No spoiler warnings were required. When moviegoers first sat down to watch “Apollo 13” in the summer of 1995, they already knew how the story would play out. Those old enough could remember how, in April 1970, the world had been captivated when an explosion ripped through Apollo 13’s command module, the Odyssey. In an instant, NASA’s third attempt to land human beings on the Moon was transformed into a tense battle for survival, a mission with a single goal: bringing astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert home alive.
Understandably, Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon were granted top billing for playing the three stranded men in Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning retelling of the story. But the movie is as much a celebration of the scientists who brought them home as the astronauts who kept their cool while they were trapped in the vast void between the Earth and the Moon. It’s an ode to people who — when the chips are down — can literally find a way to fit a square peg into a round hole.
“The astronaut is only the most visible member of a very large team,” Hanks, as Lovell, explains early on in the film. “And all of us, right down to the guy sweeping the floor, are honored to be a part of it.”
Howard had dabbled in science fiction with 1985’s “Cocoon”, but “Apollo 13” (based on “Lost Moon” by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger) planted its flag firmly in the science fact camp — give or take some dramatically expedient artistic licence. You know the drill: multiple real-life people being merged into a single composite character, some spiced-up interpersonal tensions, and liberal dashings of Hollywood-friendly dialogue. (Lovell’s famous “Houston, we have a problem” is a misquote of Swigert’s original, less poster-friendly “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”)
It’s a very different beast from Philip Kaufman’s “The Right Stuff” (1983), at the time Hollywood’s most celebrated ode to NASA’s first decade in orbit. There, the focus was very much on the Mercury 7 pilots who bravely strapped themselves to the first space rockets — and were, as they got flight-ready alongside chimpanzees, repeatedly mocked for being highly trained professionals doing a job an ape could do.
“Do you think a monkey knows he’s sitting on top of a rocket that might explode?” asks test pilot Chuck Yeager (played by Sam Shepard). “These astronaut boys they know that, see. I’ll tell you something, it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that’s on TV.”
The so-called “right stuff” manifests rather differently in “Apollo 13”. Sure, this generation of astronauts knows the final frontier is dangerous, but they also have a professional edge, acting as if going to the Moon is just another day at the office. Well, almost.
Lovell’s response to being shifted from Apollo 14 to Apollo 13 (and therefore an earlier flight) is happy but muted, while command module pilot Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) is remarkably sanguine when his recent exposure to measles prompts his last-minute withdrawal from the flight. And though the Hollywood version of an orbital crisis would typically see some courageous pilot wrestling with a joystick to arrest a life-threatening spin, Lovell’s crisis response involves calmly working through sums with pencil and paper, before radioing back to mission control to make sure his calculations are correct.
Back in 1995, there was speculation that Hanks might end the year in contention for a third consecutive Best Actor Oscar (after “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”), but in hindsight, singling out the nominal headline star would have felt wrong. Indeed, the fact that Ed Harris did pick up Best Supporting Actor nomination playing flight director Gene Kranz seems more appropriate, seeing as he’s the face of the small army of scientists and engineers battling to bring the trio of astronauts home. He also hogs the majority of the best lines, although his famous “Failure is not an option” was made up for the movie.
It’s now something of a cliché that Apollo functioned on significantly less computing power than a smartphone, but “Apollo 13” turns that lack of modern technology into a strength.
Howard’s meticulously researched movie is head-over-heels in love with the retro hardware of the era, whether it’s spacecraft exteriors or the satisfyingly chunky buttons lining the ***pit. Even the command module simulator is a thing of beauty.
But, blockogue or digital, tech is nothing without the people making it work, and “Apollo 13” never forgets that. Most of the men in mission control — this being the less enlightened 1970s, they are all men — are indistinguishable from each other. This anonymous gang dress in a uniform of neatly pressed short-sleeved shirts and unfussy ties, and even those with names barely get an introduction on screen. Even so, they’re good people to know in a crisis and a powerful advert for the strength of the collective.
Because, in a film that could easily have been subtitled “a series of unfortunate events”, they turn problem-solving into a superpower, “scienceing the s**t” out of the situation long before Matt Damon got left behind in “The Martian”. Armed only with slide rules and their numerous degrees, they’re a potent combination of Mr Spock’s smarts and MacGyver’s knack for improvisation.
Under extreme pressure, they perform a constant balancing act between safety (can they risk firing the rocket on the damaged command module?) and time (will the astronauts have enough oxygen if they take the longer route and slingshot around the Moon?). And when it turns out that the square carbon dioxide filters from the command module won’t fit the circular scrubbers on the Aquarius lunar lander (LEM) that’s become the crew’s lifeboat, they have to fashion a solution using only what the astronauts can scavenge from their stricken craft. Their ingenious creation — an unlikely combination of spacesuit parts, duct tape, and the suddenly obsolete mission plan — encapsulates the film in an inelegant nutshell.
Of course, the movie’s happy ending is never in doubt — Apollo 13 had famously been dubbed a “successful failure” by NASA — but it’s the creative ways in which mission control keeps the astronauts alive that really draw you in. The astronauts may have become the superstars of those famous trips to the Moon, but “Apollo 13” is an entertaining reminder that they’d have been stuck on the launchpad without some very clever people back in Houston.
“Apollo 13” is available to stream on MGM+ in the US, and to rent and buy on Prime Video and Apple TV+ in the UK.
