7/12 ForReel Score | 3/5 Stars

Is there anyone more obsessed with their childhood than Richard Linklater? I’m seriously asking. From Slacker to SubUrbia, Boyhood to Bad News Bears, School of Rock to Dazed and Confused, no filmmaker has ever set out to tell a coming of age story as many times as Richard Linklater. Now, once again, the famed storyteller has returned to his roots of 1960’s suburban Texas with Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood.

Linklater’s latest endeavor, a Netflix film that premiered at SXSW in mid-March, is an animated fantastical retelling of the filmmaker’s own childhood. Apollo 10½ traces the life of Stanley, a ten year old boy living in the suburbs of Houston, through the spring and summer of 1969, leading up to the Moon landing. While a grown up Stanley (voiced by Jack Black) narrates the film, we are drawn into the everyday goings-on of a prepubescent boy living through the heart of the Space Race, in both time and place. It is a gentle, if not overly nostalgic, reminiscence of Linklater’s childhood - or some proxy of it.

Animation is not a style Richard Linklater is unfamiliar with. The early 2000’s saw two animated films from Linklater, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, that were filmed in a similar way to Apollo 10½. Using real actors to film the scenes, the animation is only applied after the fact. This technique allows Linklater to flex his filmmaking muscles, resulting in often beautiful shot compositions and a fleshed out world. When Apollo 10½ is at its slowest or most redundant, there is solace in the portrait of animation being presented.

That animation is refreshing, especially since the storyline of Linklater’s latest film is not. While I certainly have no love lost for the filmography of Richard Linklater, I couldn’t help but feel worn out by the retreading of a common terrain in Apollo 10½. This is the same time and place for so many of Linklater’s films: a summertime suburb, the white Southerner’s paradise during the upheaval of Vietnam, the Cold War, and the Rights Movements. Is it Linklater’s own story? Absolutely. But it’s one he’s told before.

An overreliance on narration to account for what is a uniquely non-unique 1969 childhood didn’t win me over, either. His script’s misty eyed recollection of playing kickball until dark or setting off firecrackers without supervision (delivered with the questionable drawl of a Jack Black Southern accent) left me wondering if Linklater actually believes children weren’t let outside again after 1969. Maybe in fifty years, Apollo 10½ will serve as an interesting time capsule of what it was like to live in 1969, but in 2022, it feels more akin to the ramblings of the parents or grandparents who had it so much better back then. “I’ll never forget,” seems to be an unfortunate staple of Linklater’s vocabulary.

That being said, when Apollo 10½ takes its story from the nostalgia-dipped Houston suburb to the dreamlike wonders of space, the film comes to life again. Stanley “recounts” being the first person to walk on the moon, a child sent up months before Apollo 11 in a lunar module too small for grown-ups. His fantastical story captures exactly what it must have been like to dream your way through a community so reliant on NASA. For Linklater’s generation, especially those of them in Houston, there was no escaping the gravitational pull of space. Apollo 10½ centers children at the heart of that mission.

In that way, Apollo 10½ is a worthwhile endeavor. Linklater has always been a master of world-building, whether that world be in a Southern suburb or on the Moon, and Apollo 10½ is no exception. A better script and a more unique screenplay would have been nice, but if this animated film is what Richard Linklater - the King of Coming of Age Films - needed to finally come of age himself, then we can chalk the problems up to growing pains.

MOVIE REVIEW: Richard Linklater Comes of Age, Again, in "Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood"