Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood Review: Richard Linklater’s Dreams of Flight

Richard Linklater, across such films as Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, and Everybody Wants Some!!, crafts richly authentic milieus that draw from his life. But the filmmaker is less interested in regaling us with stories about the glorious past than in exploring, in almost anthropological detail, what it was like to be alive in a certain place and time.

Now, in his unusual animated fantasy-comedy-documentary hybrid Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, Linklater points his auto-anthropological eye toward the social environment of his own upbringing: the ever-sprawling suburbs of late-’60s Houston, where Spam is for dinner, touch-tone phones are an exciting novelty, and seemingly everyone’s dad works for NASA.

That includes 10-year-old Stanley’s (Milo Coy) father (Bill Wise), an Apollo program functionary who fills a largely undefined position in the unglamorous realm of shipping and receiving. More exciting is the role designated to Stan himself by two shadowy government agents (Zachary Levi and Glen Powell) who’ve scoped out the bright fourth-grader for a special mission: NASA inadvertently built the lunar module too small, and they need an appropriately sized individual to take it for a test run in advance of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

This fantastical plotline is introduced just a few minutes into Apollo 10½ and then summarily dropped for almost an hour as Linklater, via his on-screen proxy, engages in extended musings on the minutiae of growing up in the veritable shadow of Space Center Houston. An adult version of Stanley, voiced by Jack Black, delivers a firehose-stream of memories and period details, touching on everything from highly individualized remembrances about his penny-pinching father stealing plywood from a local construction site to cobble together a bootleg ping-pong table to broad reflections on popular television shows and board games.

With its omnipresent narrator engaged in wryly wistful yarn-spinning, Linklater’s film often suggests a space-age redux of A Christmas Story. In fact, the anecdotes about changing tires and getting one’s tongue stuck to a popsicle all but prove that Bob Clark’s holiday classic is an obvious reference point. But unlike that film’s co-writer and narrator, Jean Shepherd, who prized a good story above all else, Linklater is most interested in the constant push and pull between reality as it’s remembered and the world as it actually was.

Though it reflects the forward-thinking optimism of the space age, when domed stadiums and astroturf seemed to prefigure an imminent techno-utopia, Apollo 10½ provides constant reminders that the late ’60s weren’t such a rosy time for everyone. While white kids in Houston were chomping on Frito pies at the public pool, Vietnamese children were being massacred by U.S. troops. And while Stanley’s dad got paid good money to be a cog in the massive machinery of the Apollo program, many Black folks in Harlem were questioning why the government could pour so much money and resources into putting some guy on the moon while people in their own neighborhood struggle with poverty.

Even for the relatively happy Houston kids whom the film focuses on, they still struggled with the trauma of violent playground games, frequent paddlings, and toxic insecticides sprayed all over their neighborhoods. And this tension between reminiscence and reality is reflected in Apollo 10½’s animation style, which effects the nostalgic look of old Kodachrome film.

Eschewing the hypnotic rotoscoped fluidity of his prior animated work, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Linklater opts here for a gorgeous picture-postcard hyperrealism. Based on hours of home movies sourced from Houston locals, the film’s style is at once a loving reconstruction of the past as well as a layered attempt to distance the audience from the idea that any of this, even the most mundane details, happened exactly as they’re depicted.

Linklater’s quiet subversion of his film’s nostalgic reverie comes into focus when the story picks back up with Stanley’s space training. The scenes of Stan vomiting in the centrifuge, blasting off into space, and traipsing around the surface of the moon are, in a sense, perfectly realistic, and yet we know that they didn’t really happen. A 10-year-old kid didn’t really go to the moon, and the film makes no real effort to convince us that such a thing is even plausible.

But within this fable there’s a deeper truth. Only 12 people have ever stepped on the moon, and yet the experience of strolling across the lunar surface is part of our shared cultural heritage, something we each hold inside of us, whether we were one of the 400,000 who worked on the Apollo program, one of the 600 million who watched it on television, or one of the countless others who’ve absorbed the event through cultural osmosis.

In the end, Stanley doesn’t even see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s legendary moonwalk, as he falls asleep after an exhausting trip to Astroworld, the so-called “amusement park of the future.” His father is disappointed, but as his mother (Lee Eddy) remarks in the film’s thematically summative final line, “You know how memory works. Even if he was asleep, he’ll someday think he saw it all.” If Apollo 10½ is undoubtedly an affectionate nostalgia-fest, it’s also a sneakily perverse reflection on the limitations of human remembrance, ultimately suggesting that memory distorts and amplifies just as much as it preserves.