Apollo 13 at 31: The Space Thriller That Trusts You to Understand the Machinery

Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 opens on a July night in 1969, with Jim Lovell hosting a party while Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon play on television. Lovell, who orbited the Moon on Apollo 8, tells his wife Marilyn he will go back. He wants to walk on it.

The film then does something remarkable for a Hollywood picture with this much hardware in it. It spends its first hour on procedure — training, a flight swap, a grounded pilot, a launch — and trusts the audience to find the drama in competence.

Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.

The Flight Swap That Sets Everything Moving

Three months after the party, Lovell is touring NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building when his boss Deke Slayton tells him his crew will fly Apollo 13 instead of 14, trading flights with Alan Shepard’s crew. Lovell, Ken Mattingly and Fred Haise train for a mission that was meant to be the third crewed landing.

Days before the April 1970 launch, Mattingly is exposed to German measles. The flight surgeon demands his replacement with backup Jack Swigert. Lovell resists breaking up his team, then relents when Slayton threatens to bump the whole crew to a later mission.

Gary Sinise plays Mattingly as a man erased from the one thing he trained for. He spends most of the film on the ground, working the problem from a simulator. It is the quietest performance in the cast and the one that holds the back half together.

An Explosion 200,000 Miles Out

Three days into the mission, Mission Control orders Swigert to turn on the liquid oxygen stirring fans. An electrical short causes a tank to explode, emptying its contents into space and sending the craft tumbling. The other tank is soon found to be leaking.

The Moon landing is abandoned. The three astronauts and the flight controllers in Houston have to improvise scientific and mechanical solutions to get the crew home. The tagline, “Houston, we have a problem,” is the line everyone remembers, and Tom Hanks delivers it as a report, not a scream.

Howard went to great lengths for technical accuracy. NASA helped train the cast as astronauts and flight controllers. Howard got permission to film scenes aboard a reduced-gravity aircraft so the weightlessness would look like weightlessness and not like actors bracing against a harness.

It shows. The spacecraft interiors are cramped, lit like machinery, and full of switches that mean something.

Gene Kranz and the Room That Saves the Crew

Ed Harris plays Gene Kranz, the White Team flight director. He is the film’s second lead, and the Mission Control sequences are shot as a workplace drama rather than a countdown. Chris Ellis plays Deke Slayton, the director of flight crew operations. Clint Howard plays Sy Liebergot, the electrical, environmental and consumables manager, the EECOM who has to tell the room what the numbers say.

The supporting cast is deep on purpose: Marc McClure as Black Team flight director Glynn Lunney, Ray McKinnon as flight dynamics officer Jerry Bostick, Loren Dean as EECOM John Aaron. These are people doing jobs, and the film treats their expertise as the spectacle.

Kathleen Quinlan plays Marilyn Lovell, who has a nightmare about her husband dying in space and tells him she will not go to Kennedy Space Center to see him off. She changes her mind and surprises him. Quinlan makes the waiting the hardest job in the movie.

The crew, ranked by how much the film rests on them:

1. Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) — the commander and the film’s point of view, from the party in 1969 to the recovery.
2. Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) — the flight director who refuses to accept the loss of the crew as an option the room can consider.
3. Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) — the grounded pilot whose work in the simulator helps solve the power problem.
4. Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) — the backup who flies, and who has to prove he belongs in the capsule.
5. Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) — the lunar module pilot, sick and freezing, still working.

The film runs 140 minutes. It is classified as drama and history, and it is a docudrama built from Lovell’s own 1994 book, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, written with Jeffrey Kluger. William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert wrote the screenplay.

Where Apollo 13 Sits Against the Space Movies Around It

That table is not a knock on other films. It is the reason Apollo 13 holds up. The mission failed. The movie is about the failure being managed.

What the Editing and Sound Awards Actually Tell You

Universal Pictures released Apollo 13 in the United States on June 30, 1995. It drew critical acclaim and nine Academy Awards nominations, including Best Picture. It won for Best Film Editing and Best Sound, and it took the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast.

The Academy’s choices are the tell. Editing and sound are the awards this film deserved, because the tension in Apollo 13 is assembled, not performed. The cutting between the capsule and Houston is what makes a room full of men saying numbers into a thriller.

The one weakness is length. At 140 minutes, the film lingers in the early training sequences longer than the payoff requires, and the Lovell family scenes sometimes state what the mission already shows.

But the restraint is the point. Howard never turns the explosion into a light show. The famous line lands flat, the way a bad reading on a console lands flat, and the movie keeps moving.

This is a film that believes competence is heroic, and it is right. The best scene is not the launch or the splashdown. It is a group of people in a room with a finite amount of oxygen and a problem they did not cause, deciding what to do next.

Apollo 13 is the rare studio picture where the audience is trusted to understand the machinery, and the reward is a film that still works thirty-one years on.

1995 films · Apollo 13 · movie review · Ron Howard · space movies · Tom Hanks