The late 1960s was the pinnacle of the space race; there was a tough contest for sending a man to the moon.
The American youth had a pretty different experience from today - from witnessing a space race between the United States and the Soviet Union to being worried about the ongoing war in Vietnam at that time.
Richard Linklater, the famed director of Before Sunrise, reminisced those memories from his childhood in his latest movie Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood.
The storyteller of this movie is Stanely, a young kid living in Houston, Texas, with his parents and five other siblings.
As Houston was one of the centres of space research and his dad worked in NASA, his young mind wasn’t too far from imagining space and beyond. Where the whole world looked forward to witnessing the first human ever to land on the moon, an adult Stan narrates his fantasy of getting recruited as a young cosmonaut for NASA.
In the wake of the Apollo 11 mission, Stan imagines two NASA employers recruiting him directly from his school for a secret lunar mission. Linklater described a silly reason behind recruiting Stan, the spacecraft for the Apollo mission to be small in size, thus dubbing Stan’s mission as Apollo 10 ½.
Stan makes up every detail for his imagination, from training in NASA to cover up the whole secret mission as a trip to summer camp. But the lunar mission comes in later, as he takes the audience on a nostalgic trip to the ‘60s for the major part of the movie.
As Linklater described Stan loosely based on his own childhood experiences, the audience gets to know his perspective. Before the age of smartphones and other advanced entertainment technologies, he and his siblings had a variety of pastimes that may appear sentimental to the boomer generation.
Playing in the front yard with siblings, watching shows on the latest technicolour television with the whole family, going beach on a pickup van, listening to LPs, taking a trip to Astroworld - every one of them holds a sentimental value to the American boomer audience.
Stan’s family can also be seen as an example of an American nuclear household, a white-collar dad looking after a family of seven.
Experiencing the aftereffect of economic depression in the 1920s, Stan’s parents were utilitarian in household spending which they instilled in their children too.
Stan also remembers his grandparents efficiently utilising even mundane necessities like a bent nail. Thus, the 60s kids get a critical economic lesson from their elders - being very frugal in spending.
Nevertheless, Apollo 10 ½ is a well-made movie about the space-age nostalgia shown in rotoscopic animation. Richard Linklater executed the job of depicting the reality and imagination of space travel in a 1960s teenager’s eye perfectly.
