Apollo 10 and a half is too nostalgic tribute to the world of the past – Eileen Jones

Here is a prediction: I bet that never in your life will you feel such an intense temptation to say “ok, boomer” and leave, as after an hour of watching Apollo 10 and a half (Apollo 10 1⁄2: A space age childhood), Richard Linklater’s film currently available on Netflix.

This animated film, made with the technique of rotoscoping digital and other very old school 2D animation effects, it only lasts ninety-eight minutes, but if you can watch it from start to finish at once, congratulations on your stamina. And don’t believe the advertisements that tell you that it is a film about a fourth grade child selected by NASA to test a spaceship that was built by mistake too small to be used by an adult astronaut and that therefore ends up becoming the first person to set foot on the moon. This all sounds appealing, but it’s a mere gimmick to lock you in and lure you into this cheeky tribute to the life of the typical middle-class family living on the outskirts of Houston, the city where Linklater grew up just around the time of the launch of Apollo 11 to the moon. , in 1969.

At sixty-two, writer-director-producer Linklater shouldn’t be of the age to quit nostalgia as he does in this autobiographical film, so I assume he’s just plain old in spirit. This glimpse into the past, a throwback to a softened and fictionalized version of his childhood, is so slow, so sentimental, so full of love for old times habits, customs, ways, that it’s hard to bear. And the fact that Linklater occasionally acknowledges that there could also be downsides to the world back then, such as the part about how corporal punishment was commonly used and widely accepted by kids who meekly were beaten by anyone – from parents, to teachers, to neighbors – it only makes the situation worse. His admiration of him for that world is so strong that he could be mistaken for a confused grandpa, the kind who keep insisting that he took a lot of beating, yes, but still turned out well.

What’s worse is that 1950s American culture continued to thrive in suburbs inhabited by middle-class whites, so in 1969 this family clearly inspired by the director’s was practically still living as they did in the 1950s, except for a few hippies. occasionally popping up on the local college campus or the new Beatles record referencing drugs. Apart from that, everything has stuck to the idea of ​​a large family (in this one there are six children) in which fathers are responsible for working and earning money to feed everyone and mothers, on the other hand, stay at home, they prepare sandwiches with white bread, mortadella and salad for lunch while the children have fun playing healthy games on the perfect lawn in front of the house.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the TV was great back then! There is a long and passionate celebration of the vast array of television programs – Dark shadows, Gunsmoke, Bewitched, Lucy and me and so on – conveyed by that new thing said syndication, a group of issuers associated with each other. Even the snacks were super and the matches of dodgeball to the playground and the way the kids were able to get carried in the back of the pickups without worrying in the least for their safety. After all, practically everything was great. It was a true golden age.

It is incredible to read from his interviews that Linklater does not think he was nostalgic, neither in a simple nor cloying way, and indeed declares: “I hate the nostalgic attitude as a cultural exploitation for economic purposes, very much…”. Yet it would be nearly impossible to find a less critical and more passionate representation of the culture that was dominant in his childhood years.

Small hints of counter-current opinions appear very quickly. In a film that is dedicated to celebrating the greatness of NASA’s space program, there is a brief interlude about who wasn’t of the opinion it was so magnificent. An African American, interviewed on TV while the family is watching her, declares: “Forget the Moon and take some of that money to Harlem!”.

It is the same quote, from the same interview, that appears in Summer of soulthe documentary film of 2021, in which a lot of space is dedicated to this topic and in which there is a strong emphasis on the poetry of Gil Scott-Heron Whitey on the Moon (A white on the moon) which fits perfectly. In Apollo 10 and a half instead this moment of rejection ends before it can be perceived. After Stan’s big sister, the tough girl who loves rock and is interested in the rest of the world, says “Come on, go on like this!” and Stan’s father, a one-piece moralist with the typical military crew cut who works at NASA and heads the shipping department, replies with a grimace of rage.

The technique and the positive aspects
Of course, the film also has its positives. Overall it is well done and then in the cast is Jack Black, again with Linklater after many years of the fantastic School of rockwho does a good, if somewhat marginal, job as an adult Stanley narrating the film by seeing himself as a space-obsessed child.

The technique of making the film is striking, given Linklater’s choice to go back to using a modern version of the old technique of rotoscopingthe same used in 2001 in Waking life and in 2006 in A scanner darkly. The detail of the means of communication inside the film is a great find, because the family constantly watches television. So Johnny Cash or Walter Cronkite or Dark Shadows, or whatever goes on the air, is made more vague and abstract, in contrast to the sharp and decisive features of “real life”. To put it in the words of Linklater himself: Walter Cronkite on TV makes an effect like “it’s him, but it’s not him. It is my memory of him “. The animated version of him gives you the impression that he is “slightly out of focus.” It’s him, the voice is his, but nonetheless it looks more like a character from the world of the imagination, where memories also live.

Linklater in an interview stated that he had chosen this style of animation for Apollo 10 and a half because he wanted to give it an old-fashioned, two-dimensional cut, which is what the animation expert who has worked with him for some time, Tommy Pallotta, described as “Saturday morning cartoons that meet souls”.

Maybe I was the only one who noticed it, but I find that the rotoscoping, in general, even when combined with the decidedly more organic style of 2D animation effects, it tends to be serious and adult. Only on a few occasions does this technique give the unpleasant feeling of disquiet from an uncanny area that has nothing to do with the beautiful, funny and elastic Saturday morning cartoons that I remember. Some images of the young Stan in the space capsule of his fantasy mission are really beautiful and at the same time disturbing, it seems both a raga represented in a realistic way, and a solemn looking alien boy, alone, staring at the planet Earth from the boundless space .

This isn’t the first time Linklater has combined an interesting form-wise approach with a long, loving gaze at a boy going through the growing process. Someone comes to mind Boyhood? In the case of Apollo 10 and a half But you have to have a huge appetite for the details of the all too familiar era Linklater talks about if you want to stay on the film. It represents a real sequel to the nauseating one Everyone wants something 2016, so full of nostalgic regret; another fictionalized celebration of himself and that horrible culture. In that case, the story revolves around a young sports-addicted Texas baseball player who is in his freshman year of college in 1980. That movie would have you believe that Linklater and his full-fledged athlete friends, the “big boys” on campus. , were loved by everyone, from theatrical losers to punks.

Indeed, it is disturbing to think that Linklater may be retracing his life backwards through his work – and that after this film he could go all the way into his very early years in the 1960s and celebrate them in the same old-fashioned way, with the same boring care for. the details. Then I imagine that later would come the representation of his parents’ youth, in the fifties, a film that would probably end with the moment when he was nothing more than “a glint in his father’s eyes”, as they used to say in those old, glorious , or presumed such, times.