Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure

Like much of Richard Linklater's best work—Dazed and Confused, Bernie, Everybody Wants Some!!—the latest from the Texas-based filmmaker evokes nostalgia for a bygone, but not too bygone, era. But that sense of harkening back to a more wide-eyed time is not merely an element of Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, it's the entire movie. The story is ostensibly about a kid growing up on the outskirts of Houston, Texas during the year of the moon landing, who dreams of partaking in his own Apollo mission. But the film is really a full-blown description of what life was like for a kid growing up in 1960s suburban Texas. Animated via the rotoscoping technique Linklater used in his prior films Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), and narrated by his buddy Jack Black, this picture feels less like a movie and more like an illustrated audiobook. It's a bit like Linklater wrote a short childhood memoir, got Black to read it, had some actors play out what's described in front of a green screen, and then had a team of animators bring it all to life—even TV shows, movies, news, and other archive material gets rotoscoped here. This style of filmmaking is not my favourite, but it feels perfectly suited to this little coming-of-age comic drama.

Part memory piece and part fantasy film, Apollo 10½ passes my litmus test for what makes a good nostalgia exercise—it evokes a wistful feeling even in a viewer who did not live through the specific time and place presented. I'm exactly ten years younger than Linklater, who was born near the end of the Boomer generation, so I missed out on all the youthful excitement of the "space age." What this picture captures so well is the feeling of limitless possibilities the era offered, countered with the rather dull and routine lives most people lived at the time, and how children turned that drab existence into a kind of paradise via their current-events-fueled imaginations. It's a winning combination.