Forget the moon landing—Apollo 13 proves that botched missions are the ones to dramatize
Film Features Apollo 13
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Voyagers now in theaters and Stowaway on Netflix next week, we’re looking to the stars for five days of space movies.
Apollo 13 (1995)
Imagine hopping into a time machine, traveling back to mid-July of 1969, stopping by NASA, and telling folks there that half a century later, there still won’t be a big-budget Hollywood movie about humanity first setting foot on the moon (only a TV miniseries, which wouldn’t sound remotely prestigious three years before HBO even launched, and a Neil Armstrong biopic), but that there will be a popular, Oscar-winning movie about the third attempt to travel there. Actually, the word “attempt” alone would likely inspire sufficient alarm to alter the course of history, saving everyone a lot of anxiety and hassle, albeit at the cost of depriving the world (or perhaps some alternate/parallel universe) of a terrific film. For while Apollo 13 was a doomed mission, Apollo 13—directed by the kid who just finished playing Opie Taylor, you inform the ’69ers, ensuring that they’ll dismiss your entire crazy story—exemplifies studio filmmaking at its finest, throwing money, talent, and craft at the problem in much the same way that NASA worked collectively to save its astronauts.
It helps to be dramatizing a real-life event so legitimately harrowing that precious little needed to be invented for entertainment’s sake. Just two days prior to launch, Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) was grounded, after it was discovered that he’d potentially been exposed to rubella, a.k.a. German measles; were he to become sick, it would likely be exactly when his expertise was most needed. So he was replaced at the last minute by backup pilot Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), with whom the other two astronauts—Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton)—had never worked. As fate would have it, Swigert was the one instructed by NASA, as Apollo 13 neared the moon, to perform a routine stir of the oxygen tanks, causing (for reasons then unknown) an explosion that not only necessitated aborting the planned lunar landing, but spewed most of the command module’s remaining oxygen into space. To get home, the astronauts had to move to the lunar module, which wasn’t designed to sustain three men at all, much less three men for several days. Cue a mad scramble at NASA, with one of the two flight directors, Gene Kranz (Ed Harris), orchestrating a remarkable ultra-long-distance survival plan.
Apollo 13 has its share of poignant moments, with Hanks putting his all into Lovell’s quietly crushed reaction when Mission Control sends an instruction that will kill any chance of their landing on the moon. For the most part, though, this is a superlative problem-solving narrative—not unlike the stirring effort that brings Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut home in The Martian, except that this actually happened. Arguably, the film’s most emblematic line is delivered not by any of its stars but by the anonymous NASA tech who dumps a bunch of random crap onto a table, holds up a square filter and a cylindrical filter, and tells his assembled team, “We need to make this fit into the hole for this using nothing but that.” (The astronauts were in danger of being suffocated by their own expelled carbon dioxide, and the only filters available were constructed for the wrong module.) Every possible variable is critical, with experts at one point bewildered by their calculations seeming slightly but crucially off… until they realize that they’d expected the return to be heavier by roughly 200 pounds of moon rocks that never got collected.
Watching these men—the complete absence of women in Mission Control, while historically accurate, now seems very bizarre—improvise multiple solutions to a crisis unfolding tens of thousands of miles away from Earth instills pride, not just in America but in Homo sapiens generally. Maybe it makes sense, after all: Why make a movie about the time everything went right, when it’s just as inspiring, and even more exciting, to chronicle how we rose to the occasion when virtually everything went wrong?
Availability: Apollo 13 is currently streaming on Peacock. It’s also available to rent or purchase digitally from Amazon, Google Play, Apple, YouTube, Fandango Now, Redbox, AMC On Demand, DirecTV, and VUDU.
109 Comments
Still one of my favorite movies. When it’s on, from wherever it is, I will watch till the end. At the end when Lovell says, “Hello Houston, this is Odyssey. It’s good to see you again” and everyone cheers still gets to me.
At the end when Lovell says, “Hello Houston, this is Odyssey. It’s good to see you again” and everyone cheers still gets to me I’ll go you one better – that line and that moment bring tears to my eyes. Every damn time. Even though obviously I know they make it – and even though I was alive when it happened. I really do know how it ends and I’m still a weepy baby when I hear that “good to see you”.(In real life they could not have asked for a better suspense-builder than that actual fact that the ship would be out of contact for a few minutes while re-entry was happening. Jeez. I also liked what the movie The Right Stuff did with John Glenn’s potentially problematic re-entry – with Shepherd saying “oh, he’s singing… he does that..” – and you know he’s going to be fine.)
For me it’s the scene with Ma Lovell. “If they made a washing machine fly, my Jimmy could land it”
even READING this line makes me tear up.
It’s fine, I’d even watch parts of it again on a rainy day, but it seems like a lot of people hold this movie in much higher esteem than I think it warrants. It’s cool people like it. That’s great. It’s just kind of by-the-numbers. Honestly, it’s really no better than “Marooned” and actually a lot less fun (I mean, no David Janssen.)
You’re pretty much spot on, but I still love to watch it for the sheer attention to detail. For a NASA and space travel buff, it’s such fun to watch in this regard.
Being a real story rather than science fiction makes Apollo 13 more compelling though. Although it is interesting that Marooned predicted a similar case of astronauts in danger of suffocation before a real such situation occurred.
Jim and Marilyn Lovell actually saw Marooned on its release, and Marilyn was naturally a bit disturbed when the team member named Jim died.
Are you referring to Apollo 13, or Ron Howard’s filmography in general?
Hanks’ character weakens the whole movie for me.I’m pretty sure that the movie wants us to think of him as a hero, but in this life-or-death crisis he spends so much time moping that he doesn’t get to be a special boy anymore.I know that it’s supposed to be the big dramatic arc of the movie, but it feels very “Hollywood.” I just want him to grow up and stopping letting the rest of his crew down, already.
That is a bit of a problem with a lot of these dramatizations involving Hanks, although I like them. A more recent example is “Sully”. The film makes it out that Sully is upset and insulted that there is an FAA investigation of the Hudson River incident, but in real life Captain Sully understood fully that everything about the incident (including whether his actions were optimal) needed to be investigated as it was important to know how to handle such situations in the future better.
I dunno, I might also have higher expectations of astronauts than I do pilots?In Apollo 13 it really takes me out of the movie that “THIS IS DANGEROUS! YOU 3 ARE GOING TO DIE!” And meanwhile Hanks is gazing longingly out the window and sighing.Greyhound is another comparison, because it’s also really in the moment. And the whole point there is that Hanks is super-focused on the crisis. And (for me anyway) that works much better.I don’t know anything about Lovell, but I really hope he wasn’t as flaky as Apollo 13 makes him seem.
TBH Sully was made by noted “government lover” Clint Eastwood so that should give you a clue about why the movie the way it was.
Captain Phillips, of course, being a reversal of these situations.
I read Lovell’s book and that characterization is quite accurate. I think Hanks actually humanizes Lovell a bit more than he comes across in the book, making him someone you root for, rather than someone you wish would stop whining.
I read Lovell’s book and that characterization is quite accurate. I think Hanks actually humanizes Lovell a bit more than he comes across in the book, making him someone you root for, rather than someone you wish would stop whining.
Yup, this is competently made and pretty effective in pulling the right strings, but almost despicable in how visible those strings are. I feel like this is the movie when Tom Hanks figured out how to Tom Hanks his way through a lot of his movies. This is the Tom Hanks we all ended up seeing in many subsequent films: The Green Mile, Saving Private Ryan, Road to Perdition. This is also the movie that I feel sank Kathleen Quinlan’s career. Her scenes especially during the climax to me are nearly unwatchable not necessarily because she did a bad job, but more that Ron Howard did such an obvious, shameless onion-chopping job. Boo.
It is certainly no Robinson Crusoe on Mars.
I mean, it’s held up as the best depiction of space travel by a majority of astronauts. That alone gives it something special.
This film remains my favourite IMAX experience. The film was shot Super35mm, in which you expose the full 35mm frame and then letterbox it to widescreen, so for the IMAX they just removed the letterbox so the top and bottom of the image filled the entire screen. Looked and sounded incredible. They had to trim a bit of the running time so it could fit on the IMAX reel but I didn’t miss whatever they cut.
Prepare to feel the cold grip of time around your heart: we are now farther away from this movie than it was from the real event.
More depressing: For almost all of mankind’s history, no living human had ever walked on the moon. We are likely to be right back there since the youngest one is 85 and Artemis isn’t scheduled to land a person on the moon till October of 2024. We all know how good NASA is at hitting deadlines these days.
Time heart grips suck, and that was no exception.
Speaking of failed missions, I still can’t believe no one has made a film about Project Azorian, in which the CIA, using Howard Hughes’s corporation as a cover, built a tanker ship with a concealed moon pool and grappling arm and attempted to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine in the Pacific Ocean. The sub was a few hundred feet from the surface when the arm catastrophically failed, and most of the sub fell away…or so the CIA claims. It’s an incredible story, so full of intrigue and adventure and bizarre characters, that it would seem absurd if it were a work of fiction. And it’s one of the greatest engineering endeavors of the 20th century.
There was a bit of a backdoor nod to the whole Glomar Explorer situation in The Abyss (the Benthic Explorer was the stand-in mothership, and part of the plot was about salvaging a submarine, obviously). But yes, a dedicated film based on the endeavor would be great cinema.
There was another nod to the Glomar Explorer in Charles Stross’ book ‘The Jennifer Morgue’ but with a distinctly different flavor.
Huh, now I can hear Mike Nelson saying “Glomar Explorer” in my head but have no idea which Mystery Science Theater episode it’s from. This is what my dotage has in store for me, apparently.
This would honestly be a MUCH better project for Canadian Supervillain James Cameron than 5 more Avatar movies. I know the story and it would definitely work on film.
I suspect that the wide range of characters and the multiple angles actually makes it hard to pitch. It lasted so long and involved so many different people and moving parts that I wonder what you focus on and how you make all those parts work into a coherent narrative structure?
Never heard of this and now I want that movie more than anything.
The thing that freaks me out about that is that I, as an 11-12 year old, knew all about the Glomar Explorer; it was featured on a segment of “In the News”, a 2 minute news segment aimed at kids that aired during CBS’ Saturday morning cartoon lineup. So the CIA did just build a giant ship, they basically advertised it. Of course I guess they figured they couldn’t hide it.
I was on a rowing team in highschool and rowed past that thing every morning. Crazy to be within a couple yards of it. Once, we were warming up with a run and accidentally tried to run past the guard booth into the yard where it was kept. Guard stepped out with his hand up and said, “Woah there guys. Right church, wrong pew.”
I was on a rowing team in high school and we rowed within yards of that barge every morning when it was parked in the port of Redwood City. Super creepy.It was right next to the huge Morton’s Salt pile, which I once hopped the barbed wire fence to climb up and sled back down on a piece of cardboard. Good times.
Behold the constellation Ur-ine!
Why make a movie about the time everything went right, when it’s just as
inspiring, and even more exciting, to chronicle how we rose to the
occasion when virtually everything went wrong?
Aha! Sounds like it’s time to make a movie about the Apollo 1 mission! You know, the one nobody remembers or talks about because of the horrible way the would-be astronauts died?
Or even the Challenger shuttle mission. As far as I know, there’s been no movie made of this. Is it still too soon? I think there was a tv movie about it but tv movies back in the day were pretty much awful.
Yeah, the TV movie came out in 1988 or so but it was meant as a tribute, not to sensationalize anything, so it ends as the Challenger lifts off. So there’s no explosion, no aftermath about what went wrong, no blame laid anywhere. It was actually good as I recall, but it really needed a second half.
I think generally you don’t want your movie to end with the entire crew suddenly dying. There’s a pretty good documentary on Netflix about Challenger though, it’s about one episode too long in my opinion but still worth a watch (‘Challenger: Final Flight’).
I don’t know, the Flight 93 movie was really good (better than I expected) and that didn’t end well except for maybe the White House.
I haven’t seen Flight 93, but I think the difference would be that the passengers on Flight 93 were aware of what was going on and tried to fight back while the astronauts aboard Challenger were just bystanders to the catastrophe.
Apparently there’s a movie in production right now about Challenger so we’ll see.
Ok well don’t spoil the ending for me please.
They’re making a Challlenger movie right now, with Michelle Williams as Christa McAullife (who looks absolutely nothing like her, but she’s such a great actress that no one cares).
Very interesting, thanks for that info!
Apollo 1 is covered in First Man. It’s a small part of the movie of course, but the way it’s filmed makes the horror pretty memorable: instead of cutting away from the interior of the ship right away when the fire starts, you stay with the crew long enough to see them going into crisis mode and trying to save themselves until the point where everytbing is on fire.
Was it the door?
It gets covered in First Man well. I think that movie was very well done. You know the ending to both missions, so that Apollo 11 made it back safely does not make it feel any less dangerous. That shot of opening the door on the lander and being on the moon, in the bright sunlight dropping off into a dark, dead void that will kill with one mistake so very far from home was really the flipside of all the perky depictions that we normally see of happy astronauts hopping around in low gravity. You had to have a test pilot of Armstrong’s caliber or they would have run out of fuel or landed wrong and died of slow asphyxiation. It all felt anything except that it was going to work out well.
I always leaven my criticisms of this film with the admission that I saw this 12 times in the theaters when it first came out (I grew up during the Apollo missions and my entire childhood was shaped by moon shots). Since its release, I’ve had a few things spoil the experience a bit for me (like discovering whole sections of James Horner’s score were recycled from other scores he did, along with a couple of pivotal scenes being made up for dramatic effect [viz., the Big Blowup in the LM], etc.). And Ron Howard’s directorial style hasn’t aged as well as I’d have hoped.It’s incredibly serviceable pop culture filmmaking, and it set the stage for Tom Hanks to help fund and produce the superior From the Earth to the Moon series. Hanks’ enthusiasm for the whole proceeding is a large part of why the movie works the way it does – I shudder to think what would have happened if they had cast Jim Lovell doppelganger Kevin Costner in the role as Lovell had requested. Without Hanks going all-in (he was such a space program superfan that he double-checked in every scene that he was toggling the correct switch and using the proper terminology for every procedure), I think this would be a less dynamic, by-the-numbers boomer nostalgia junket.
I’ve been rewatching “From the Earth to the Moon” lately. A real shame that Chaikin’s book still hasn’t come out digitally.
It’s worth it reading the paper copy. I’m sure you can get a used one pretty cheap too.-d
Yes. I’ve had it for years. I’d really like an e-version though. It’s the best book on the program. It is really strange that its never come out.
YES YES YES. I’ve worn out the pages on my copy and I’m furious that it’s not in Kindle format yet. Probably the seminal book on the Apollo program. Don’t know what the roadblock is, especially since Slayton and Shepard’s hagiographic book has had multiple digital reissues in the interim.
Yeah — Love this film (and that it lead to the even more satisfying FE2M); but some of the inaccuracies for the sake of drama bug me—the LEM “fight”, framing Swigert as a playboy and less-than-prepared, doofus Grumman guy, etc. And finally, Tom Hanks is playing Tom Hanks, with no attempt at portraying the actual Lovell. But the VFX hold up amazingly well (and are STILL better than the remastered CGI done for the HD FE2M).
Apparently some actual astrophysicists were convinced Howard really had somehow gotten a camera into those positions, and asked how he did it.
I hate to dump on him since he died in a terrible plane crash, but most of James Horner’s scores re-use big chunks of other James Horner scores. There’s a bunch of stuff in Aliens that he lifted out of Wrath of Khan (granted, he was under tremendous time pressure when he wrote Aliens, and Cameron’s many last-minute re-cuts didn’t help), and there are motives that he re-uses in just about every film score that he wrote: in particular, a little rising four note chromatic triplet lick that shows up in EVERYTHING- Khan, Aliens, Willow, Avatar, the Boy in Striped Pajamaz, Braveheart, Titanic… it makes me roll my eyes whenever I hear it.
Yeah. It was Apollo 13 that made me realize what a recycler he was. The scene when Hanks is looking at the Earth as 13 is nearing home has the exact same musical sting as in Sneakers when Martin Brice realizes that Cosmo is insane – same instruments, same key, the works. It crushed me because up until that point, Horner was one of my very favorite composers – but now, that’s all I can hear whenever I hear one of his scores.
Also Wolfen/Aliens. It’s very common. Morricone recycled many tunes as well and it doesn’t detract from his quality. Philippe Sarde too. And heck, I’ve just watched Jason and the Argonauts, and it was full of North by Northwest.
After looking at photos of Apollo-era Lovell I think he looked more like Jimmy Stewart.
This is a great movie and a good write-up, but fails to mention one of the most amazing aspects of the film, which is that they are able to wring genuine suspense out of the landing when we all knew going in that they survived!
When I think about these guys in their horn rim glasses and their short sleeve button down shirts sending test pilots to the moon using the computing power of an early TI calculator (if that), I grieve we’ve come to [gestures to QAnon, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, adherents of trickle-down economics] this.
It’s amazing to me that a little over 50 years ago the whole world was enraptured by a voyage to the moon, and about 4 years later, the world was like, “Fuck that shit.”
I love the bit where they’re trying to do some calculations and the way they confirm it’s correct is by having ten guys doing the math with paper and pencil.
It wasn’t all rosy idealism and can-do spirit. Even back then, there were people complaining that the money was wasted and should be spent on other things. Other dramatizations and documentaries have shown that, although this one didn’t.
I have no quarrel with anyone who wants to debate, in good faith, about budgetary priorities. I would of course immediately point out how tiny NASA’s budget is compared to what we spend on the military and so forth, and the ROI we get for the dollars we put into it. The real rage inducer is the mainstreaming and championing of intentional stupidity and “anti-elitism” which is really just what dumb jealous people call anti-intellectualism. Some how being a fucking moron has become a virtue to be loud and proud about. I have no doubt there were incredibly dimwitted Americans around back then, I just thought by now there would be fewer. Instead it feels like there’s more.
Is anti-intellectualism really what’s behind loss of interest in space travel? I doubt most people think of astronauts as intellectuals. Besides, you don’t need to be an egghead to love the idea of space travel. If anything, given how much Americans love escapism I wonder why it’s with space travel that we decide to get “practical.”
It concerns me in a couple ways, and the current indicators are mixed at best:Can we, as a population, still churn out the brain power to “do stuff”? Looking at the creation of the covid vaccine (yes, an international effort, not just an American effort), the answer seems to be yes.
Do we, as a population, believe in science? Looking at the acceptance of the covid vaccine, the answer seems to be “not enough.” Can we, as a population, get organized enough to change the course of our own history? Looking at the rollout and distribution of the covid vaccine as well as the general response to the pandemic, the answer seems to be unclear. The entire pandemic, from initial news stories up to right now with the struggles to get people to take the vaccine, get it distributed, get people to wear masks and not go on spring break, etc… I can’t help but compare it to the way the population mobilized as a whole during world wars, particularly WW2. As a nation, there is a clear and present danger. What sacrifices do we make? What leaders do we choose, and how do we follow them? I marvel that this was a country that lived through years of rationing, and buying war bonds, and sending kids off to fight fascism, and inventing the atomic age (a mixed bag). I don’t know if we have that kind of fortitude today. Final point – I look at the arc of human history and I think about what civilizations and communities have dedicated themselves to. In particular I think about the churches of Italy. Construction started on the Duomo of Florence in 1296 and was completed in 1436, and there were even parts of the facade that weren’t even fully finished until the late 1800s. Whole generations of builders worked on this church – it wasn’t uncommon to find a laborer whose father and grandfathers all worked on the church. Why? Why would so many people be willing to spend so many resources and so much of their time on an effort they had to at least suspect they would never live to see through completion? Because they believed in societal goals. They believed they were contributing to the ultimate salvation of future generations. And here I’m going to pivot from my covid analogy to climate change. Can you imagine what we could accomplish in mitigating climate change and expanding sustainability if that was our mentality?
I have no doubt there were incredibly dimwitted Americans around back then, I just thought by now there would be fewer. Instead it feels like there’s more.There’s not more; they’re just louder. Social media and smartphones gave everyone a platform, including the idiots.
the problem is that social media connects those idiots and makes them feel emboldened, as well as convinces those on the fence into believing their idiotic points through various viral and insidious ways.
The reason it feels like there’s more is social media. Plain and simple… now we know what every idiot thinks all the time.
They do nod in that direction towards the beginning when Hanks is conducting a tour and somebody says something along the lines of, “Well, we beat the Russians to the moon, why bother going back?”
The women were doing the calculations!
Were things really better in that regard back in 1970?
I think of the way I read that global warming deniers have decided that CO2 is literally “The Gas of Life” and I wish I could force them to watch the CO2 scenes in this movie.The idea that there is a scientifically identifiable sweet spot for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is impossible for them, it has to be either good or bad.
For Apollo 13 there was a sweet spot too — too much and they all die, too little means nobody was breathing because the tank explosion had ruptured the hull.
But no. “Gas of Life.”
I know this movie isn’t thought of as one of the greatest of all time, nor should it be. But it is VERY good, and I’m serious when I say that it is one of the few that, if I’m channel-surfing and it’s on, I will stop and watch to the end. Even though I own it on DVD. There are “greatest” movies I won’t do that with. I have to be in the mood for Citizen Kane, and even Casablanca. But Apollo 13 ? I can watch any time.
Yeah, whatever the complaints, Howard did something right…https://theplaylist.net/ron-howard-apollo-13-fact-based-films-20201215/
Kind of like The Sting. Did it change my life? No. It is an extraordinarily well-executed piece of entertainment that I always stop on when changing channels? Yes.
For me, that’s why it’s one of the best movies of my lifetime, because there’s something about it that remains powerful enough that I *must* stop on it whenever it comes out. For me, a great, timeless movie doesnt necessarily have to be as profound as, say, Eternal Sunshine (which is very, to me), but can be something like Groundhog Day or Mad Max Fury Road that knows what it wants to do, and accomplishes it as well as it possibly can. There’s such a level of focus on the story it’s telling that I always get sucked in, even though I know the breats by heart, I know the ending, etc. I just marvel how everything comes together in A-game fashion in just about every regard for me as a viewer, especially when it could have gone wrong in so many ways (imagine a guy like Michael Bay handling this the way he handled “Pearl Harbor”)
They were supposed to release this back in theaters last year for the 50th anniversary. I was excited to see it on the big screen. Of course, that never happened. This is a nice reminder that, at one point, Rin Howard still knew how to direct a movie.
Hey, I thought A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon were pretty good.
Rush was a good movie. But Hillbilly Elegy is so bad I don’t know he bounces back.
James Horner’s score still brings a tear to my eye every damn time.
I love this movie a lot, but most particularly that scene you specified, with the box of junk tossed on the table that they need to use to literally fit a square peg into a round hole. Problem solving at its best. Also, Ed Harris in a waistcoat.
It’s such a great scene I was kinda heartbroken to learn it didn’t happen… But then circled back to impressed when I learned the guy who figured it out did so on the drive over. That’s just a wonderful bit of genius.
It says something about the movie that this piece leaves out a major chunk of the movie — the family left behind stuff. It was awful, and nobody wants to remember it, just like a commenter noted in another article that almost everyone completely blanks out on the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan (which made a similar dumb decision to shoehorn in a family to establish MEANING).Howard made a terrible decision to cram dumb moralizing about the press into those scenes, along with stupid digs at the Beatles-loving daughter, and the tired device of using newscasters to tell the audience the story is important, because maybe they’re too dumb to figure it out? He got the heart of the story right, but really fumbled by trying to add even more than was needed, I assume because either he or the producers couldn’t believe people would want a to watch a gripping story told well.
Competence porn at its finest, and it certainly helps that 99% of it is factually based.
I was wondering if the guy holding the camera in the cover image has been in anything else? He sort of looks familiar?
They were able to wring a remarkable amount of tension from a bunch of people working on a complex math problem that the audience knows they’re going to find the right answer to.
I also think this is one of the best jobs of ensemble casting in a feature I’ve ever seen.
One of the things I love about this movie is its protrayal of scientific and engineering proficiency. The astronauts and NASA staff don’t have natural gifts, or super powers and they don’t stand as guardians of hidden esoteric lore. Rather, their skills are the result of dedicated professionalism. This depiction of science in films has become vanishingly rare.
Concur. Like The Martian, it was a virtue to be smart enough to unexpected solve problems.
I think that is the movie’s real gift and allure. I think more than the actual narrative — there’s no shortage of movies about navigating disasters, real or fictional — the heartbeat of the movie is the celebration of ingenuity and will, of both astronauts and engineers et al — in both the mission itself and then the rescue. The movie has remarkable restraint and clarity in that it knows that’s all it needs — no beaucratic villain, no extra family histronics — and every moment feels “right”, from the performances to knowing when to alter the POV from the astronauts to Mission Control to Lovell’s family.
It tries to have a bureaucratic villain, I seem to remember. There’s some vague and rather hard to follow conflict about whose responsibility everything is – people muttering about one of the companies involved in making some of the kit which I think flares up into a brief argument between Ed Harris and some interchageable old white dude about who’s going to be blamed for everything. It feels like it was some vestige of a dropped narrative thread, though.
“Well, don’t you worry, honey. If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it.” I must have seen this movie 20 times, but it still makes me tear up every goddamn time.Same with the tense four-plus minutes where the astronauts don’t come out of blackout and don’t come out of blackout, and it seems all is lost, but then you see that chute open on the monitor and hear the crackle on the radio. “Hello, Houston, this is Odyssey. It’s good to see you again.” I’ve seen the movie umpteen times, I know what’s going to happen, but I’m still nervously waiting with bated breath while they’re in blackout and cheering when they come out.Fuck off haters and naysayers. Is it manipulative? Sure. But it’s also movie magic.
That post above you whining about “Who cares about the family?” and the use of real news footage to illustrate the information being relayed to an entire nation holding its breath, it just makes me think some moviegoers don’t deserve great movies.Like the test audiences who complained about Apollo 13’s Hollywood ending, in that they all survived.
Part of the thrill of this movie was the realization that 25 years earlier, people were travelling to the Moon a couple of times every year. In contrast, the manned space program of the ‘90s was still stuck with routine shuttle missions to low Earth orbit and a space station program that hadn’t launched a single piece of hardware after more than a decade in gestation.
Honestly, to me this is VASTLY more inspiring than watching a movie about a mission accomplished. I get chills watching the ingenuity and intelligence being celebrated and put on display in the movie.
I had a lengthy, chatty meeting with Ron Howard one day at Todd-AO Sound when he was in New York mixing Apollo 13. He told me at the time that John Sayles did a great deal of work on the screenplay, but the Writer’s Guild felt Sayles didn’t deserve a screen credit. It really bother Howard that this happened. He said Sayles made it a much better film than it otherwise would have been. I don’t read every article I see about Apollo 13, to be sure, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that mentioned about the movie. Anyway- John Sayles is partly responsible for it working as well as it does, not that anybody would know from the credits!
I’m a huge Sayles fan. He’s such an underrated talent.
I feel like he’s made some very good movies and some very tedious movies. I respect his talent and his commitment to his own voice, though.
Even though I don’t watch Baseball (it not really being a thing in my country), I’ve always loved Eight Men Out. It’s such a good movie.Return of the Secaucus Seven is entertaining and interesting as a little indie movie which does so much with so little.
… directed by the kid who just finished playing Opie Taylor, you inform the ’69ers, ensuring that they’ll dismiss your entire crazy story …They’re probably a little preoccupied anyway.
See also: The Ongoing Saga of Tom Hanks and Urine.
I watched this and the Green Mile in quick succession with my parents. I believe my mom’s quote was “I could go a long time without watching Tom Hanks pee again”
I talked to Prof Brian Cox on twitter about this and we agreed that you can still watch it, know how it turns out, and it’s still incredibly tense. Same with the original footage. Watch the original broadcast and when the astronauts go silent, even though you know they’re fine, it’s nerve shredding
1970 : “Failure is not an option”, “The crew is coming home”. What an inspiring display of determination, ethics and solidarity ! That’s what the NASA is all about, that’s what America is about ! Let’s make a movie about it.1986 : “Guys, sorry to insist but I worry about this joint in case it gets cold outside…” “Who cares, it’s Florida, man, it never gets cold, shut up.” Okay, hm, shit happens.2003 : “Guys, you still didn’t answer, I think some foam hit that wing, shouldn’t we be checking this ?” “Who cares, too much hassle, we’ll just see if they come down or burn in the sky, better leave them the surprise. It’s just another bunch of astronauts, don’t you have more important things to worry about, you nerd ?”Oh the Ron Howard movies that weren’t made.
It’s like evolution – the fuck-ups and kludges are both more fascinating and more revealing than the successes.
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THIS MOVIE! One of Hank’s all-time best performances, even though he didn’t win the Oscar for this one. Everything is just s well-done, including the juxtaposition of the drama in space, at Mission Control and at the astronauts’ homes, as their families hold vigil praying for their safe return.
Man, imagine if there was a tv show on right now about a fictionalized space race to make a moonbase. AVClub would totally cover that and not ignore its existence, right? …right?