Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood Review - A Beautiful Film We've Seen Before
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood plays like an instructional manual for being a kid in the late sixties. Jack Black’s (School Of Rock) narration is oddly flat considering the performer's usual flare but it fits with the model of listing a movie's worth of facts. The animation at large will remind fans of A Scanner Darkly, but flashbacks and vignettes boast a similar yet noticeably different change that is more than welcome. Writer-director Richard Linklater (Boyhood) seems obsessed with making movies about himself as a youth, but the script of Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood has a trick or two up its sleeve.
Stan (Jack Black) is an average nine-year-old living in late-60s Texas. His sister works at Baskin-Robbins, his brother mows lawns, his dad works at NASA and so does Stan — at least for now. The “Apollo 10 1/2” has a design flaw built into its cockpit and only Stan can pilot the craft. Though this secret mission doesn’t get the recognition of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, he does still enjoy the highs of life as it is. Board games, sports, trips to Astroworld, watching TV, and listening to records with his family, to name a few.
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood is another entry into two of Linklater’s go-to choices: a film about a young, southern kid in Vietnam War era America, and animation. 2006’s A Scanner Darkly was revolutionary not only in its animation, but in the story it was telling through animation, and with the added bonus of actors one could see. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood doesn’t have nearly the same storytelling chops, but it furthers Linklater's animation career by going backward. The best animation in the film is not with the main storyline, but in everything else. Whenever there is a television, flashback, vignette, or really anything that is out of the main characters' reality, the animation is stripped down. The result is a smoother texture and a more original vision. Compared to the rest of the film, these scenes feel like moving paintings with a soft touch.
Plot comes in many forms in Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood. News clips, the outer space secret agent fantasies of a child, and — most distracting of all — what feels like endless information in the form of voiceover that does not serve the story. Jack Black doesn’t exactly drone on, but he is not being used to the best of his abilities. There is something intensely boring about a subdued Black, as well as the literal list of what comprised the late 60s and early 70s. A third of Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood is Black taking an inventory of things that are not only obvious, but repetitive. If the film was set in the modern era but wasn't about the moon landing, there might be room for time-themed context. However, because the audience is so entrenched in the moment, every reference that isn’t specific to Texas feels unwarranted.
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood is a fun experiment but not much more. There are no heartstrings to pull on and the energetic child astronaut plot is bogged down by 70s references that play on a loop. It's still fantastic that a film like this can be made today and hardcore Netflix animation fans, as well as those who enjoy Linklater's work will likely get a kick out of this one. Linklater is trying to recreate the feeling of being so close to a huge moment in time and the community of that moment, but the film only soars when kids are being drafted as intergalactic spies.
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood is now streaming on Netflix. The film is 97 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for some suggestive material, injury images, and smoking.