Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood | Little White Lies

Apol­lo 10½: A Space Age Childhood

02 Apr 2022 / Released: 01 Apr 2022

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Glen Powell, Milo Coy, and Richard Linklater

Starring Jack Black

Group of young people in dim lighting, sitting and interacting around a table.
Group of young people in dim lighting, sitting and interacting around a table.
3

Anticipation.

Netflix have allowed this one to fly a little under the rader.

5

Enjoyment.

One of those movies you just want to watch from the beginning as soon as the credits roll.

5

In Retrospect.

A beautiful, moving family portrait set against the epic backdrop of history.

This mag­nif­i­cent mid-cen­tu­ry mem­o­ry piece from Richard Lin­klater is up there with the director’s finest films.

The infec­tious­ly inquis­i­tive Tex­an film­mak­er Richard Lin­klater has, in his near­ly 30 years behind the tiller, made numer­ous films using a dis­tinc­tive ani­ma­tion tech­nique called Roto­scop­ing. It’s a process which dig­i­tal­ly syn­the­sis­es live footage to give it the visu­al sheen and expres­sive capac­i­ties of tra­di­tion­al ani­ma­tion. His 2001 fea­ture Wak­ing Life employed the medi­um to play­ful­ly unpick the nature of dreams, while his 2006 Phillip K Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly used it to express the ways in which drugs can warp human perception.

With his excep­tion­al new fea­ture Apol­lo 10½: A Space Age Child­hood – made for and released by Net­flix: with trag­ic lit­tle fan­fare, it must be added – he returns to Roto­scop­ing for an effort­less­ly charm­ing and intri­cate essay on nos­tal­gia, mem­o­ry and how the crit­i­cal events of his­to­ry inter­play with the minia­ture dra­mas of our every­day lives. Things are cer­tain­ly low and lazy for Hous­ton-based high school stu­dent and aca­d­e­m­ic all-rounder Stan (Milo Coy), whose just-above-aver­age acu­men sees him head-hunt­ed by the nabobs at NASA for a secret mission.

It’s the late 1960s, a time when wide-eyed inter­plan­e­tary endeav­our was used as a diver­sion­ary tac­tic for America’s many, many polit­i­cal woes. The famous Apol­lo 11 mis­sion was still some time off, yet this mis­chie­vous piece of YA counter-his­to­ry pro­pos­es that NASA man­u­fac­tured the lunar mod­ule a few sizes too small and need­ed some­one of a more petite stature than the John Glenns and Neil Arm­strongs of this world to head upstairs and walk on the Moon instead – and Stan is their man.

We’re quick­ly tee’d up for a Boy’s Own adven­ture movie about a low­er-mid­dle class kid being offered the chance to live the dream of most (male) mor­tals with a keen sense of imag­i­na­tion. Yet Lin­klater just as swift­ly dou­bles back on that pro­pos­al to instead offer a scin­til­lat­ing, hour-long cul­tur­al his­to­ry of Hous­ton and its envi­rons which demon­strates how the var­i­ous tides of Amer­i­can his­to­ry con­verged to pro­duce an epochal moment in the annals of human history.

Rocket launch over playing field with group of children watching.

The entire film is nar­rat­ed by Jack Black as adult Stan, and his casu­al, almost lack­adaisi­cal into­na­tion beau­ti­ful­ly empha­sis­es the chasm between what our mind opts to com­mit to mem­o­ry and what his­to­ry deems to be valu­able. It’s like flick­ing through a gor­geous, mid-cen­tu­ry fam­i­ly pho­to album in which the lives of Stan, his par­ents and his five sib­lings are ren­dered with tremen­dous affec­tion and detail.

In a sim­i­lar vein to 2014’s Boy­hood, Lin­klater is more inter­est­ed in life’s ethe­re­al flot­sam than he is the life-chang­ing spec­ta­cles that dis­rupt the time­line of a fam­i­ly. Mem­o­ry is about the real­ly impor­tant stuff: what we watched; what we ate; where we worked; what we read; who we fan­cied; who we bul­lied; where we played, etc. Linklater’s human­ist phi­los­o­phy – that life is the char­ac­ter-build­ing prod­uct of all the triv­ial phe­nom­e­na we encounter and expe­ri­ence – is pushed once again here, and it’s a the­sis he’s been expand­ing on since his still-won­der­ful 1990 debut, Slacker.

Once we loop back to Stan’s train­ing and his voy­age to eter­ni­ty, we’re giv­en a liv­ing room POV of the episode that’s more focused on how it affect­ed peo­ple emo­tion­al­ly than the tech­ni­cal aspects of how it was achieved. Due to the fact he has secret­ly walked on the moon already (sum­mer camp was the cov­er), Stan falls asleep as the Eagle lands on live TV and Wal­ter Cronkite attempts to hold back the tears.

His dad com­plains that he won’t be able to tell his grand­kids that he wit­nessed as the first man walked on the Moon, to which his moth­er replies, Well, you know how mem­o­ry works – even if he was asleep, he’ll some­day think he saw it all.” Apol­lo 10 ½ is about the sub­jec­tive inti­ma­cy of his­to­ry, and how all events are just an equal­ly-sized, vibrant­ly-coloured frag­ment in the kalei­do­scope of our mind.

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