Apollo 13, directed by Ron Howard and staring Tom Hanks as mission commander
Jim Lovell, is positively the best film of the 1990s. It tells the true story
of the mission of Apollo 13, a lunar expedition that suffered an explosion in
flight and turned into a harrowing effort to get the crew home alive.
The story begins with the night Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and continues
with the scheduling of Apollo 13’s mission, the last minute selection of Jack
Swigert, played by Kevin Bacon, to the crew due to the potential sickness of
crewmember Ken Mattingly, played by Gary Sinese. There’s a broadcast from space
that no network picks up; hard as it is to believe, by April, 1970, lunar
expeditions were considered boring. The accident itself is depicted as a fast,
frightening event that might well have killed the crew then and there. The film
proceeds from there on a nail biting, edge of the seat experience from the very
moment the command module splash lands in the Pacific. Great support
performances are turned in, as well, by Bill Paxton, as Fred Haise, Ed Harris,
as Flight Director Gene Kranz, and Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn Lovell. Lovell
himself has a cameo as a Navy Admiral on board the recovery ship.
The lengths to which Howard and his fellow film makers went to get the
technical details right are awe inspiring, down to the very controls in the
command and lunar modules. To simulate micro gravity, Howard put the set of his
space craft into NASA’s Vomit Comet aircraft, which the astronauts use to train
for space missions. The launch sequence of the Saturn V was entirely done
within a computer, but was so real that at least one lunar astronaut wondered
how Howard had gotten footage that he had never seen before.
There are some nits to pick. The tension between the crewmembers was not as
intense in real life as it was on film. They were too busy trying to get home
to bicker. And one hears tales of the odd NASA veteran grumbling because, “The
third flight controller from the left looks nothing like me.” Other than that,
Apollo 13 remains one of the most accurate historical films in history.
Apollo 13 has been credited with reviving interest in space exploration. It
was so well received by audiences that at many performances, the ending
resulted in standing ovations. It is and will remain a classic.