Apollo 13 (film)

Apollo 13 is a 1995 American drama film directed by Ron Howard. The film stars Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Kathleen Quinlan and Ed Harris. The screenplay by William Broyles, Jr. and Al Reinert, that dramatizes the 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission, is an adaptation of the book Lost Moon by astronaut Jim Lovell (the story's protagonist) and Jeffrey Kluger.

Astronauts Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise are launched aboard Apollo 13 for America's third Moon landing mission. En route, an onboard explosion deprives their spacecraft of most of its oxygen supply and electric power, forcing NASA's flight controllers to abort the Moon landing, and turning the mission into a struggle to get the three men home safely.

Released in the United States on June 30, 1995, Apollo 13 garnered critical acclaim and was nominated for many awards, with nine Academy Awards including Best Picture; it won for Best Film Editing and Best Sound.^[3] In total, the film grossed over $355 million worldwide during its theatrical releases.

Plot

On July 20, 1969, veteran astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) hosts a party for other astronauts and their families, who watch on television as their colleague Neil Armstrong takes his first steps on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Lovell, who orbited the Moon on Apollo 8, tells his wife Marilyn that he intends to go up again.

While giving a VIP tour of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building, Lovell is informed by Deke Slayton that he and his crew will fly the Apollo 13 mission instead of Apollo 14. Lovell, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) begin training for their new mission. Days before launch, it is discovered that Mattingly was exposed to measles and has to be replaced by backup Command Module pilot Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) as a safety precaution.

As the launch date approaches, Marilyn's fears for her husband manifest in nightmares, but she goes to Cape Kennedy to see him off despite her misgivings.

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 flight director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) gives the go-ahead from Houston's Mission Control Center for launch. As the Saturn V rocket climbs into the sky, an engine on the second stage cuts off prematurely, but the craft successfully reaches Earth orbit. After the third stage fires, sending Apollo 13 on a trajectory to the Moon, Swigert docks the Command/Service Module Odyssey with the Lunar Module Aquarius, and pulls it away from the spent stage.

Three days into the mission, the crew send a live television transmission from Odyssey, but the networks, believing the public now regards lunar missions as routine, decline to carry the broadcast live. Swigert is told to perform a routine procedure of stirring the two liquid oxygen tanks in the Service Module. When he flips the switch, one tank explodes, emptying its contents into space and sending the craft tumbling. The other tank is soon found to be leaking, prompting Mission Control to abort the Moon landing, and forcing Lovell and Haise to hurriedly power up Aquarius as a "lifeboat" for the return home, while Sweigert shuts down Odyssey before its battery power runs out. On Earth, Kranz rallies his team to do what is necessary to get the astronauts home safely, declaring "failure is not an option." Controller John Aaron recruits Mattingly to help him figure out how to restart Odyssey for the final return to Earth.

As Sweigert and Haise watch the Moon passing beneath them, Lovell imagines walking on its surface. With Aquarius running on minimum systems to conserve power, the crew is soon subjected to freezing conditions. Swigert suspects Mission Control is unable to get them home and is withholding this from them. In a fit of rage, Haise blames Swigert's inexperience for the accident; the ensuing argument is quickly squelched by Lovell. When the carbon dioxide exhaled by the astronauts reaches the Lunar Module's filter capacity and approaches dangerous levels, an engineering team quickly invents a way to make the Command Module's square filters work in the Lunar Module's round receptacles. With the guidance systems on Aquarius shut down, and despite Haise's fever and miserable living conditions, the crew succeeds in making a difficult but vital course correction by manually igniting the Lunar Module's engine.

Mattingly and Aaron struggle to find a way to power up the Command Module with its limited available power, but finally succeed and transmit the procedures to Swigert, who successfully restarts Odyssey. When the Service Module is jettisoned, the crew finally see the extent of the damage and prepare for re-entry, unsure whether Odyssey's heat shield is intact. If it is not, they will burn up. They release Aquarius and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere in Odyssey. After a long period of radio silence due to ionization blackout, the astronauts splash down in the Pacific Ocean and report all is well. The three men are brought aboard the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima.

As the astronauts are greeted on deck, Lovell's narration describes the events that follow their return from space—including the investigation into the explosion, and the subsequent careers and lives of Haise, Swigert, Mattingly and Kranz—and ends with Lovell wondering when Man will return to the Moon.

Cast

The real Jim Lovell made an appearance as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima. The real Marilyn Lovell also appears briefly during the launch scene standing in front of actress Kathleen Quinlan. Ron Howard's family make appearances throughout the film. Parents Rance and Jean make appearances in the film as The Reverend and Blanch Lovell, respectedly and wife and daughter Cheryl and Bryce make uncredited appearances. Xander Berkeley appeared as "Henry Hurt", a fictional NASA Office of Public Affairs staff member^[6] Acclaimed horror director Roger Corman makes an appearance as a congressman^[7] and future Cold Case actor Thom Barry appears as an orderly at Blanch's retirement home.

Brad Pitt was offered a role in the film, but turned it down to star in Se7en.^[8]

Each member of the cast researched extensively on the project in order to provide an authentic story. Dave Scott, technical adviser and crewmember of the Apollo 15 launch was impressed with their efforts, stating that each actor was determined to make each scene correct by the word.^[4]

Production

Pre-production and props

Jim Lovell stated that, before the book was even written, that the rights were being shopped to potential buyers.^[4] While preparing the director Ron Howard decided that every shot of the film would be original and that no mission footage would be used.^[9] The spacecraft interiors were constructed by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center's Space Works, who also restored the Apollo 13 Command Module. Two individual lunar modules and two command modules were constructed for filming. While each was a replica, composed of some of the original Apollo materials, they were built so that different sections were removable, which enabled filming to take place inside the capsules. Space Works also built modified command and lunar modules for filming inside a Boeing KC-135 reduced gravity aircraft, and the pressure suits worn by the actors, which are exact reproductions of those worn by the Apollo astronauts, right down to the details of being airtight. When the actors put the suits on with their helmets locked in place, oxygen was pumped into the suits to cool them down and allow them to breathe, in the exact manner of real astronauts.^[10]

The real Mission Control room is located on the third floor of a building in Houston, Texas. NASA offered the use of the control room for filming but Howard declined, opting instead to make his own replica from scratch.^[9][11] Production designer Michael Corenblith and set decorator Merideth Boswell were in charge of the construction of the Mission Control set at Universal Studios. The set was equipped with giant rear-screen projection capabilities and a complex set of computers with individual video feeds to all the flight controller stations. The actors playing the flight controllers were able to communicate with each other on a private audio loop.^[10] The Mission Control room built for the film was on a ground floor.^[9] One NASA employee who was a consultant for the film said that the set was so realistic that he would leave at the end of the day and look for the elevator before remembering he was not in Mission Control.^[11] By the time the film was made, the USS Iwo Jima had been scrapped, so her sister ship, the USS New Orleans, was used as the recovery ship instead.^[9]

Ron Howard stated that he had difficulty portraying space in a realistic manner. He discussed this with Steven Spielberg, who suggested using a KC-135 airplane, which created 23 seconds of weightlessness. The method was used in the film.^[12]

Cast training and filming

To prepare for their roles in the film, Hanks, Paxton, and Bacon all attended the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. While there, astronauts Jim Lovell and David Scott, commander of Apollo 15, did actual training exercises with the actors inside a simulated Command Module and Lunar Module. The actors were also taught about each of the 500 buttons, toggles, and switches used to operate the spacecraft. The actors then traveled to Johnson Space Center in Houston where they flew in NASA's KC-135 Reduced gravity aircraft to simulate weightlessness in outer space. While in the KC-135, filming took place in bursts of 25 seconds, the length of each weightless period that the plane performed. The filmmakers eventually flew 612 parabolas which added up to a total of three hours and 54 minutes of weightlessness. Parts of the command module, lunar module and the tunnel piece that connected them were built by production designer Michael Corenblith, art directors David J. Bomba and Bruce Alan Miller and their crew to fit inside the KC-135. Filming in such an environment, while never done before for a film, was a tremendous time saver. In the KC-135, the actors moved wherever they wanted, surrounded by floating props; the camera and cameraman were weightless so filming could take place on any axis from which a shot could be set up. In Los Angeles, all the actors, including Ed Harris and the others who comprise Mission Control, enrolled in a Flight Controller School led by Gerry Griffin, an Apollo 13 flight director, and flight controller Jerry Bostick. The actors studied audiotapes from the mission, reviewed hundreds of pages of NASA transcripts and attended a crash course in physics.^[9][10]

Soundtrack

The score to Apollo 13 was composed and conducted by James Horner. The soundtrack was released in 1995 by MCA Records and has seven tracks of score, eight period songs used in the film, and seven tracks of dialogue by the actors at a running time of nearly seventy-three minutes. The music also features solos by vocalist Annie Lennox and Tim Morrison on the trumpet. The score was a critical success and garnered Horner an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.^[17]

Release

The film was released on June 30, 1995 in North America and on September 22, 1995 in the UK.

In 2002 the film was re-released in IMAX. It was the first film to be digitally remastered using IMAX DMR technology.^[18]

Box-office performance

The film was a box-office success, gaining $355,237,933 worldwide.^[2] The film's widest release was 2,347 theaters.^[2] The film's opening weekend and the latter two weeks placed it at #1 with a US gross of $25,353,380, which made up 14.7% of the total US gross.^[2]

Reception

Apollo 13 garnered critical acclaim and at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 51 reviews collected, the film has an overall approval rating of 97%, with a weighted average score of 8/10.^[19] Among Rotten Tomatoes's Cream of the Crop, which consists of popular and notable critics from the top newspapers, websites, television and radio programs,^[20] the film holds an overall approval rating of 88 percent.^[21] By comparison, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized 0–100 rating to reviews from mainstream critics, calculated an average score of 77 from the 22 reviews it collected.^[22]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the film in his review saying, "A powerful story, one of the year's best films, told with great clarity and remarkable technical detail, and acted without pumped-up histrionics."^[23]

Richard Corliss from Time Magazine highly praised the film saying, "From lift-off to splashdown, Apollo 13 gives one hell of a ride."^[24] Edward Guthmann of San Francisco Chronicle gave a mixed review and wrote, "I just wish that Apollo 13 worked better as a movie, and that Howard's threshold for corn, mush and twinkly sentiment weren't so darn wide."^[25] Peter Travers from Rolling Stone Magazine praised the film and wrote, "Howard lays off the manipulation to tell the true story of the near-fatal 1970 Apollo 13 mission in painstaking and lively detail. It's easily Howard's best film."^[26]

Janet Maslin made the film an NYT Critics' Pick, calling it an "absolutely thrilling" film that "unfolds with perfect immediacy, drawing viewers into the nail-biting suspense of a spellbinding true story." According to Maslin, "like Quiz Show, Apollo 13 beautifully evokes recent history in ways that resonate strongly today. Cleverly nostalgic in its visual style (Rita Ryack's costumes are especially right), it harks back to movie making without phony heroics and to the strong spirit of community that enveloped the astronauts and their families. Amazingly, this film manages to seem refreshingly honest while still conforming to the three-act dramatic format of a standard Hollywood hit. It is far and away the best thing Mr. Howard has done (and Far and Away was one of the other kind)."^[27]

Ron Howard stated that, after the first test preview of the film, one of the comment cards indicated "total disdain"; the audience member had written that it was a "typical Hollywood" ending and that the crew would never have survived.^[28]

Home media

A 10th-anniversary DVD of the film was released in 2005; it included both the theatrical version and the IMAX version, along with several extras.^[29] The IMAX version has a 1.66:1 aspect ratio.^[30]

In 2006, Apollo 13 was released on HD DVD; on April 13, 2010, it was released on Blu-ray disc, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 13 accident (Central Standard Time).^[29]

Accolades

Technical and historical accuracy

The dialogue between ground control and the astronauts was taken verbatim from transcripts and recordings, with the exception of one of the taglines of the film, "Houston, we have a problem." (This quote was voted #50 on the list "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes".) According to the mission transcript, the actual words uttered by Jack Swigert were "I believe we've had a problem here." (talking over Haise, who had started "Ok, Houston"). Ground control responded by saying "This is Houston, say again please." Jim Lovell then repeated "Ah, Houston, we've had a problem."^[33] But the script deliberately changed the quote, since Lovell's actual words suggested the event had happened in the past, rather than the present.^[11]

The tagline "Failure is not an option", stated in the film by Gene Kranz, also became very popular, but was not taken from the historical transcripts. The following story relates the origin of the phrase, from an email by Apollo 13 Flight Dynamics Officer Jerry Bostick:

"As far as the expression 'Failure is not an option', you are correct that Kranz never used that term. In preparation for the movie, the script writers, Al Reinart and Bill Broyles, came down to Clear Lake to interview me on 'What are the people in Mission Control really like?' One of their questions was 'Weren't there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?' My answer was 'No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution.' I immediately sensed that Bill Broyles wanted to leave and assumed that he was bored with the interview. Only months later did I learn that when they got in their car to leave, he started screaming, 'That's it! That's the tag line for the whole movie, Failure is not an option. Now we just have to figure out who to have say it.' Of course, they gave it to the Kranz character, and the rest is history."^[34]

A DVD commentary track, recorded by Jim and Marilyn Lovell and included with both the original and 10th-anniversary editions,^[29] mentions several inaccuracies included in the film, all done for reasons of artistic license:

• In the film, Mattingly plays a key role in solving a power consumption problem that Apollo 13 was faced with as it approached re-entry. Lovell points out in his commentary that Mattingly was a composite of several astronauts and engineers—including Charles Duke (whose rubella led to Mattingly's grounding)—all of whom played a role in solving that problem.^[11]
• When Jack Swigert is getting ready to dock with the LM, a concerned NASA technician says, "If Swigert can't dock this thing, we don't have a mission." Lovell and Haise also seem worried. In his DVD commentary, the real Jim Lovell says that if Swigert had been unable to dock with the LEM, he or Haise could have done it. He also says that Swigert was a well-trained Command Module pilot and that no one was really worried about whether he was up to the job,^[35] but he admitted that it made a nice sub-plot for the film.^[11]
• A scene set the night before the launch, showing the astronauts' family members saying their goodbyes while separated by a road, to reduce the possibility of any last-minute transmission of disease, depicted a tradition not begun until the Space Shuttle program.^[11]
• The film depicts Marilyn Lovell dropping her wedding ring down a shower drain. According to Jim Lovell, this did occur,^[35] but the drain trap caught the ring and his wife was able to retrieve it.^[11] Lovell has also confirmed that the scene in which his wife had a nightmare about him being "sucked through an open door of a spacecraft into outer space" also occurred, though he believes the nightmare was prompted by her seeing a scene in Marooned, a 1969 film they saw three months before Apollo 13 blasted off.^[35]

See also

• From the Earth to the Moon, a documentary mini-series based around the Apollo missions.
• Marooned, a 1969 film directed by John Sturges, about astronauts marooned in an Apollo Command/Service Module

References

External links

• Apollo 13 at the TCM Movie Database
• Apollo 13 at the Internet Movie Database
• Apollo 13 at AllRovi
• Apollo 13 at Rotten Tomatoes
• Apollo 13 at Box Office Mojo