Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

★★★½
Give me the option to choose one director’s works that I could take with me to a deserted island (which has a power source, television and D.V.D. player of course), and I would choose Richard Linklater and his astonishing lineup of amazing stories. Other than the unexceptional School of Rock (which Andrew Lloyd Webber turned into an unexceptional play) and Fast Food Nation, Linklater's output has been consistently remarkable. His careful study of Generation X through the years in all its highs (the Before trilogy) and lows (subUrbia) is the result of a curious Baby Boomer eye on the generation after his own. He has fondly recalled his own generation's coming of age (Dazed and Confused), but perhaps he sees the Xers, the latchkey kids, the Oregon Trailers, as both a proper continuation of and a direct result of his contemporaries. Baby Boomers have been getting a bad rap lately (the moronic "Okay boomer" taunt being one manifestation), but Linklater sees them (and himself) from a different angle. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood isn't just a space movie, but it is also a celebration of a childhood shaped by the realization that the works of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke were coming close to fruition. It was a promise ultimately unfulfilled, but what a time to dream about it. The catalyst was right there on television, and in the case of young Stanley, right across town.

Adult Stanley (Jack Black) narrates this animated tale of growing up in suburban Houston through the eyes of his younger self, a dreamer whose family could have been modeled after millions of families in the late '60s. There was the pro-Vietnam War father and the older sister who looked like she might be falling in with the S.D.S., and there was the young boy too young to understand any of that. What Stanley (Milo Coy) does understand is how the space program could open the doors to the future, and how he could dream about it and see those dreams come true. It was an exciting time. He gets his first taste of adventure when two NASA agents arrive at his school to recruit him for a top secret project to send a kid to the moon. NASA built a moon lander too small for an adult, so rather than scrap the whole thing and start over, NASA decided to use it anyway. Stanley’s cover will be summer camp, but he will instead train for space travel and go to the moon unbeknownst to his family. Stanley agrees.

Before we get to the meat of his training, we are treated to life growing up in Houston and the ‘60s. There is a lot to recognize here. Linklater celebrates life outdoors when kids didn’t require supervision and spontaneously came up with ways to occupy their time in the presence of other kids. The tumultuous elements of that decade are on the periphery, though they sometimes intrude through the television or while traveling about. Stanley’s mother helpfully points out the hippies in a mocking manner, but by and large Stanley’s childhood was grounded in trips to the beach and riding in the backs of pick-up trucks with other kids and without restraints. This carefree method of transportation lasted into the early ‘90s, which was the last time I did it. Paddling existed in schools; this practice endured into the ‘80s, though my dad denied my school the ability to use it on me on a permission form. Linklater lovingly presents this era as a record of childhood unencumbered by distractive little devices. These scenes might go on too long for some, but for me, it was a journal of a way of life no longer found, and I relished it. The movie is a nostalgia trip not just for the Baby Boomers but for Generation X and the oldest of the Millennials.

Back to training. Stanley prepares for his trip to the moon. His family is watching on T.V. as liftoff occurs. Actual broadcasts, including Walter Cronkite’s legendary coverage of the landing, are recreated here using the same animation style that Linklater used to breathe life into his masterpiece Waking Life and his Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly. This serves two purposes. This presentation gives the movie a dreamlike quality to make us yearn for a simpler time. The animation also complements a sudden shift in the narrative. We realize that Stanley’s story wasn’t exactly forthcoming in the details. Once we realize the perspective, we can appreciate the use of animation as a device to highlight Stanley’s imaginative reconstruction of these events. He’s an adventurer, and even as an adult, he fondly remembers his desire to be part of history. He initially downplayed his selection as the first kid on the moon because it made sense to him that he should go. Who else would it be? He grew up in NASA’s backyard, after all.

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood is precisely that. It is about a childhood reared on pulp fantasy novels about space travel and put to use when the country needs it. It is also about a time and place that no longer exists—a place that Linklater probably thinks was an environment most suitable for a child to enter his formative years and preferable over today’s social climate. The animation is beautiful. It lacks the fractured structure of Waking Life, but that was a philosophical movie about a young man inhabiting an unreal world. A Scanner Darkly involved government coverups and characters experiencing drug-induced paranoia. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood sees the world through a child’s eye with awe and wonder. Finally, Linklater’s movie is an impressive recreation of a monumental event in history passed through rotoscoping techniques to give us a fresh way to revisit the moon landing in all its glory. Stanley drifts off to sleep when he should be awake, but we know what he’s dreaming.

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