Richard Linklater lovingly crafts a detailed pop-cultural backdrop for his latest picture, a return to rotoscope animation techniques that he explored in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. Apollo 10½ draws upon his own background, building a portrait of a late 60s Texan childhood, coloured in with everything from the space race to health and safety violations, to snack food packaging and the slowly encroaching crawl of hippy culture. It is a time, he suggests, in which the television was a part of the family. Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story.
