Apollo 10 1/2: a Space Age Childhood

Writer/director Richard Linklater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD                 B                                                     USA  (97 mi)  2022  d: Richard Linklater 

You know how memory works, even if he was asleep, he’ll someday think he saw it all.     —Mom (Lee Eddy), to her husband after their son fell asleep during the moon landing 

Few directors understand the thought process of kids better than Austin director Richard Linklater, whose films like Dazed and Confused (1993), 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, or even Everybody Wants Some !! (2016) feel like anthems to childhood, giving audiences a chance to just hang out with a typical ragtag group of kids that may remind you of your own childhood experiences, bringing the musical soundtrack center stage, a remembrance of what we were listening to back in the day.  This, on the other hand, is an animated quasi-autobiographical story about growing up in a suburb just outside of Houston in the late 60’s, where everything revolved around NASA, established in the late 50’s, becoming one of the state’s largest employers with 8000 employees and an annual budget of $100 million.  Today, however, it employs more than 50,000 with a budget closer to $5 billion, ranking #12 on Forbes list of America’s Best Large Employers for 2021 (NASA ranks in top 25 of Forbes 'America's Best Large ... - Chron), with more than a million people each year visiting the Houston Space Center.  The key to this film is the folksy narration by Jack Black (whose mother actually worked for NASA), which comprises the majority of the film, weaving together childhood memories, offering an amusing context of what it was like growing up in a neighborhood surrounded by other NASA families, as living there “was like being where science fiction was coming to life,” yet it’s all told like a bedtime story, or an even younger version of The Wonder Years (1988-93).  It’s extremely rare for an animated movie to also be a period piece, a love letter to a lost era and a rather astonishing memory play, like a diary or scrapbook of the time, yet what distinguishes this film is the clever attention to details, which couldn’t be more accurate to the times it depicts, with Linklater as screenwriter recalling his own nostalgic upbringing, told with an enthusiastically cheerful style, actually conveying a childlike sense of wonder.  Returning to the playful animated style of WAKING LIFE (2001) and A SCANNER DARKLY (2006), comical and often absurd references told through an existential reference point, this film takes us back to a more innocent time, breaking ground in the suburbs, an experimental new style of living that becomes all the rage in America, tract housing for communities that are almost entirely white, offering amusing anecdotes in a playful style, using edgy 60’s music to match the humor, mixing dreamlike reveries into a classical coming-of-age experience that is mostly a delight from start to finish.  Taking us back to 4th grade, in between incidents of severe school punishment, as back in those days it was still all right to paddle kids with brutality, Stan (voiced by Milo Coy), claims it all happened during a dodgeball game, as two men in suits showed up, Bostick (Glen Powell) and Kranz (Zachary Levi), taking him aside to offer him a chance to be an astronaut, as by some happenstance mishap the initial space capsule was built too small, where only a child could fit, so they were impressed by his science reports and his physical fitness, thinking he would make an ideal candidate.  Without thinking too hard he agrees, not realizing what he’s signed up for, as it’s a top secret mission, unable to tell his friends or family, with the mission taking place during summer camp, with NASA providing all the fake photographs sent to his family of his supposed experience in the northern woods of Michigan, but he would actually be going through extensive training for his first space flight to the moon.    

Taking a lengthy aside, we quickly realize this is a film devoted to capturing a place in time, like a modern era version of Our Town (1940), as the narrator proceeds to tell us about his childhood experiences growing up with his family in Texas, where his Dad works for NASA, but doesn’t have one of those sexy or glamorous jobs, much to his son’s chagrin, as that’s all he can think about, being an astronaut, completely surrounded by Astro-dominated themes in local businesses, from hamburger and hot dog shops to bowling alleys to theme parks, including the mammoth Astrodome where they play baseball, the first stadium to play on AstroTurf, with a giant exploding scoreboard that shoots off pistol fire with every home run, the kinds of things that would capture a young boy’s imagination.  The youngest of six siblings, he leads a charmed life, where blacks and hippies seen on the street from their car are gawked at like specimens in a zoo, outsiders that are completely outside their normal experience, where they only hear about them from afar.  The family life revolves around the television, developing peculiar family viewing habits, while recalling all those old 60’s television shows, running home after school to watch Dark Shadows, with Twilight Zone coming on late at night, often falling asleep before the national anthem plays, signing off for the night (unthinkable today with 24/hour marathon television coverage), while on weekends they could check out the sci fi/monster movies playing at the local theater that reflected the paranoia craze from nuclear fall-out with mutant radioactive monsters.  Of course, listening to his sister’s record collection was fun, while setting off fireworks was a big thing in his neighborhood, where there was always a local pyrotechnic setting off rockets, even creating a capsule and putting a live grasshopper inside.  Among their most favorite activities was piling into the back of a pick-up truck, with no regard for personal safety, and heading for the beach in Galveston, with his Dad chugging down beers, which was not against the law at the time, recalling wiping the tar off their feet from oil spill pollution embedded into the sand.  Because the housing development was built on flat land, it tended to flood during heavy rains, causing sewer back-up and standing water, ideal conditions for breeding mosquitos, generating another favorite past-time, riding bikes through the fumes behind the pest control truck spraying DDT insecticide throughout the neighborhood to wipe out a potential mosquito-infestation, knowing nothing at the time about its toxic impact on humans as well.  Yet nothing was more fun than a trip to Astroworld, which was a Texas version of a Disneyland theme park, with scary rides, splash drops, shooting galleries, Double Ferris wheels, an encounter with the Abominable Snowman, and just a million fun things to do, while the accompanying musical soundtrack is simply extraordinary, always a highlight, and one of the most pleasantly rewarding aspects of any Richard Linklater film, APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD - Movie Soundtrack on Spotify.

Tommy Pallotta is the head of animation on all three Linklater animated films, each one using the Max Fleischer rotoscope technique responsible for the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons, but he uses a somewhat different method here, animating over live-action footage, photographs, or television broadcasts, including the historic Walter Cronkite broadcasts of the Apollo 11 moon mission on live CBS television during the summer of 1969, with astute commentary provided by his sidekick Eric Sevareid, a war correspondent turned television journalist who offered opinion and analysis.  Changing the focus to actual historical events gives the film a more starkly realistic look, with television providing recurring war footage on a daily basis, reminding viewers of the grim body count of tragic American lives lost in Vietnam, also offering views of blacks in Harlem expressing their viewpoint that the millions of dollars spent on a moon landing is wasted, as it could be put to better use by helping poor people in America who were struggling on a daily basis to make ends meet.  With NASA employing less than 4% blacks, and no presence of minorities in their own schools, what’s noteworthy is that from the protected vantage point of the Houston suburbs, those events couldn’t be more distant and alien to their own lives, “confined to television,” as Stan puts it, while the NASA launch was shown in their classrooms at school, with students discussing the significance of space exploration, including suggestions that it may actually become such an everyday occurrence that in a few years people might even be living in outer space, while many felt space would be the great unifier, bringing the world together, perhaps epitomized by the first photo of a blue earth as seen from space.  From a child’s imagination, it’s easy to see how realistic news stories might be tuned out, while dreams of interplanetary space exploration was so much more fascinating, heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), interjecting Stan’s own space fantasy happening simultaneously to the Apollo mission.  What this suggests is that at least for this generation of kids, they were less concerned about war, poverty, and budget constraints and much more thrilled imagining what it would be like to be an astronaut, which would suddenly be listed high among what they might aspire to be.  Among the more hilarious scenes is watching Stan enthusiastically talk about the sublime qualities of Kubrick’s futuristic film in front of several disinterested friends who couldn’t care less, showing a really good grasp of what the film is about, especially for a ten-year old, considering most adults couldn’t figure it out, clearly suggesting the kid was a budding filmmaker.  A cantankerous grandma offers a humorous counterpoint, a complete opposite from the one who keeps taking them to see THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965) and feeding them treats, as this one feeds them conspiracy theories, like JFK is not really dead, instead he’s a vegetable living on a Greek island owned by Aristotle Onassis, which explains why Jackie married him, or how overpopulation will leave people without sufficient food to eat, leading to mass starvation and famine, while the space race itself led to broad speculation about how nuclear war could devastate the planet, with the duck-and-cover school drills (How 'Duck-and-Cover' Drills Channeled America's Cold War ...) offering a ridiculous defense against toxic radioactivity.  When it comes time for the men to actually walk on the moon, Stan pretty much sleeps through it, exhausted from spending his day at Astroworld, where it seemed to take forever sitting in front of the television to get to that point, continually prolonging the main event with endless talk about things not even shown, described by his sister as “endlessly boring,” though in his own dreams he imagines himself doing his own moon walk, which in the end, seems to be all that really matters.   

Who Are the 12 Men Who Walked on the Moon? - WTTW

In all, 24 American astronauts have made the trip from the earth to the moon between 1968 and 1972.  Three astronauts made the journey from the earth to the moon twice, but only twelve men have actually walked on the moon.  None have been back since December 11, 1972. 

Countdown

 

Director Robert Altman

Altman on the set

Screenshot of James Caan and Joanna Moore

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COUNTDOWN         B-                                                                                                                USA  (101 mi)  1968  d:  Robert Altman

An early, often forgotten film by Robert Altman, his first feature shot more than a decade after his earlier 1950’s ventures, the perpetually underseen Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), a horribly bad film where Altman is only listed as a co-writer in the credits, a fictionalized look at juvenile delinquency in THE DELINQUENTS (1957) and the teen exploitation documentary THE JAMES DEAN STORY (1957), none of which show early signs of the director he was to become.  While working steadily in television for more than a decade, this film has bigger stars and more recognizable camera movement, yet it’s still more of a television drama than a Robert Altman movie, an adaptation of the 1964 Hank Searles book The Pilgrim Project, which is mostly a behind-the-scenes look at NASA in its infancy, which fully cooperated with the film, offering its facilities, including the Cape Canaveral missile launch location and the nearby, recently opened Kennedy Space Center.  Released 18-months before the first manned mission to the moon, this is a fictionalized, last-minute attempt to beat the Russians to the moon during the space race, known as the Pilgrim Project, accelerated into action after learning the Russians were on the verge of making a moon landing, where egos and petty jealousies come into play, yet in true Altman fashion he was fired before completing the film, as studio head Jack Warner looked at some of the footage and immediately demanded his dismissal claiming “That fool has actors talking at the same time.”  Of course, overlapping dialogue would become a standard trademark of any Robert Altman film, but early on the studio expressed little interest in this innovative filmmaking quirk.  Executive producer William Conrad, who actually hired Altman for the film, shot some new footage and provided a happier and more upbeat ending, as Altman’s original bleak ending had the astronaut lost on the moon, wandering in the wrong direction, ultimately doomed on a lifelessly deserted terrain.  Despite this interference, there are early signs of an Altman film, basically a blip on the radar, standing in stark contrast to Philip Kaufman’s large-scale historical drama THE RIGHT STUFF (1983), pitting two astronauts against one another (a prelude to seeing them work together in The Godfather (film series) 1972, 74,1990, also appearing in Coppola’s THE RAIN PEOPLE in 1969 and again as rivals in Sam Peckinpah’s THE KILLER ELITE in 1975), starring Robert Duvall as Chiz, an Air Force trained colonel who knows every aspect of the mission, groomed for the project early on, completing all the exercise missions, but he’s pulled out at the last minute because of his association with the military, which the top brass felt was a bad look for the first man on the moon, needing the optics of a civilian on a mission of peace, as they want no rumors of military intervention in outer space during the Cold War, when Americans were competing against the Russians.  In an early scene, where viewers aren’t sure what’s an exercise and what’s real, the mission is mysteriously aborted, leaving the crew totally befuddled, only to learn afterwards that there’s been a revision in the sped-up timetable and a change in assignment, Countdown (1968) -- (Movie Clip) Roger, Houston, Apollo 3 ... YouTube (2:27).  Plucked from the ranks is James Caan as Lee Stegler, an All-American guy who was a subordinate of Chiz, a member of his crew suddenly catapulting over him for the coveted mission, given just three weeks training before the launch, which doesn’t sit well with Chiz, who intends to undermine Lee, agreeing to train him, but drive him hard, proving he’s not ready, making the case that he’s the only one for the job.  Even during exercise missions there are plenty of distinctly different points of view, leading to disagreements and bureaucratic handwringing, causing unneeded tension, hardly the teamwork one might expect, yet the astronauts themselves are surprisingly clear about what they need to do, Countdown (1968) -- (Movie Clip) He Thinks He Can Fly - TCM YouTube (3:54).

Loosely remade by Ron Howard in APOLLO 13 (1995) with a much larger budget, this fits the low budget B-movie profile, better than expected, with very little science fiction to speak of but plenty of realistic detail, less interested in heroism or an established plot, with no real good guys, just a bunch of ordinary working stiffs doing their jobs, yet lacking the personal intensity of an Altman movie, resembling the cheesy sets on the television series Star Trek (1966 – 69), yet this is a typical Hollywood studio film told in linear fashion, using a structure that Altman would largely rail against for the entirety of his career afterwards, with a swelling atonal orchestral score by Leonard Rosenman that offers a sense of spacious anxiety, Leonard Rosenman music score from Robert Altman's COUNTDOWN (1968) Main & End Titles. YouTube (2:55), mirroring the epic musical score from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which was released just one month earlier, while the sets seen are replicas of actual NASA lunar modules used for exercise missions, where it’s hard to imagine being cramped into that tight space for days on end.  The script was written by Loring Mandel, a giant of “live” drama from the Golden Age of Television like Playhouse 90 or CBS Playhouse, anticipating the actual moon landing, though in much more desperate and alienating fashion, as Lee would be transported to the surface of the moon, where he would have three hour’s worth of oxygen to find a space station already on the surface, where once inside, he could safely live there for the next 10 months, or a year or so, until another mission could come to rescue him.  This astonishing isolation, being stranded on the moon, is actually the intended goal of the mission, the first dry run of the international space station which has been in existence since 1998, though orbiting around the earth.  This offers a completely different emotional edge to the experience, as neither astronaut has been trained to endure long periods of isolation. Altman shifts the focus to the astronaut’s wives, Barbara Baxley as Jean is the seemingly exiled wife of Chiz, rarely seen in each other’s company, while Joanna Moore as Mickey is the devoted wife of Lee (both blondes), often seen in social settings with a drink in their hands, but they are largely ignored and kept out of the official loop, literally kept in the dark, both seen here when they first inadvertently hear about the mission, still thinking Chiz will be the lone astronaut, Countdown (1968) -- (Movie Clip) An Emergency Backup To ...  YouTube (3:08).  Living in the shadows of their husbands, feeling obligated to support them, yet clearly they’re stressed out about all the things they aren’t being told about what could possibly go wrong, not the least of which is having a husband and father stranded on the moon indefinitely, while their shock and silence mirrors their husband’s overall sense of secrecy and extreme isolation.  There’s also a power play between a no-nonsense NASA administrator Ross (Steve Ihnat) and Navy doctor Gus (Charles Aidman), who voices his concerns for the health of the astronaut which, to put it bluntly, is never the primary focus of the operation, typically overlooked for the bigger picture, precariously cutting corners in a last minute high risk, high reward gamble in order to beat the Russians to the moon, with Ross quickly setting him straight about the mission’s expedited priorities, as you’re either all-in or out, Countdown - Steve Ihnat vs Charles Aidman YouTube (1:50).  

Using Altman regular Michael Murphy as one of the crew, whose work with Altman goes back to a television episode of Combat (1962 – 67) in 1963, and Ted Knight, known for his role as a dim-witted and totally clueless news anchor with perfect enunciation on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970 – 77), plays a bloviating NASA public relations guy, yet what Altman gets right is the look of the late 50’s and early 60’s, particularly the men working for NASA, all in crew cuts, wearing those undistinguished Eisenhower era glasses that were so commonplace, but also the press corps, the vintage cars, the bars, and the social gatherings.  At one party filled with NASA personnel (actually shot at Altman’s own Mandeville Canyon residence in Brentwood), an out-of-place Bohemian folk musician (voice artist Robert Ridgely) is singing a song about folk hero John Henry, transporting him from the railroad to the moon, making up satiric spoof lyrics about how “the moon is gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord,” Countdown (1968) -- (Movie Clip) The Man In The Moon Is A Girl YouTube (3:20).  This is in such bad taste, especially with the astronauts and their wives present, that it feels like it had to be an Altman touch, as the man had a thing for bad jokes, much like incorporating a song entitled “Suicide is Painless” during an irreverent Last Supper homage in MASH (1970), MASH Funeral Scene 1080p YouTube (2:25).  The moon flight has Lee in the capsule while Chiz guides him from the Houston Command Center, staying in radio contact, continually providing instructions, while the wives watch from a glass-enclosed room in the back, seeing and hearing everything.  What’s surprising is that Lee gets rattled by unexpected circumstances, encountering a power drain malfunction that causes him to lose his composure, showing visible fear at having to shut down much of his power, not trusting that it will be there when he needs it, but conditions eventually stabilize.  Radio contact is sporadic as he nears the moon, so part of each message is missing, yet Chiz is adamant about aborting the landing should he be unable to make eye contact with the space module with a flashing beacon, as there is still an opportunity for a safe return to earth.  Never really seeing it on the approach, Lee refuses to see failure as an option and lands on the surface anyway, losing all radio contact, shot in the Mojave Desert to simulate the surface of the moon.  He has only a brief window to find it, and instead, in a chilling Altman twist, discovers gruesome evidence of a failed Russian landing that is a sobering reminder of just what can go wrong.  An inveterate gambler, Altman devises a scheme of chance that sends him in the wrong direction, as viewed from a pulled back vantage point from the module, like a Hitchcockian device, ending in downbeat fashion, but that’s not what we see, just the opposite, curiously expressed through a long and wordless sequence, which does really feel like an exploration, but lacks any sense of outer space curiosity, showing no signs of awe or wonder.  Unlike the actual moon, with little gravitational pull, where a moon walk consists of giant skips and bounces, this is more straightforward where a walk is a walk, yet the region is entirely lifeless and desolate, exhausting the entirety of his oxygen supply, relying upon a miracle, which, of course, happens in the movies.  Every expedition needs a little luck.  Still, even if successful, he’s stranded up there for months on end, yet food, air supply, and radio contact will allow him to maintain human contact.  It’s a very eerie and unsettling conclusion, where a scene involving the American and Russian flags might seem surprisingly civil, as there’s little patriotic fervor, but James Caan does an excellent job as the man on the moon, where all earthly relations and connections will just have to wait until the scientists figure out how to get him back.  It’s a bit surreal, evolving slowly in extreme quiet, allowing the potentially dire implications to play out.