Released in the United States on June 30, 1995, Apollo 13 garnered critical acclaim and was nominated for many awards, most notably nine Academy Awards including Best Picture; it won for Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing.[3] In total, the film grossed over $355 million worldwide during its theatrical releases.
The voice of Walter Cronkite describes President John F. Kennedy's call for the United States space program to land a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s, as scenes of the Apollo 1 fire that killed three U.S. astronauts are shown.
On July 20, 1969, veteran astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) hosts a party for other astronauts and their families, who watch on television as 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 (Kathleen Quinlan) that he intends to go back.
As the launch date approaches, Marilyn's fears for her husband manifest in nightmares, but she comes to Cape Kennedy to see him off despite her misgivings, and later loses her wedding ring when it falls into her motel shower drain.
On April 11, 1970, Lovell, Haise and Swigert are suited up, secured inside the spacecraft, and Apollo 13 flight director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) in Houston's Mission Control Center gives the go-ahead 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 ModuleOdyssey with the Lunar ModuleAquarius, 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, refuse to broadcast it live.
As part of routine procedures, Swigert flips a switch to stir up the two liquid oxygen
tanks in the Service Module, which unexpectedly causes one of them to
explode. The other tank is soon found to be leaking, prompting Mission
Control to abort the Moon landing, and forcing the crew to hurriedly
shut down Odyssey and power up Aquarius, so it can keep them alive for the return home. As the Aquarius
crew watches the Moon passing underneath them, Lovell imagines walking
on its surface. On Earth, after flight director Kranz declares that
"failure is not an option", Mattingly is recruited by flight controller
John Aaron to help prepare procedures to restart Odyssey once the crew nears Earth.
The crew shuts down Aquarius to conserve power, subjecting
them to freezing conditions. Swigert suspects Mission Control has made
a mistake and is withholding it from them, and in a fit of rage, Haise
blames Swigert's inexperience for the accident; an argument ensues but
is quickly quelled by Lovell. As another problem arises—the dangerous
buildup of carbon dioxide
exhaled by the astronauts—an engineering team quickly formulates a
solution which allows the Command Module's square air cleaners to be
used in the Lunar Module's round receptacles. With guidance systems on Aquarius
shut down, and despite Haise's fever and freezing conditions inside the
cabin, the crew succeeds in making a difficult manual course correction
by briefly igniting the Lunar Module's engine.
Meanwhile, as Mattingly and Aaron struggle to find a way to power up
the Command Module with its limited power, procedures are finalized and
sent to Swigert, who successfully revives Odyssey. After witnessing the damage to the jettisoned Service Module, the crew prepare for re-entry, unsure of the condition of Odyssey's heatshield. The crew releases Aquarius and re-enters the Earth's atmosphere in Odyssey, and after an unusually long period of radio silence,
the crew reports they are alive and well; to the great relief of
Mission Control and the astronauts' families. After splashing down in
the Pacific Ocean, the three men are plucked out of the water and taken
to 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 onboard the Service Module, and the
subsequent careers and lives of Haise, Swigert, Mattingly and Kranz—and
ends with Lovell saying "I look up at the Moon and wonder: When will we
be going back, and who will that be?".
Walter Cronkite as himself, provides introductory narration, and re-dubbed commentary from CBS News TV coverage of the Apollo 11
Moon landing, slightly tailored for the film; also appears in archival
footage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and Apollo 13 recovery, both
edited into the film.
While preparing for the shooting of the film, director Ron Howard
decided that every shot of the film would be original and that none of
the actual footage from the original mission, or any other mission
would be used.[4] The spacecraft interiors were constructed by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center's Space Works, who also restored the actual Apollo 13Command 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 diminutive interior space of the capsules.
Space Works also built modified command and lunar modules for filming
inside a Boeing KC-135Reduced gravity aircraft.
Additionally, Space Works made 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.[5]
The real Mission Control room is located on the third floor of a building in Houston, Texas. NASA
offered the use of the actual control room for filming but Howard
declined, opting instead to make his own replica from scratch.[4][6]
Production designer Michael Corenblith and set decorator Merideth
Boswell were in charge of the construction of the Mission Control set
at Universal Studios. Built to within six inches of the specifications
of the real Mission Control in Houston, 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. In
addition, the actors playing the flight controllers were able to
communicate with each other on a private audio loop to better simulate
reality.[5] The Mission Control room built for the movie was on a ground floor.[4]
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 actually in Mission Control.[6] 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.[4]
"For actors, being able to actually shoot in zero gravity
as opposed to being in incredibly painful and uncomfortable harnesses
for special effects shots was all the difference between what would
have been a horrible moviemaking experience as opposed to the
completely glorious one that it actually was.”
To prepare for their roles in the film, Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin 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 would eventually fly
612 parabolas
which added up to a total of 3 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
actually fit inside the KC-135 airplane. Filming in such an
environment, while never done before for a movie, 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 actual audiotapes from the mission, reviewed hundreds of
pages of NASA transcripts and attended a crash course in physics.[4][5]
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.[7]
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.[8]
The film was a box-office success, gaining $355,237,933 worldwide,[2] which easily covered its production budget. 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 domestic gross of $25,353,380, which made up 14.7% of the total
domestic gross.[2]
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.[9] Among Rotten Tomatoes's Cream of the Crop, which consists of popular and notable critics from the top newspapers, websites, television and radio programs,[10] the film holds an overall approval rating of 88 percent.[11] By comparison, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized 0–100 rating to reviews from mainstream critics, calculated an average score of 85 from the seven reviews it collected.[12]
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."[13]Kenneth Turan of Los Angeles Times
gave a somewhat positive review of the film saying, "Ron Howard, is
certainly well-suited to the kind of sentimental, middle-of-the-road
filmmaking of which Apollo 13 is the epitome. And because the
material to a certain extent cries out for this kind of worshipful
treatment, the picture stands as Howard's most impressive to date. As
noted, genuine courage was involved, and Howard is effective at putting
the tension and bravery of that mission on screen."[14]
Richard Corliss from Time Magazine highly praised the film saying, "From lift-off to splashdown, Apollo 13 gives one hell of a ride."[15] Edward Guthmann of San Francisco Chronicle gave a somewhat negative 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."[16]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."[17]James Berardinelli from Reelviews
highly praised the film saying, "While the events of this motion
picture may not depict NASA's finest hour, the release of Apollo 13
represents Ron Howard's."[18]
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.[19] In 2006, Apollo 13 made its way into high-definition video formats with its release on HD DVD, and on Blu-ray disc on April 13, 2010, the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 13 accident (Central Standard Time).[19]
In 2002 the film was re-released in IMAX. It was the first film to be digitally remastered using IMAX DMR technology.[20] The film was shortened by 24 minutes, and some vulgar language was removed.
The film is notable for its technical accuracy; principals reported
that the film is reasonably faithful to the facts of the mission but
adds some tension between the astronauts for dramatic effect.
The dialogue between ground control and the astronauts was taken
verbatim from actual transcripts and recordings, with the notable
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".)
The actual words uttered by Jack Swigert were "Ok, Houston, we've had a
problem here." Ground control responded by saying "This is Houston, say
again please." Jim Lovell then repeated "Ah, Houston, we've had a
problem."[24]
The script changed the quote deliberately, as Lovell's actual words
suggested something happening in the past rather than the present.[6]
A dramatic event in the film occurs when Mrs. Lovell drops her
wedding ring down a shower drain. According to Lovell, this actually
did occur [6] (the Lovells refer to the incident in an interview on the DVD version of the film [6]), however the drain trap caught the ring and Mrs. Lovell was able to retrieve it.[6]
Another tagline from the film, "Failure Is Not An Option", as stated
by the Gene Kranz character, also became very popular but was not taken
from the historical transcripts. As to the origin of the phrase, the
following story was given, citing an email by Apollo 13 FDO Flight Controller 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."[25]
Unlike the movie, the book, and many first person accounts, the
official accident investigation report did not conclude that the oxygen
tank exploded. Instead, the report described in detail the multiple
safeties like pressure relief valves and rupture discs specifically
designed so that the spacecraft pressure vessels would not explode.
This ubiquitous misunderstanding is explained further in the Apollo 13 article. However, this remains controversial as most people, including Lovell, continue to characterize the failure as an explosion.
The film depicts the oxygen tank "explosion" as occurring almost
immediately after the tank-stir switch was thrown; in fact there was a
delay of 93 seconds between the stir command and the tank failure.[26]
Jim Lovell fantasizes about his lost Moon landing
A DVD commentary track, recorded by Mr. and Mrs. Lovell and included with both the original and 10th-anniversary editions,[19] 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 repeatedly in his commentary that in this
case 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.[6] Also, Ken Mattingly did not watch the launch at Cape Canaveral as depicted in the film, but from the command center in Houston.[6]
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, but he admitted that it made a nice
sub-plot for the film.[6]
A scene set the night before the launch, showing the astronauts'
family members saying their goodbyes while separated by a road, a
distance introduced to reduce the possibility of any last-minute transmission of disease, depicted a tradition not begun until the Space Shuttle program.[6]
^ abcdefghijApollo 13: 2-Disc Anniversary Edition (Disc 1), Special Features:Commentary track by Jim and Marilyn Lovell. [DVD]. Universal Studios. 2005-03-19.
