Apollo 10 1/2 review: A Linklater movie about nothing (and the Moon landing)

The brand new Netflix movie Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is a magic trick. It has no stakes, no battle, no villain, no love curiosity, no cash issues, and nobody learns something. But, by some miracle, it is partaking all through. I hesitate to explain it because the story of a boy named Stan (newcomer Milo Coy) who grew up subsequent to the Manned Spacecraft Heart throughout the Apollo program. Why? As a result of “story” implies actions resulting in different actions, and that is not what Apollo 10 ½ is about. To cite Homer Simpson, “It is only a bunch of stuff that occurred.”

The film is the work of filmmaker Richard Linklater, who, like Stan, was born and raised in Houston. Apollo 10 ½ is Linklater’s Roma or Belfast: a semi-autobiographical love letter to the time and place that fashioned him. (He may have known as it Clear Lake.) Maybe its closest analog is The Tree of Life by fellow Texan Terrence Malick. Each movies contain kids taking part in in mists of DDT amid “long summer days of play and idleness” whereas cosmic issues they do not totally comprehend occur close by.

Air Bud, meet house Stan

Apollo 10 ½ is narrated by an grownup Stan (Jack Black, Jumanji) within the current day, and the consequence is sort of a higher model of one thing you would possibly hear in a bar. Grownup Stan tells issues out of order, goes on about extraneous particulars, and introduces characters however forgets to do something with them. All of the whereas, within the background, people are about to land on the Moon. Think about a Linklater traditional like Slacker or Dazed and Confused, then add the Texas house race and a sprinkle of rotoscoped psychedelia, and also you get the concept.

Linklater has stripped away lots of the artifices of storytelling to current a rambling but brisk checklist of recollections. However he permits himself one storytelling conference. Among the many duties of being an older relative—say, a dad or a cool aunt or a grandpa—is telling children bald-faced lies. Grownup Stan simply occurs to let slip (offhandedly, no large deal) that he was recruited by NASA to go to the Moon when he was in elementary college. NASA by chance made the primary lunar lander too small, you see, and the company wanted a baby to check the lander out in secret earlier than the right grownup Moon touchdown.

This plot line is rarely as soon as convincing within the actuality of Apollo 10 ½. Is it a dream sequence? Is that this a fantasy Stan has as a baby? Is Stan the sufferer of too many large purple kickballs to the cranium? The extra seemingly clarification is that grownup Stan is our slovenly uncle, the viewers are his little ones, and he is pulling our legs for the heck of it. Additionally, Stan’s tall story provides Linklater the barest minimal of a clothesline on which to hold his vignettes.

The film is about within the suburbs that sprang up across the Manned Spacecraft Heart (now Johnson Area Heart) within the Nineteen Sixties. The buildings, streets, neighborhoods, and faculties are model new, in the identical method that Stan and his schoolmates are constructing themselves up from scratch. The neighborhood youngsters—whose names, appearances, and personalities run collectively—play baseball on the street, journey aimlessly on bikes, and provides shows on outer house that their classmates drowsily half-listen to. They roam from display screen to display screen on the drive-in theater and attempt to get free video games out of pinball machines. They scour building websites for provides to construct picket forts of their yards (the foliage put in by the builders remains to be a long time from being tall sufficient to accommodate tree homes).

Mother (Lee Eddy, Crimson vs. Blue) makes use of the ability of chain-smoking to run the family, whereas NASA bureaucrat Dad (Invoice Clever, Sonic Rebuilt) holds court docket from his straightforward chair and tries to give you knowledge to impart to his brood. The house race infuses all the pieces; we see used automotive tons describing their costs as “out of this world!” Characters drift out and in, very similar to they do in reminiscence. I might be hard-pressed to call Stan’s siblings, and if his mother and father had names, I did not catch them.

Alongside the best way, we periodically see a reasonably engaged Stan collaborating in astronaut coaching and simulations. After being impressed by his kickball expertise, a few fits pull him off the schoolyard and recruit him. (The NASA guys are performed by Zachary Levi of Shazam and Glen Powell, who performed—would not you recognize it—astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures.) Stan relates all this with the identical timbre he makes use of to explain most issues in Apollo 10 ½, i.e., it isn’t as thrilling as going to AstroWorld.