There’s 1960s nostalgia overload in Linklater’s third animated feature, which is a mostly engaging take on the cultural phenomena surrounding the 1969 Moon landing, told through one boy’s fantasy of becoming an astronaut.
Review #2,661
Dir. Richard Linklater
2022 | USA | Animation, Drama | 98 min | 1.85:1 & 2.35:1 | English
PG13 (Netflix rating) for some suggestive material, injury images, and smoking
Cast: Milo Coy, Jack Black, Zachary Levi
Plot: A man narrates stories of his life as a 10-year-old boy in 1969 Houston, weaving tales of nostalgia with a fantastical account of a journey to the moon.
Awards: –
Distributor: Netflix
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – 1969 Moon Landing; Suburban America; Popular Culture
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Normal
Audience Type: Slightly Mainstream
Viewed: Netflix
Spoilers: No
American indie darling Richard Linklater has been such an eclectic filmmaker over the last 30 years that he has even made animated features. His latest for Netflix, Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, is his third, after Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).
While considerably less dark, Apollo 10½ cranks the nostalgia level to the maximum as it brings us back to the 1960s when the Space Race was a thing, culminating in the 1969 Moon landing.
Told through one boy’s (Stan) childhood fantasy of becoming an astronaut, Linklater’s film almost feels like a quirky documentary of the times as he navigates friends in school and his family.
Mainly narrational in approach, some of the finest parts of Apollo 10½ are its detailed info on the cultural milieu as old television shows are brought up, as well as different music bands, and in one scene, a brief playback of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
“I guess I was what you’d call a fabulist, which is just a nicer way of saying persistent liar.”
In fact, I found the film most engaging when it is painting the experiences of the so-called suburban Texan childhood. For it to be rendered entirely in animation, it is at once visually stimulating yet also distancing as if we are witnessing a slice of history unfolding.
I think this gives Linklater’s film a more sobering quality that younger audiences may not be able to appreciate. As for the sequences involving the Moon landing, they take on a slightly surreal route as Stan imagines himself to be Neil Armstrong.
This would make a great triple-bill with Damien Chazelle’s underrated biopic, First Man (2018), and the stunning documentary, Apollo 11 (2019).
The theme of childhood has been done to death, but in Apollo 10½, while it may fall into the conventional trappings of nostalgia and memory, what I found insightful was the American sociocultural fabric at the time as well as its paradoxes—while several Americans were sent to the Moon, many more were sent to die in Vietnam.
Grade: B+
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 