Movie Review: Apollo 10 1⁄2

Stop me if you've heard this before: Richard Linklater uses a fanciful premise as an excuse to wax nostalgic. I don't know how you feel about it, but me? I fucking love this shit.

Linklater's newest, the Netflix rotoscoping Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood, pushes the concept to its limit. The pitch is that, four days before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, a fourth grader from Houston completed the mission first, and became the actual first person to step on the moon. Within the first few minutes, NASA scientists have recruited young Stanley for the mission, and then almost immediately (and, in retrospect, hilariously), the narrator (adult Stanley, voiced by Jack Black) cuts away with a "let me explain how I got here" that lasts for pretty much the entire rest of the movie.

This means, in the middle of this fantastical story of a child training to walk on the moon, we get a 75 minute tangent about a normal suburban family in Houston, describing childhood games, TV shows they watched, the music they listened to, intra-neighborhood politics, adolescent observations, adult observations about adolescence, and on and on.

Listen: I adored this movie. I can also understand why it might grate on others. The child-landing-on-the-moon thing serves a purpose, thematically, but not in terms of the plot, and maybe you feel cheated by that. I won't spoil "what it all means," and I will say that it doesn't become a red herring (not fully, anyway), but this story could have theoretically existed in a different context.

I don't care though, man, I really don't. I could listen to Jack Black talk through some amalgam of Linklater's childhood and a fictional childhood for seven hours straight if I had access to such a film (and knowing this filmmaker, I just might some day!). Linklater's greatest gift, vis-à-vis nostalgia, is that he nails that infinitesimally small bullseye between being too broad and being too specific. I think it comes from the really unique observations he makes about certain specific things that are happening throughout the nostalgic piece, observations that could also apply to nostalgia from your own life, if you wanted it to. He's just really good at painting with broad strokes and in minute detail and combining the two into one really appealing package.

Otherwise, I dunno, man, I rarely know what to say in straight-up reviews of films. I just wanted you guys to be aware of this thing's existence is really the main purpose here. And yeah, the acting (half acting, half voice acting I guess) was excellent, the animation style was interesting and added to the nostalgia aspects, and for a movie that was 80% narrated, it never really slowed down. Other than that?

I suppose I could say that I watched this one on a plane, and I can tell you that I agree with the unspoken premise here: things are a lot more interesting on the ground than they are in the sky.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5