When film director Ron Howard set out to make a movie about the Apollo program, the problem he faced was that nearly all of the Apollo expeditions to the Moon had proceeded pretty much perfectly. The exception, of course, was the flight of Apollo 13, which in April of 1970 suffered an explosion in the spacecraft’s service module and came nearly to a total loss of the ship and crew. Thus one of the greatest adventure films of all time was born.
The film starts many months before the flight of Apollo 13, on the night that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on its surface. Jim Lovell, the future commander of Apollo 13, played with great skill by our modern day Jimmy Stewart, Tom Hanks, is throwing a party to celebrate. Attending is a whose who of the Apollo program, including one Pete Conrad, future commander of Apollo 12 and Skylab 1, who offers a toast to the crew of the “dress rehearsal” of his own expedition to the Moon.
This sequence captures the awe of that magic night in July of 1969-as well as some of the melancholy. At one point, Lovell and one of his crew vow that “our turn will come” and that “they won’t cut the program before then.” Already the political winds were turning against space adventures.
This point is restated in a later scene, when Lovell is conducting a tour of the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the Saturn Vs were stacked and made ready, to a Congressman played in a cameo by filmmaker Roger Corman, under whom many a more famous director, including Ron Howard, learned his craft. While Lovell talks about the technologies spawned by the space program, including computers that “fill whole rooms and make millions of calculations per second” (a great laugh line even in 1995), the Congressman hints about how it might all soon be over.
Nevertheless Lovell and his crew will get their chance at glory. Not Lovell’s command module pilot, Ken Mattingly, played by Gary Sinise, however. He has been exposed to the measles, a disease then without a vaccine. Rather than risk getting sick on the way to the Moon, he must drop out for his backup, Jack Swigert, played by Kevin Bacon. Fred Haise, played by Bill Paxton, rounds out the crew of Apollo 13.
A little bit of obvious foreshadowing takes place when Marilyn Lovell, played by Kathleen Quinlan, loses her wedding ring in the shower the morning of the launch. There is also a hilarious scene when Mrs. Lovell instructs a very pregnant Mary Haise, played by Tracey Reiner, in the proper demeanor of an astronaut’s wife in 1970. Sally Ride and female astronauts were about ten years in the future; then space travel was a man’s game.
The sequence of the Saturn V launch is one of the most spectacular to ever be put on film. It is not like experiencing the real thing, when the Earth shook for miles around and the sky was painted by the light of the rocket’s engines. But it is close, so close in fact that upon seeing it, astronaut Buzz Aldrin asked in Ron Howard had actually found some hitherto unknown footage in NASA’s archives. But the whole sequence was done on computers.
Next, Howard engages in a little sly social commentary. The crew of Apollo 13 produce a special broadcast from inside their space craft. It’s own of those awkward productions from the era, with lame jokes. Nevertheless it is a broadcast from a space craft on its way to the Moon. Yet not one network deigned to carry it. Less than a year after Apollo 11, watched by the whole world, voyages to the Moon had become too boring to preempt soap operas and game shows.
The accident itself is depicted with an intensity that was unknown to TV viewers at the time. It is at this point that other characters, including flight director Gene Kranz, played by Ed Harris, come into their own. Because of the explosion, the Moon landing is scrubbed. Now the problem is how to get the crew back home and safe with limited air and energy. The solution is the use the undamaged lunar module as a kind of lifeboat, preserving the lives of the crew until it’s time to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and splash down in the Pacific.
Mattingly shines, now, as he runs simulation after simulation to help his fellow astronauts survive their ordeal. Kranz’s flight controllers, all unsung until this movie came out, prove that engineering nerds can too be heroes, solving problems like how to put a square object into a round hole in order to fix a carbon dioxide filter.
One bitter sweet sequence occurs when the space craft is rounding the far side of the Moon and Lovell imagines what it would have been like to land on it. It will be an experience that he will never have now. Yet he now has the job of getting himself and his crew home alive, a task perhaps more difficult than going to the Moon.
The film viewer knows that Apollo 13 made it home, if he or she knows anything about history. But Apollo 13 the movie is so tightly paced that the same film viewer wonders if that will be so. When the command module appears on the TV monitor, drifting down toward the Pacific Ocean beneath her parachutes, more than one movie audience stood and cheered. Later, the real Jim Lovell, in the person of a Navy Admiral, greets the movie Jim Lovell as he boards the carrier.
Apollo 13 has been praised for its meticulous attention to historical accuracy, down to the exact layout of the controls on the Apollo space craft. Howard literally out the set of the Apollo space craft into the hold of NASA’s “Vomit Comet”, which flies parabolas to simulate the effects of micro gravity, to get a true sense of his actors playing astronauts on space. Hitherto, micro gravity was awkwardly simulated using wires.
There were a few scenes that were “enhanced” for dramatic effect, such as the tensions between Haise and Swigert during the flight. And there remains to this day the odd retired flight controller who will grouse that “the third guy on the left looks nothing like me.” But Apollo 13 will remain a classic of true life space adventure, one that does not have to rely on blasters or evil aliens for its dramatic tensions. It will be enjoyed by audiences long after we answer the question Tom Hanks puts in Jim Lovell’s mouth, “When will we be going back?”
