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Apollo 13

“Houston we have a problem.” When he said those words, Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) saw all his hopes to walk on the moon thrown out into space, together with the spaceship’s oxygen.

Apollo 13 doesn’t tell a story about three astronauts on a journey to the moon and their final consecration, walking on the surface of the earth’s natural satellite. Rather, it’s a movie about the mission that went wrong and a struggle to survive in a very dangerous environment, where just a few inches of aluminum paper protects the astronauts from the certain death of the space vacuum.

After the explosion of the oxygen tanks, three astronauts - Jim Lovell, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) - of the third NASA mission to the moon, face the danger of becoming forever lost in space, while the NASA crew on the ground desperately tries to bring them back.

“We've never lost an American in space and we're sure as hell not going to lose one on my watch. Failure is not an option," says Gene Kranz (Ed Harris), commander of the NASA control center in Houston.

Based on the book by Jim Lovell and Jerry Kluger, Ron Howard’s film is almost documental, relying on several historical details, alternating scenes between the spaceship, NASA’s control center and the astronauts’ families.

The dialogues between the astronauts and the ground control were taken from transcripts and recordings, and one of the most interesting aspects of this picture is the fact that the space scenes were shot inside of a descending aircraft - NASA's "Vomit Comet" - to simulate the weight loss and floating of the zero gravity. That, in particular, created an extremely realistic experience.

If you know history, you probably know how the story ends, but it doesn’t matter, the great thrill is to see how the astronauts managed to overcome the several dangerous situations - the air loss, the increasing level of carbon dioxide and their final re-entry in the atmosphere, in which the slightest miscalculation could make them bounce on the atmosphere or burn to death - relying just on a craft that would be junk today, and on a computer that wasn’t more than a calculating machine.

Apollo 13 is a fascinating and compelling movie about real, brave men, who chose to risk their lives by facing a challenge, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.

Written by: Edward Olivier

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