Richard Linklater‘s Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (Netflix) is a plotless boomer nostalgia thing — a visit to the oasis of suburban family life in the mid to late ’60s and a re-sampling of all the pop cultural stuff of that era (late LBJ, early Nixon).
Like Linklater’s Waking Life (’01) and A Scanner Darkly (’06), Apollo 10 and 1/2 is rotoscoped — the only kind of animation I really enjoy. Performed by skilled actors and then converted to subtle, ultra-realistic animation.
It’s set in a bland Houston suburb, and is oriented to some extent around NASA and the July 1969 Apollo moon voyage. It’s about a Brady Bunch or Wonder Years-type family, of which Stan (voiced by Milo Coy) is the young lead protagonist. Dad (Bill Wise) works in shipping and receiving for NASA. It’s narrated by an off-screen Jack Black, playing an adult Milo. There’s a mom, an older brother plus two or three sisters.
Apollo 10 and 1/2 is an easy-going, laid-back time machine. Boomers and older GenXers will sink right in — it’s an amiable return to their young lives and everything that was happening in terms of music, TV, cultural changes, the Vietnam War, racial conflict, evolving sexual mores, etc.
I had a nice mellow time with it.
The only problem is that Linklater’s time trip has no POCs. If I were Jon Stewart or Race2Dinner’s Lisa Bond I would say that this absence reflects a foul racist agenda on Linklater’s part, and that he has to be lashed along with all the other white animators who’ve committed similar crimes.
To those who would say “but Linklater based it on his own childhood to some extent and it’s set in a ’60s whitebread neighborhood…there were no kids of color in this neck of the woods back then,” I would say “have you never heard of presentism? It doesn’t matter if there were no black kids in Linklater’s old neighborhood — this is 2022 and he should’ve blacked it up.”
I’ll tell you what I did last night while watching Apollo 10 1/2. I ignored the whole doofus fantasy subplot about the 14 year-old Stan being selected by NASA engineers to go on a secret Apollo mission, blah blah. I watched it, yes, but I didn’t give a damn. It bypassed my aesthetic digestive system entirely.