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There are those who insist moon landing never happened. As far as I know, director Richard Linklater is not among them, but his new film oddly offers his own revisionist account of what NASA was doing in the summer of 1969. Before Neil Armstrong. took the giant leapIt seems that a Texan fourth grader named Stan has landed on the lunar surface from the landing module.
Stan’s story is told by his adult self (voiced by Jack Black). This isn’t exactly a conspiracy theory, it’s more of what Tom Sawyer calls a stretcher—the kind of thread where pretending to believe can be fun. The movie, which premiered on Netflix this week, is full title “Apollo 10½: Memories of a Space Age Childhood,” and Stan’s astronaut tales are shiny threads in the cozy fabric of baby boom nostalgia.
At that time, many children dreamed of going to the moon. Stan’s imaginative adventures are filtered through animation techniques that are both dreamlike and precise, so they fit seamlessly into the meticulously rendered suburban reality. (The head of the animation says that between Linklater and previous collaborations “waking life” and “A Dark Browser”) And that’s what the movie is all about: remembering what it was like to be a young American in the ’60s. Black’s voice-over has the sarcastic, can-you-can-believe quality of entertaining young people with stories about the old days, as if Stan were a father (or even a grandfather, at this point). Or if they’ve heard of these things before, maybe they’ll just zip them up.
But give the old man some rest. “Apollo 10½” may not work with the freshest ingredients — “Great Years‘ threw rhymes and kickballed similar-generational grasses—but it’s still a lively and fascinating ride down memory lane. The film’s greatest strength may be for audiences in Stan’s generation, who are likely to appreciate the film’s meticulous sense of detail and indulgent, relaxed spirit.
Stan is the youngest of six children, a “Brady Bunch” configuration of three boys and three girls living with their families on the outskirts of Houston. My dad works for NASA – in shipping and receiving – and is a bit of a curmudgeon, a bit of an eccentric, mostly charitable dad. My mother is troubled, sarcastic and resourceful, running the house like a bustling small business.
Things were definitely different back then. There was a lot more smoking and a general disregard for the safety of children who piled up in the back of pickup trucks, rowed frequently at school, and were free to cycle without helmets through clouds of DDT. There were fights over who controlled the television and hi-fi, and there were plenty of good things to watch and listen to even without cable or Spotify: “The Beverly Hillbillies” and the Monkees are just two of them.
There was, of course, the Vietnam War, racial conflicts, and political assassinations. “Apollo 10½” pays some attention to all of this, but also points out that the wider world may seem far away to a 9-year-old in the suburbs of Houston. Unlike the moon, which is suddenly, miraculously reachable.
Linklater captures the drama and tension surrounding the Apollo 11 mission, as well as how it endured everyday patterns of life. It is not the first time that he uses layered animation on live performances, and this digital rotoscoping technique is particularly suited to the nuances of gesture and facial expression. Stan’s father leaning forward while watching the news, the side glances between Stan and his siblings, the tired stoicism of their mother’s stance – it’s all beautifully subtle and more cinematic than cartoony.
And “Apollo 10½” is more of a humble memoir than a buzz space epic. His view of the past is stubbornly rose-colored, with its social and emotional rough edges softened by the passage of time and the filmmaker’s genial temperament. The moon landing itself is groundbreaking, transformative, and yet something else that happens in a child’s eventful, mundane life: it’s a small step after all.
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
It is rated PG-13. Smoking and other suspicious behavior. Duration: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and above Netflix.
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