There’s a genuine, welcome sense of play to Richard Linklater’s “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood,” and it’s present right off the bat, from the opening frames. This Netflix production marks the filmmaker’s return to rotoscope animation, the ingenious and striking drawn-over-the-top method that he brought into the mainstream with “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly.” The technique’s real-but-not qualities were just right for those films, cranking up their (respectively) dreamlike and paranoid qualities; here, the M.O. is entirely different.
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We open on the playground of Ed White Elementary in the Houston suburbs, circa spring of 1969,where little Stanley (voiced by Josh Wiggins) is at recess with his fellow fourth-graders. His kickball wizardry is observed by two men in suits (Zachary Levi and Glen Powell); it turns out they’re with the FBI. “We accidentally built the lunar module… a little too small,” one explains. “But we’re not gonna let that set us back!” And so he is drafted on a top-secret mission, to train and test the module in advance of that summer’s Apollo 11 moon landing. “No one can know about this,” he’s told. “This meeting? This never happened.”
Jump cut to our boy in the midst of his astronaut training, but only briefly. “Ok pause, let’s forget all this, we’ll come back to this later,” explains our narrator, the adult Stanley (Jack Black) – who then embarks on a forty-plus minute sidebar of childhood memories. Early on, Stanley admits, “I guess I was what you’d call a fabulist, which is just a nicer way of saying ‘persistent liar,’” and it’s clear that the “Apollo 10½” mission is a fairy tale – a “The Last Starfighter”-style flight of fancy (literally).
But this wraparound story, which could have been played at full-length as a family adventure (along the lines of Linklater’s pal Robert Rodriguez’s “Spy Kids” series), is just an entry point for Linklater – a bookend for the material he’s really interested in, to craft a shambling hangout memory play, along the lines of “Licorice Pizza,”“Once Upon a Time In Hollywood,” and, of course, his own “Dazed and Confused.” He sets the scene of that summer by rotoscoping real newsreel footage, scratches and grain and all (a nice touch), but he mostly wants to explain that feel of this specific time and place, in such close proximity to the home of the space program, that summer of moon fever.
So, with the help of Black’s relaxed narration, we see how young Stanley (clearly Linklater’s avatar) and his siblings spent their days, where they ate, what they were watching and talking about (with riffs on “2001” and their various television favorites). There are neighborhood adventures: going “out to play,” enjoying board games, prank calling, chasing foul balls at the baseball field, raiding the throwaway wood piles of nearby construction sites to build forts. Stanley is the baby of the large brood, so he recalls family dynamics – affection for his sisters and idolization of his brothers – and memories, of dad’s chintziness, mom’s hipness, and grandma the conspiracy theorist. It’s not all rose-colored glasses; we see corporal punishment and adult intimidation, as well as violent playground games, at school, and even the nostalgic glow of the moon landing is colored by the controversies surrounding it (of the mostly-white make-up of NASA, and the outsized cost of the project).
Linklater (who also wrote the screenplay) returns to the NASA tall tale around the halfway mark, as cool-as-a-cucumber Stanley’s recalls “being more excited than nervous” when “we carried out Apollo 10½’s secret mission without a hitch.” He returns home to watch the real, “official” landing, “But to me it was like some kind of dream – the only person on earth who knew exactly what they were experiencing. It was like I was up there with ‘em!” And so, in dramatizing the launch, the landing, and the days in between, Linklater interweaves Stanley’s memories of his imagined mission with archival coverage of the real one. It’s a clever and involving way to reframe an oft-told story – and to beautifully animate it, making this familiar footage new again.
Some of the needle drops are a weeeeee bit obvious (“The Age of Aquarious”? C’mon), and even at a reasonable 98 minutes, “Apollo 10½” runs a bit long; some may grow exhausted by all of the detailed memories, particularly when he dips back into that territory after the launch to recall the family’s summer fun (drive-in movies, beach visits, Frito pies at the pool, AstroWorld adventures). The jankiness of this structure is a bit much, at least on first viewing, drifting into memoir material for so long that it the picture feeling shapeless for a good long while. But then again, that’s our Linklater, and complaining about narrative aimlessness is kind of like coming out of a Scorsese movie bitching about all the voice-over. It’s a new Linklater, is the point, and that’s good news indeed. [B]
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