like the TV dinners his family ate while watching the Apollo 11 launch. Stanley’s father works for NASA and while his kids don’t necessarily share his enthusiasm for the lunar mission, the excitement is palpable for Stanley and his family.
In many ways, Apollo 10 ½ is a kissing cousin to both Boyhood and Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life in its depiction of a Texas childhood. Linklater shows us kids being kids and, in many ways, that is more interesting than Stan’s moon mission. We even see echoes of Malick in how Stan and his friends followed behind the trucks spraying DDT, playing in the clouds of insecticide. The wide-eyed wonder of childhood is deftly captured here, from the filial devotion to a television show (“Dark Shadows”) to marveling at new-fangled inventions (Stan and his siblings make songs out of the tones of a new push-button phone). It is also a great pairing with Apollo 11, Todd Douglas Miller’s 2019 documentary.
Apollo 10 ½ dabbles a bit in the history of the ‘60s, but it’s mainly seen on the television or via Stan’s parents deriding hippies. Stan and his siblings have an insulated childhood, the type of Wonder Bread peddled in many narratives about the American Dream, but Linklater acknowledges the safety of this existence without beating us over the head with words like “privilege.” For those of us who had similar childhoods, we see echoes in the idyll.
Like all good cinephiles, Linklater also injects his love of film. Stan, who has seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, bores his friends talking about the film’s ending. He and his siblings go to a triple-feature at the local cinema. Stan and his family go to the drive-in and then bicker about which movie they want to see. Like Truffaut, Linklater must have also lost himself in the movies as a child.
Like past works such as Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2016), Linklater has chosen to use rotoscoping animation to capture the dreamy existence of his childhood. Perhaps Stan’s lunar mission is a metaphor for the ascent into adulthood. He may soon lose all the innocence that comes with being a child on summer vacation where the days stretch on forever and anything is possible. But the wonder still exists, even if deep inside. Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, helps us reconnect to that.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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