Apollo 10 1/2 review: Richard Linklater finds perspective in animated nostalgia

This review was written at SXSW in 2022 by Polygon, which saw writers from the company examine the future releases.

Richard Linklater is a specialist in nostalgia. He is best known for his come-of-age films, which he made from You are confused and dazedTo Everybody wants someTo BoyhoodImmerse the audience in an era and place, capture its nuances, create characters that are real, and then immerse them again. The rotoscoped Netflix movie is his most recent project. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age ChildhoodThis time and place are as fantasy-like as they come. It explores the way that hope for the future blends with the horror of the past through the eyes of a suburban child.

Apollo 10 1/2 This film is set in 1969, just three months prior to real-life Apollo 11’s landing of the first human explorers on Mars. Zachary Levi and Glen Powell play NASA scientists. They realize the Apollo module they constructed is too small for them. Their solution was simple: To operate the module, recruit a fourth grader named Stanley. He has only average grades and is not gifted. It is absurd and silly to think of this. Spy Kids’ Robert Rodriguez might have spun out into a trilogy, but Linklater isn’t that interested in the story’s space-adventure possibilities. Before Stanley can go to space, his adult self (played by a rather earnest Jack Black) stops the story to embark on a side story, taking up more than half the movie’s runtime to paint a picture of Stanley’s childhood. Don’t worry, he says — he promises he’ll return to the NASA stuff later.

Stanley, in an orange flight suit, floats upside down in zero gravity in Apollo 10 1/2

Image by Netflix

There you will find the following: Apollo 10 1/2 focuses on Stanley’s daily life, growing up just outside of NASA in a Houston suburb with his five older siblings, his mom, and a dad who pushes papers for the space program. Linklater paints a picture of Stanley’s life with precision and care. The film, even without any rotoscope animation, feels like a glimpse into the past. Linklater focuses on small, grounded things: the family’s daily routine, the siblings’ petty squabbles, the games the kids make up when they’re bored on a rainy day, the fights over control of the television. TV and movies are a big part of this film, and even with a run time just over 90 minutes, Linklaker makes time to give his audience a sense of the kids’ viewing schedule, and the importance each show and theatrical release has to Stanley and his siblings. In many ways, this is a semi-autobiographical film about Linklater’s own childhood, focusing in on the last summer where going to the Astroworld theme park was an adventure, and watching the new episode of Dark Shadows It was the most important thing.

The sense of a major shift on the horizon for Stanley comes because Linklater constantly draws attention to just how sheltered the boy’s childhood is, and how much things are changing all around him. He only briefly comments on his privileged childhood in a direct way, but it’s still painted all over the movie. TV reports about protests against the moon landing are used to distract viewers from larger social problems, and it’s clear that Stanley buys into that distraction completely. It wasn’t easy to ignore the world’s problems in 1969, with the war in Vietnam claiming thousands of teenage lives. Stanley still learns the duck-andcover defense against an attack by atomic bomb at school. His suburb is populated mainly with white NASA workers.

Black’s narration brings out this cultural dissonance in Stanley’s life, with a hint of sadness and regret as he explains how unique this moment was, because of the juxtaposition between being excited for the space age and the new technology making life more exciting, and the horror of living in the middle of a war. Reports on the effects of global warming on the environment and overpopulation, which were threatening to destroy the planet’s future were making it clear that political leaders would be assassinated. While the adults in the film can’t stop talking about the morality of littering and the death of the planet, for a suburban Texas kid, it was easy to ignore the scary stuff and focus on the excitement of an amusement park or a new film. The timing of this film’s release — with a pandemic still raging around the world and a war in Europe, while blockbuster comic book movies continue to break box-office records — is a reminder of how little humanity changes from era to era, which only bolsters the movie’s point.

Linklater communicates this same concept through animation, which is his return to the rotoscope 17 years after his retirement. Apollo 10 1/2This is a marked departure from the previous rotoscope features. Living the Waking Life A Scanner Darkly, because Apollo has such a clear, focused goal for its animation — to bring the cloudy memories of a child to life, and accentuate the fantasy inside the reality. When Stanley falls asleep as the actual moon landing is happening, in spite of his excitement for it, his mom tells his dad, “Even if he was asleep, he’ll one day think he saw it all.” That’s the sentiment that drives the entire movie forward: the way our memories morph with time, creating individual fantasies about what the past was actually like. Tommy Pallotta was the animator. He used motion-capture with real actors to get the best possible animation. This gives characters realistic, nuanced expressions that go well with layers of vivid colors and cartoony backgrounds.

Stanley and his family gather in a darkened room to watch something from a projector in Apollo 10 1/2

Image by Netflix

This clearly isn’t the real 1960s — it’s the 1960s from Stanley’s mind (and Linklater’s), one that revolved around the TV, playing in the street, and looking out at the stars in wonder. One of the film’s most visually interesting moments comes when Stanley explains the kind of shows he used to watch on TV, and Linklater shows viewers rotoscoped versions of old TV and movie intros, including The Wizard of Oz, The Twilight ZoneThe film also features a trippy rotoscoped Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny version. Using animation to illustrate Stanley’s memories makes the film’s approach to nostalgia clearer and cleverer, because it manages to explain away the things that aren’t seeing as the results of the main character’s selective and sheltered memory. It is not a romanticized view on the past because Linklater saw it this way. As Black’s adult voice suggests, he eventually began to see things as they are.

It is now complete circle when Linklater returns from his original idea of a child going into space. He juxtaposes this footage with the rotoscoped footage and real Apollo 11 lunar landing and launch. Apollo 10 1/2 is a charming, visually striking blend of history and fantasy that captures the way children see and process historical events happening around them, and considers what they choose to remember — and how those choices affect them as adults, and the worlds they choose to build around them.

Apollo 10 1/2Netflix launches April 1

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