PLOT: A boy growing up in Houston, Texas, fantasizes about going to space himself on the eve of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
REVIEW: Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood is yet more proof of how important Netflix is to our modern film culture. While folks may scoff (and I’m one of them) at their big swings like Red Notice or The Adam Project, the fact remains that they still greenlight challenging fare like Jane Campion’s Power of the Dog, the upcoming Blonde, and some genuinely original movies such as Richard Linklater‘s latest. With the indie offshoots of all of the studios gone, it’s unlikely Linklater would have been given the opportunity to make his latest, and we would have missed out on this unique, impressionistic take on childhood in the shadow of the moon landing.
While it’s being billed as a kid’s fantasy of going to space around the time of Apollo 11, that’s only a tiny piece of what the movie is. Instead, it’s Linklater’s fond remembrance of life growing up in Houston. Not much happens, but it’s still utterly charming as Linklater’s alter-ego, Milo Coy’s Stanley, wanders around Houston, hangs out with his friends, goes to movies and just lives his life as a kid growing up in a much simpler time.
Linklater uses his Waking Life/ A Scanner Darkly rotoscoping technique and it works on several levels. On the one hand, it gives it that heightened vibe, perfect for animating Milo’s fantasies of space. But it also adds tremendously to the scenes on earth. We’ve seen plenty of films set in this era, but oddly animation, rather than making it feel surreal, makes it feel all the more real in some ways. Linklater can recreate 1969 in a way that’s he probably couldn’t afford to in live-action. The film’s episodic nature gives you a feeling of what life might have been like back then, with Linklater fondly depicting everything from the movies he was going to see to what TV was like back then.
This vibe won’t work for everyone, but it’s an intoxicating slice of life. Nothing much happens, but that’s ok. For ninety minutes you get to live life as a kid in 1969 Houston, with Jack Black our amiable narrator, as he’s playing the adult Stanley. Linklater has filled the movie mostly with unknowns in terms of the cast, which works to its benefit as you truly feel like you’re watching a real family. Bill Wise, a Linklater regular, plays Stanley’s dad, who has an unglamorous job at NASA, while Lee Eddy plays his mom. Other than Black, the most prominent names are Glen Powell and Zachary Levi, who play two NASA officials in Stanley’s fantasies.
Again, the episodic, slice-of-life nature of the movie won’t appeal to everyone. For those of you who thought there were too many driving scenes in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you might find this frustrating as Stanley’s effort to cheat at pinball and watch TV probably get equal importance to his fantasies of being on the moon. Still, to me, there was something hypnotic about it. The movie gives you a legitimate feel for what it must have been like to be there at such a brilliant moment in history. I can’t think of anything else quite like it.
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