Cinema’s great explorer of time and memory, writer and director Richard Linklater, travels back to 1969 with the semi-autobiographical Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, a coming-of-age animated time capsule of middle-class life in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. Through a continuous voiceover narration from Jack Black, a present-day Stan recalls one childhood summer made momentous by the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon, as viewed on living room television screens across America. He details a time hyperfixated on the space race – evoking a moment where an idealistic future sat on the collective consciousness of the country, and forward progress seemed to move faster than it ever had before.
Alongside this comprehensive depiction of childhood in the late 1960s, a fantastical alternative story coexists. Stan, an average 10 ½ year old student from Texas, is scouted and chosen by NASA to carry out the lunar mission as a result of a mathematical manufacturing error requiring a non-adult passenger to fit inside the shuttle. Here, an unextraordinary boy plucked from obscurity is given the chance to complete the biggest feat in the history of mankind. We witness Stan’s demanding training as an astronaut, hushed by a fabricated summer camp cover story, leading up to the big launch like an adolescent daydream miraculously come true.
These two versions of the same event are often purposefully indistinguishable, presented with the same degree of stylistic realism, and with narrative conflict sidelined for a kind of documentative fiction that can be passed down and shared from each generation to the next. Even if the viewer didn’t live during this period, there is still an impressive amount of specificity in these vignettes, capable of making anyone nostalgic for a time they might not have known. Many of these moments feel like stories from older relatives told through their own memories from childhood, as expressed through pop culture references from movies, television, and music. There’s a particular attention to how people of the time interacted and engaged with these forms of entertainment. Listening to the new record from a favorite artist is treated like an event. Seeing The Sound of Music every six months in the cinema is treated like an event. The Wonderful World of Color was a weekly television must, despite also signifying the bittersweet close of the weekend and return to school the next morning.
Whether it’s inventing new yard games with the neighborhood kids, seeking advice about crushes from a Ouija board, or launching model rockets, there’s a key focus on how kids of the 60s occupied themselves within the boundaries of their own geographical bubble and without the restrictions of having round-the-clock adult supervision. Linklater suggests that perhaps the flight of fancy found in the premise of Apollo 10 ½ can only exist as a result of having nothing better to do than falling asleep on the couch while watching one of the three channels available on TV.
As intensely detailed as this nostalgia trip becomes, Apollo 10 ½ still lacks a pressing narrative momentum in the form of any significant conflict or character growth. Stan’s lackadaisical response to being offered this space adventure makes for a funny exchange in the moment, but it also calls us to question the low emotional stakes through which he approaches this adventure. The distancing effect of a narrator reflecting on their past, combined with the primarily objective viewpoint of his descriptions, makes it difficult to know exactly how this fictional character, and Richard Linklater as an extension of Stan, considers this point in their lives. Linklater is most admired for his work in different forms of anti-plot structures, but the film’s ultimate takeaway feels slightly ambiguous as it prioritizes a history lesson by way of a trip down memory lane over his usual mode of speculative philosophies and dialogue driven hangouts.
When the broadcast of the moon landing finally airs after a long day of adventures at AstroWorld amusement park, Stan falls asleep on the couch and misses the historic milestone. While carrying his sleeping son to his bedroom, Stan’s father believes that someday Stan will regret not staying awake for the event as he might want to tell his grandchildren of the time he watched the moon landing as it happened live. Stan’s mother counters by saying “Even if he was asleep, he’ll someday think he saw it all.” As time goes on, our understanding of what is factual in our memories versus what we invent for ourselves starts to blur and become unclear, creating an inseparable story of fact and fantasy. The version we remember is the version where we are awake.
Even if Stan did sleep through the moon landing on television, what he dreamt was something far more memorable.
