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

The new Netflix movie Apollo 10 : A Space Age Childhood is a magic trick. It has no interests, no conflict, no villain, no love interest, no money problems and no one learns anything. But by some miracle it is captivating everywhere. I hesitate to describe it as the story of a boy named Stan (newcomer Milo Coy) who grew up next to the Manned Spacecraft Center during the Apollo program. Why? Because ‘story’ implies actions that lead to other actions, and that’s not what Apollo 10 is about. To quote Homer Simpson, “It’s just a lot of things that happened.”

The film is the work of filmmaker Richard Linklater, who, like Stan, was born and raised in Houston. Apollo 10 is from Linklater Rome or Belfast: a semi-autobiographical love letter to the time and place that shaped him. (he could have called it) Clear Lake.) Perhaps the closest analog is: the tree of life by fellow Texan Terrence Malick. In both films, children play in the mists of DDT amid “long summer days of play and idleness,” while cosmic things they don’t fully understand happen nearby.

Air Budmeet space Stan

enlarge † An unlikely space mission. Quite unlikely, based on the unreliable narrator in Apollo 10†

Apollo 10 is narrated by an adult Stan (Jack Black, jumanjic) in the present day, and the result is like a better version of something you might hear in a bar. Mature Stan tells things that aren’t in order, goes on about strange details and introduces characters, but forgets to do anything with them. All the while, in the background, people are about to land on the moon. Imagine a Linklater classic like slacker or Dazed and confusedthen add the Texas Space Race and a dash of rotoscoped psychedelics, and you get the idea.

Linklater has left out many artifices of storytelling to present a dashing but solid list of memories. But he allows himself one storytelling convention. One of the responsibilities of being an older relative, say a father or a cool aunt or a grandpa, is to tell the young ones naked lies. Grown-up Stan happens to mention (awkwardly, no problem) that he was recruited by NASA to go to the moon when he was in elementary school. NASA accidentally made the first lunar lander too small, you see, and the agency needed a kid to secretly test the lander for the real adult moon landing.

This plot line is never convincing in the reality of Apollo 10† Is it a dream series? Is this a fantasy Stan had as a kid? Is Stan the victim of too many big red kickballs on the skull? The most likely explanation is that the grown Stan is our messy uncle, the viewers are little ones, and he’s making fun of us. In addition, Stan’s strong narrative gives Linklater the bare minimum of a clothesline to hang his vignettes on.

The film is set in the suburbs that sprang up around the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) in the 1960s. The buildings, streets, neighborhoods and schools are brand new, just as Stan and his classmates build themselves from scratch. The neighborhood kids—whose names, looks, and personalities are mixed up—play baseball in the street, ride bicycles aimlessly, and give presentations about the room their classmates sleepily half listen to. They roam from screen to screen in the drive-in theater trying to get free games from pinball machines. They scour construction sites for supplies to build wooden fortresses in their gardens (the foliage applied by the builders won’t be tall enough to house tree houses for decades to come).

mom (Lee Eddie, Red vs. Blue) uses the power of chain smoking to run the household, while NASA bureaucrat Dad (Bill Wise, Sonic Rebuilt) keeps the court from his easy chair and tries to come up with wisdom to inform his offspring. The space race permeates everything; we see a lot of used cars describing their prices as “out of this world!” Characters drift in and out, just as they do in memory. I’d find it hard to name Stan’s siblings, and if his parents had names, I didn’t get them.

Along the way, we occasionally see a moderately engaged Stan participating in astronaut training and simulations. After being impressed by his kickball skills, some suits pull him off the schoolyard and recruit him. (The NASA boys are played by Zachary Levi of Shazam and Glen Powell, who played – wouldn’t you know – astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures.) Stan tells all this with the same timbre he uses to describe most things Apollo 10that is, it’s not as exciting as going to AstroWorld.