Review: Apollo 10 1/2

The new movie offers a funny nod both to NASA's glitch-prone engineering and its can-do spirit

Looked at one way, there's nothing particularly ambitious about Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood. Part quasi-memoir, part nostalgic fantasy, the animated movie draws from director Richard Linklater's childhood experiences living in the shadow of NASA during the moonshot era, with one big difference: Milo, the child at the center of the story, has been secretly tasked with manning his own moon mission, because NASA accidentally built one of the lunar landers too small.

This amusing conceit offers a funny nod both to NASA's glitch-prone engineering and its can-do spirit, and it mostly serves as a narrative hook to pull together the movie's digressive observations about the era and its culture.

The movie's subtle daring comes from its embrace of the kid's hopeful outlook: Milo's world was awash in new technology and the promise of a better future, powered by cultural and physical innovation, from AstroTurf to pop music. NASA critics will probably find the movie too hagiographic, but it's hard to dislike this gentle, genial picture and its belief in the inspirational power of the frontier, whether in Texas or on the moon.

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[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

What? They cast Milo as a white male? I hope he crashes on the moon and dies.

[Overt]

Loved this film. It tells how people were in these sleepy TX suburbs, and the way their childhood was. Some stuff we miss, some stuff we shake our heads about. But it never apologizes for the way things were. It does not feel the need to give context, or to portray characters with today’s moral values so that the audience has someone to identify with.

Compare it to, say, Stranger Things, where they can’t help but to project 2020’s politics into the 80s, Apollo 10 1/2 knows what the politics were. It was about the Vietnam War and the Cold War in general. But more than anything, it was largely about the complete LACK of politics. No 24×7 news cycle. Kids outside playing all day rather than angsting about their gender and sexual orientation. So refreshing.

(And I say this as a child of the 80s, not the era of this film)