Apollo 13 (Review)

What do you do when reality is more unrealistic than fiction? That was the struggle of Apollo 13 (1995), directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, Ken Paxton, and Kevin Bacon. The film is a fictionalized adaptation of the "successful failure" of the titular mission to the moon; where astronauts Jim Lovell (Hanks), Fred Haise (Paxton), and Jack Swigert (Bacon) were forced to adapt to a series of nearly fatal malfunctions that threatened to bring their flight to a violent end.

The things that made this film so spectacular in 1995 are even more present in 2021. For starters, the level of technology that was used on the mission feels positively archaic compared to modern computers; it's become a cliché to say it, but the computer that I'm writing this review on houses exponentially more computing power than what they had at the time. But what really stands out is the ability to act under pressure that the entire crew of the mission exhibited during the film. Forced to rely so heavily on the human mind and body, even the smallest error could have been fatal. Ironically, the film was actually forced to include more arguments and emotional reactions from the astronauts than actually happened in the real mission; as it turns out, the superhuman levels of calm exhibited by the crew were hard to believe!

The camerawork and pacing of the film help to ground it in the human element which makes the story so profound, and the fear and relief that you feel in every scene is made possible by the incredible actors who helped to immerse the viewer in the nearly suffocating anxiety during the film's tensest moments. I give it a 10 out of 12 stars.