Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood

Drawn to the Past

or

"Well, You Know How Memory Works..."

 

Some film-makers go back to recapture their youth. Supposedly, Orson Welles made The Magnificent Ambersons because it reminded him so much of his early childhood. Fellini made Amarcord. Francois Truffaut made The 400 Blows. George Lucas made American Graffiti. Francis Coppola drew on his family life on quite a few of his films. One always gets the impression from Wes Anderson's films that he's tapping into his early years. Robert Benton made Places in the Heart. Mel Brooks produced My Favorite Year. Noah Baumbach made The Squid and the Whale. The trend seems to be gathering momentum. Alfonso Cuaron made Roma. Lee Isaac Chung made Minari. Last year, Kenneth Branagh made Belfast. Paul Thomas Anderson made Licorice Pizza. Spielberg's next movie is The Fabelmans, which started as a screenplay by his sister, now adapted by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, and based on...growing up Spielberg.

 

Richard Linklater seems to specialize in it—both Dazed and Confused and Boyhood are coming of age movies drawn from his past. 

And now, he's hitting the nail on the head with Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood(streaming on Netflix), using animation to literally draw his past, growing up as a "space kid" in a Houston suburb during America's race to the Moon. A self-described "fabulist", Stan (Milo Coy, voiced as a narrating adult by Jack Black) is a clear-eyed recounting of everything about his childhood, from schoolyard games, pop culture, the usual fascinations and distractions of a male kid before he notices girls, but when it comes to the space program, his imagination takes him out of this world. In this way, he's a more extreme version of his Dad (Bill Wise), who works in shipping at NASA, but from listening to him, you'd think the whole program depends on him.

Stan is one day recruited by a couple of NASA officials, who, noting, his extraordinary abilities playing in the schoolyard, say that he's just the kid to take care of a little problem the space agency has—they've built the Lunar Excursion Module just a little too small to hold an adult, so they want to send him into space him to test land it on the Moon in secret before Apollo 11 attempts it in front of the whole wide televised world.* They'll explain his absence that he's "at camp" so the parents aren't concerned and nobody asks any questions, and then the kid will get a condensed version of the years of training in a month, so that he'll be best prepared do all the things that three astronauts can do...alone. With such a well thought-out plan, what could go wrong?

Yeah, it's not a documentary. But, you wouldn't know it from the rest of it. The details that Linklater fills his tale with are spot-on and recognizable to anyone growing up in the 1960's. From the eclectic library of "oddity" music to the touchstones of movies, games and TV (the rights issues on this thing must have been enormous). As one of those old coots who remember that time, Apollo 10½ made long-dormant synapses firing off every few moments, whereas younger viewers may be traumatized by the era's ever-present habit of smoking (in the house!!), neighborhood DDT "runs" and the last vestiges of the Eisenhower era of fashion. Heck, this was the era before computers and cell-phones; that's enough to discourage any millennial from time-traveling back to it.

One little error in this—Planet of the Apes would probably have had a second feature as part of a double-bill.

Those expecting a straight-ahead SpaceCamp kiddie space adventure will probably be miffed that Linklater spends so much of the film's screen-time on Earth-nostalgia—it's fully two-thirds of the film—rather than creating some complicated space scenario. Hey, it's his fantasy—believe me, at the time going to the moon was enough, and the revolutionary kid's space movie, Star Wars, was still eight years away. Plus, there's only so much you can do with a "going-to-the-moon" scenario, that is if you're going to stick with science fact in your science fantasy. Going to the Moon meant a lot of switch-flipping, dial monitoring, math, and keeping your lunch down until you had to do something that might kill you, like try to land the most-unlikely flying machine ever engineered on a pillar of flame without landing on a crater lip and toppling over.

For me, the nostalgia is the fun part (although it may feel as strange as steam-punk to anyone born this century). The space stuff is well-tread territory we've seen before and can smirk at here for its presumptions and naivete in its dream-like simplicity. Because it is a dream. It was a dream. It will continue to be a dream until they have a McDonald's on the Moon...and the other common things that made up daily life in Houston of 1969. And it was a dream shared by a planet full of sky-watchers, whose parents did the same, who can trace their lineage to the hominids who wondered what that thing in the sky was and watched its travels anticipating that time it might move closer and crash on us like a rock...as other rocks do.

And if Apollo 10½ doesn't recreate the moon landing as diligently as First Man did, what of it? It does recreate—just as carefully—what it was like being a kid...in thrall with the Moon.

* Yeah. No. I won't go into it but there are a LOT of reasons why this isn't real, but merely a child's fantasy with all the logic of a child's fantasy ("You ever get a 100% on your math tests? No? Well, there ya go..."). It's funny...there WAS an Apollo 10 a few months before with the mission to do everything Apollo 11 was supposed to do EXCEPT land. They went within 9 miles of the lunar surface and had to come back, without going that last 1%. Imagine how THAT felt. Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan and John Young were the astronauts on that frustrating mission. Young and Cernan got to land on the Moon and Cernan is the last man to walk on the Moon...so far.