Apollo 13

Apollo 13

There is one point in “Apollo 13” early on when astronaut Jim Lovell is taking some American press on a guided tour of the Kennedy Space Center, and he boasts that they have a computer “that fits in one room and can send out millions of instructions a second.” And I’m thinking to myself, man, I’m writing this review on a better computer than the one that got us to the moon.

“Apollo 13” provokes many thoughts, and one of them is that our space program was achieved with equipment that would look like tin cans today. Like Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic in the first plane he could string together that might make it, we went to the moon as soon as we were able, with what we had.

Today it would be safer and cheaper with new alloys, engines, fuels, computers and other technology but we’ve lost the will.

“Apollo 13” never states its theme, unless you count a sentence of narration at the end; indeed the movie scarcely seems to have been written so much as edited together out of actual events. But there’s hardly an irrelevant or unnecessary line anywhere in it: The space program was an extraordinary thing; it shaved down hazards through training and preparation until they were thin enough to fit through; it demanded resourcefulness from astronauts who could not expect every problem to be soluble from Houston; those men up there really did depend on each other for their very lives; people are glad now for all kinds of reasons that Apollo 13 didn’t land on schedule among them Lovell’s own comment about how he thought another few flights would have gone ahead if his had made it but maybe most simply because here was something truly heroic without any need at all to die first.

These qualities were demonstrated nowhere more dramatically than during the flight of April 1970 when an oxygen tank exploded aboard ship a route to the moon. The three astronauts aboard Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert faced the possibility of being stranded in space. Their oxygen could run out; they could be poisoned by carbon dioxide accumulations; they could freeze to death. If somehow they were able to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, they had to come in at precisely the right angle.

Too steep an entry, and they’d burn up like a meteor; too shallow, and they’d skip off the top of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond and go sailing off into never-never land.

Ron Howard’s film about this mission is directed with a single mindedness and attention to detail that make it riveting; he doesn’t make the mistake of adding cornball little subplots to popularize the material he knows he has a great story, and tells it as simply as possible. The movie feels like it was made on location in outer space.

So accurate are the small details, indeed, that after seeing “Apollo 13” I went back to look at “For All Mankind,” Al Reinert’s great 1989 documentary about Apollo moon missions, for which he co-wrote this movie. It was eerie: It looked as if one had been made from footage shot for the other.

Many shots are identical: astronauts boarding spacecraft; lift-offs seen from below (Howard uses an astronaut’s-eye view instead); inside capsule during burn sequences; views out capsule window onto moon’s surface (and interior cabin light casts same sort of glow for both views); chilling sight of oxygen supply venting into space through hole caused by explosion in service module (even same little tape recorder playing country music).

Tom Hanks (Lovell), Bill Paxton (Haise) and Kevin Bacon (Swigert) are the astronauts. Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise), who had been exposed to the measles, was originally scheduled to be the pilot for Apollo 13 mission; however, he was grounded. The main person at Houston Mission Control is Gene Kranz (Ed Harris). The public saw them as supermen: clean-cut, crew-cut, wearing white collars even in space. As Phil Kaufman’s movie and Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” showed, they were more likely to be hot-shot test pilots than straight arrows (with the exception of John Glenn).

The picture opens with Lovell’s group being chosen out of nowhere to crew Apollo 13. Members of their families are introduced us to , particularly Marilyn Lovell (Kathleen Quinlan), we see some of the training, then it follows the ill fated mission in space and on the ground. Kranz, chain-smoking Camels his character played by Harris, masterminds how (and if) can ever return.

A scheme is dreamed up to shut down power in the space capsule and move astronauts into the lunar exploratory module as a kind of temporary lifeboat. The lunar lander will be jettisoned at the last minute; however, enough power may be left in weakened batteries of main capsule so that crew can return alive.

Meanwhile, what has got to be done is not allowing them die there.

Out of materials on board a scrubber is built together with everything necessary for cleaning carbon dioxide from air supply system in a capsule (you can see a man holding one just like it over ‘For All Mankind’ film). And while astronauts swing around dark side of moon and head back home you start realizing that their craft’s equipment for returning Earth is only slightly better than rocket sled in which Evil Knievel proposed to hurtle across Snake River Canyon at approximately same time.

Ron Howard has become a director specializing in stories involving large groups of characters: “Cocoon,” “Parenthood,” “Backdraft,” “The Paper.” All those films were constructed so as not only to keep many stories afloat and interesting but also pay attention to individual human stories involved this was a triumph of construction indeed.

He makes correct decision with ‘Apollo 13’ that story is in mission. In scenes with Lovell’s wife on ground there is useful counterpoint (she tells their son “Something broke on your daddy’s spaceship and he’s going to have to turn around before he even gets moon.”). But no additional side stories are added by Howard , no little parallel dramas like lesser director might have done.

This is an intensely powerful story, one of the year’s best films, acted without pumped-up histrionics and told with remarkable technical detail great clarity. It’s about men trained to do better job than anyone could have imagined them capable of doing. Buried message is: we lost something crucially important when we dialed down space program. When I was kid they used predict that by year 2000 you’d be able go to moon; however nobody ever thought predict that you’d be able but nobody would bother.

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