Review: Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood

By far, and I mean by far far, the best film about the Apollo 11 moon landings is the documentary entitled Apollo 11. It’s quite simply the best, and maybe even one of the best space films of all-time. So, when I heard that Richard Linklater was producing a rotoscope film about his life in Houston around the time of the first space launch, I was pretty jazzed for it. But then I thought, wait…why is it rotoscoped to begin with?

After having watched the 90 minute film, my question was never answered. The Jack Black-narrated biography inspired by Linklater’s life sees Rich imagine a suburban family (I’m not sure his because his parents divorced when he was young) growing up in a fast-moving Houston, TX town that is responding to the growing commerce brought to it by NASA. From here the rise of the oil giants can be seen on display, but we also get a glimpse of what life was like for kids in the late sixties i.e., music, film, TV, other entertainment options. Interwoven through the actual upbringing of “Stanley” and his family, is the 10 1/2 year old star’s dream of going through the paces of his own moon-bound mission. Bordering on that very thin line of delusions of grandeur and imagination, I can’t help but think that Stanley’s proficiency for fibbing in school helped grow the inner-workings of his subconscious ergo the sudden fascination with space travel.

As far as production goes, I have a few issues on a number of different scales. For starters, if we’re going to have a film inspired by Linklater’s life growing up in Texas, why did we hire Jack Black as the narrator? This is not me taking anything away from Jack, I love the guy and am a card carrying member of the Tenacious D’s fan club, but despite the quality output why not have an actor who was also raised in Texas do the voice over? Linklater’s worked with a bunch of them like Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey, so I’m unsure of the Black direction. I could’ve overlooked that small detail if it wasn’t for the fact that I kept asking myself, why is this animated? In Linklater’s previous animation projects, there are good reasons. For Waking Life, it’s because we’re in constant dream sequences. For A Scanner Darkly, the film is set in the near future. If we’re going through the trouble of re-animating live-action sequences, Minnow Mountain Studios is as good as they come, but has Linklater seen another series by the studio called Undone? THAT’S a series that needs to be animated. I would’ve preferred some sort of a hybrid effort, have the non dream sequences not animated at all and then animate Stanley’s dream sequences, because then at least the animation direction would’ve served a loftier purpose in helping reset the viewers’ eyes through the different mediums. Also, Glen Powell already portrayed the role of John Glenn in Hidden Figures, and in this one he’s a lowly NASA agent in an imaginary sequence, so what happened did Glen get a demotion?

There were just too many things that bothered me about Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, however it isn’t like there are a ton of coming-of-age films that cover similar if not the same ground. The feature is largely a CNN documentary of Houston in the late sixties juxtaposed in an animation format for what reason, I don’t know, Jack Black’s voice-over was the only thing of any originality in this and even he should not have been here.