Summer of 1995: Apollo 13
Ron Howard's drama in the stars is best when it's on the ground.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
It was the tagline of summer 1995, plastered on the poster for Apollo 13 and made instantly iconic by Tom Hanks.
It’s also a hell of an understatement.
Jim Lovell and his crewmates didn’t have a problem so much as one damn thing after another. The astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission faced a string of catastrophes that kept their lives in peril over the course of several days as NASA scrambled for a solution and the world watched. And 25 years later, Ron Howard brought it to life with meticulous detail and nearly unbearable tension.
Apollo 13 was the second-highest-grosser of 1995 domestically and the third globally. It scored nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress (it won editing and sound awards). After winning best actor two years in a row for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, it solidified Tom Hanks’ role as the world’s most beloved movie star and was key in shifting him into his longtime position as America’s dad. It was a great movie then; it holds up quite well.
Lost in space
The film tells the story of 1970’s doomed Apollo 13 mission, originally intended to touch down on the lunar surface and give Lovell (Tom Hanks) and his crew an opportunity to walk in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Instead, while completing a routine task, the astronauts experienced a catastrophic explosion that left them venting oxygen into space and changed their mission from exploration to survival.
I run hot and cold on Ron Howard. He doesn’t have a personal style or any identifiable artistic flourishes and, at times, he can be painfully square (which is why he was so great in a profane recent turn on The Studio). But he’s one of our most successful journeymen directors; he tends to crash and burn when he attempts whimsy or fantasy, but he’s often great telling grounded stories about people doing high-pressure jobs. Apollo 13 is easily his best work.
Howard focuses on the multitude of obstacles facing the crew and shows how innovative thinking, experimentation and grit on the ground saved the three astronauts. The script is based on Lovell’s book Lost Moon and researched by screenwriters William Boyles Jr. and Al Reinert, whose journalism backgrounds likely added to the accuracy. In his review, Roger Ebert notes compared the to the classic documentary For All Mankind and was astonished how closely Howard recreated real-life details, from the cabin seats to the small tape player floating around playing country music.
Howard largely didn’t use CGI for the film. The weightless effects were filmed using NASA’s “vomit comet,” and the launch of the Saturn V – still possibly the gold standard in cinematic rocket launches – was filmed with a mix of digital effects and miniatures. Little details throughout the travel – condensation flying into the astronauts’ faces upon re-entry, ice on the windshields, debris floating around the cabin – add to realism. The film looks like it hasn’t aged a day – if you don’t account for how young Hanks and his co-stars look – and it’s a reminder that CGI has its limitations; it will age in a way practical effects won’t. That groundedness invests audiences and reminds them of the gravity of the situation (no pun intended).
But while Apollo 13 is a tactile and visceral experience, it’s also a celebration of ingenuity in the face of disaster and a celebration of smart people working together to pull off a miracle.
Star-bound suspense, grounded drama
I saw Apollo 13 in theaters and I believe we owned the VHS, but it never stuck too deeply with me. I think that’s because, coming on the heels of Philadelphia and Forrest Gump (a film I’ve since learned my lesson on), I expected Tom Hanks to give a big performance and I was disappointed that he felt so normal, even subdued. In actuality, that’s one of its strengths.
The film’s fronted by three dependable actors – with Hanks as Lovell, Bill Paxton as Fred Haise, and Kevin Bacon as Jack Swigert, brought in at the last minute when Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) is grounded because he’s been exposed to the measles. Any of them can deliver outstanding performances, and it’s easy to see why audiences might have expected big movie star work. Instead, they’re a shorthand for the superstar nature the public would have had for astronauts, but they depict them as just regular guys in an extraordinary situation.
Hanks would, of course, go on to excel in roles where he’s the smartest and most composed person in the room, and he’s good as Lovell unites his fellow astronauts and keeps them focused. But what I appreciated most this time were the notes of sadness and even bitterness as Lovell realizes he’s lost his chance to walk on the moon. Bacon portrays Swigert as the rookie who knows he shouldn’t be there. There’s a small arc of him having to earn Lovell and Haise’s trust that’s largely dealt with through quick glances and insinuating lines, never an all-out conflict. Paxton gets the least to do, mainly because Haise is suffering a fever through most of the trip, but he does a good job suggesting the character’s fear and frustration without ever going too big. These internal conflicts are context, wallpaper. Survival is the main key. And none have a scene where they suddenly perform heroics; in fact, for much of the film, the astronauts simply await word from NASA about their next steps.
That’s what makes Apollo 13 so gripping. While the three stars do solid work, Howard gets the most mileage from the people left on the ground. Most notably, this movie confirmed that if you need an actor to stand at control panels and bark orders, you won’t do better than Ed Harris. This was far from his first performance – it wasn’t even the first time he’d played an astronaut1. He had been doing solid work for over a decade at this point, but Apollo 13 solidified the “Ed Harris” character. As Flight Commander Gene Kranz, he has to be calm and firm as NASA tries to bring the crew home. And Harris does that well – “failure is not an option” might be as memorable a line as “Houston, we have a problem.” But it’s how Harris suggests the desperation Kranz key at bay – his insistence that they won’t lose the crew – that gives him another dimension. When the astronauts splash down and reconnect with Mission Control, watch the way Harris sits down and puts his head in his hands, the pressure finally dissipating. It’s a great performance that earned Harris a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
While the life and death stakes are rooted in space, the true drama happens in the NASA control room and offices as crews tackle the ever-mounting problems, from rising CO2 levels to power outages to figuring out the proper trajectory for re-entry. NASA’s scientists and engineers had to develop a solution without the help of computers and calculators. They had pencils, paper and whatever was at their disposal. Howard generates solid tension from shots of people sitting around conference rooms spitballing ideas2. I also quite like Sinise as Mattingly, who’s understandably bitter at being grounded but nonetheless willing to jump work long hours in the simulator to bring his friends home. Apollo 13 celebrates the way smart people worked together not to pull together one game-changing rescue but to solve myriad problems as they occurred.
The film also loops in the drama of the families left home and the national context surrounding space travel. Kathleen Quinlan also earned a Supporting Actress nomination for her work as Lovell’s wife, and it’s a strong performance, asking her to balance hope, fear, and anger at both NASA for putting her husband in a precarious position and the American media for not caring until they found a way to exploit it for drama. The screenplay weaves in the tragedies that dotted the early space program and the waning public interest that ultimately ended the program in a way that never overwhelms the film but makes it richer. There are a few instances where Howard’s a bit too cutesy and on the nose – Lovell’s mom meeting Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and asking if they’re in the space program; his daughter mourning the breakup of The Beatles – but overall, the film holds together well3.
Apollo 13 would go on to be nominated for Best Picture, but it would ultimately lose (Howard wasn’t even nominated). I haven’t seen Il Postino or Sense and Sensibility, but this seems absurd. Babe is a charmer and Braveheart is a rousing epic, but I’d put Apollo 13 above them. And how can you not recognize Howard for his direction (Howard got his Oscar years later for A Beautiful Mind)?
Of all the films I’ve seen for this summer’s flashback series, Apollo 13 is the revisit I’ve appreciated most. It’s fantastic entertainment and a wonderfully made tale of real-life triumph. It’s fantastic.
Previous entries in Summer of 1995:
That, of course, was The Right Stuff…and while The Abyss went the other direction, that sort of counts as well.
The film, however, does present largely rooms of white men and leaves out the people of color and the women involved in bringing the men home. One of my favorite bits of Apollo 13 trivia that would have meant nothing to audiences at that time is that one of the people responsible for creating the system that brought the astronauts home was a scientist named Judith Love Cohen – the mother of Jack Black.
There is also a weirdly anti-medical streak in this movie, from the cynicism about the doctors grounding Mattingly (who didn’t get the measles), to a scene that celebrates Lovell ripping off his sensors so no one can monitor his vitals. It’s not too strong, but it’s there.
Good review. I saw this one again recently when TCM aired it, and it does hold up wonderfully. I too loved that little moment from Harris showing Kranz's relief. (One tiny correction -- Mattingly never actually tested positive for measles, which leads to a wryly funny line reading from Sinise. He was exposed and had never had it, which is why they left him home. And it's hard to see what else they could have done; you raise a very interesting point there about the anti-medical thread.)