Ron Howard managed to make a suspensful movie out of an event that everyone in the world knew how it came out.
The deeper meaning of the movie?
One of the greatest events in the history of the world was already considered mundane by the third attempt. Only disaster made it interesting again.
Or,
Heroes are those who work together for the common good.
Or,
The dream of exploration comes with a price in lives and heartache.
Or,
…
As for mistakes:
The most notable for me was that the LM lifeboat option was already documented procedure written up well before the launch. (My father was one of the authors.)
Having gone to school with both Fred Haise III and Susan Lovell, we were all 12 when the mission took place. In the film Susan looks about 8.
I think it is sort of amazing that a film should only have minor errors in it considering how often that a film script and reality have nothing in common in Hollywood.
But I imagine NASA didn’t pay to have the sets built inside the aircraft. They had to build re-creations of parts of the Apollo capsules, plus camera gear and lighting mounts, and make it aircraft-safe. I can’t imagine that was particular cheap. Especially compared to building a similar set inside a wooden frame on a sound stage.
The main “complaint” I’ve heard from people who are knowledgeable on the subject (I put “complaint” in quotes because most of them liked the movie) is that it doesn’t show the SCALE of the operation, and the sheer NUMBER of people working on the problem.
That is, Astronaut Mattingly really was working on the problem, but he’d be quick to tell you HE Wasn’t the one coming up with all the ideas, and HE wasn’t the one who had a breakthrough and saved the day… He was constantly trying out ideas that NASA’s many specialists were bringing to him.
The movie focuses on a relatively small number of composite characters. In reality, there were HUNDREDS of highly skilled people working to make things happen. But showing hundreds of nameless, facelss, anonymous people doesn’t work so well in a movie.
True, but if Ron Howard ever demonstrated in any movie that he was capable of more than “hambone sentimentality”, and “largely one-dimensional characterizations”, one might be more understanding.
I greatly respect Howard’s ability to do drama and tension and action (the lift off scene and reentry sequence are both amazing). But, his strengths are most definitely on the surface.
At least it was more realistic than Space Cowboys.
This is all very standard filmmaking stuff; the kind of loads seen in the Vomit Comet are nothing compared to those experienced in a boom rig hanging off of a truck running at 50mph down a dirt road while tracking a car chase scene. Just one short scene of CGI work probably cost more than all the physical labor that went into filming set filming, even on the 'Comet. The biggest problems with filming on the 'Comet are those which are attributable to its name; the nauseating motion for which it is known can make it difficult for the cast to perform, and the ballistic behavior of the aircraft which obtains its free-fall state only allows for filming in 30-40 second intervals.
To be fair, it would be impossible to show the scale of the rescue effort any more than it would be possible to make a war movie about the entire war (hence, why war movies are always focused on a squad-level group or smaller). There weren’t hundreds of people working on the problem; there were thousands directly cranking away, and tens of thousands of contractors trying to come up with alternatives. The scale on which space travel works is simply unimaginable to the average viewer, and gives obvious lie to conspiracy theories about Moon landing hoaxes.
Of course, as a music nut, my favorite nitpick is the scene where the daughter is throwing a tantrum over the Beatles’ breakup while holding a copy of the Let It Be LP (which wouldn’t be available for another month). But I swear that this has been cut on the DVD release. When I first saw the film (on a VHS rental), I’m sure the LP was very plainly visible. I certainly noticed it. But on the DVD you can really only see that she’s holding something black, and the album isn’t identifiable unless you’re actually watching for it. Anyone agree?
I never meant to assert that everything does. But it is often what differentiates a movie that’s “great” from a movie that’s “fine” for me. A13 is perfectly fine, but I can easily come up with 25 films from 1995 alone that I believe are better. I’d also refute that bigger themes go hand-in-hand with bigger scale; I can think of a myriad of overrated war movies that are huge in size, but their presentation of “big” themes are usually watered-down, pandering, or simplistic. Stuff (while certainly not perfect) doesn’t succeed because of its larger arc or bigger cast; it succeeds because of its unconventional tone, clever construction, and well-written characters.
Truth is often stranger (and more suspenseful) than fiction, and that’s the only real thing that A13 has going for it. A true story can be full of what would ordinarily be considered cliches in fiction, but a gifted director can still do an effective job of transcending those cliches and make it dramatically compelling. Ron Howard may be a perfectly competent man behind the camera (he would’ve fit in perfectly in the studio system, where directors had no obligation to assert anything resembling a personality or viewpoint), but I have never considered him a gifted one. Generously speaking, he maybe makes one interesting movie a decade. A13 certainly isn’t bad, but I also don’t find it particularly interesting, either cinematically or dramatically (though it is interesting technically, I suppose–from both a space & film standpoint).
I would have to disagree with the idea that this movie presents 1 dimensional characters and I have seen enough movies to know the difference.
Every effort is made to flesh out the characters. This is a difficult task because there are so many other aspects to this story other than the characters. There are no wasted scenes in this movie. The original TV broadcasts are used to full effect. In order to make this a more human story, it would have to be twice as long which would be fine by me but not acceptable by Hollywood standards.
I agree with you about Ron Howard being a “hambone” director. I cringe during most of his movies including his Academy Award winner but this picture is his best bv far. He may be a mediocre director but here he is in his element and his passion shows.
You’re only in free fall when you’re in a vacuum. The ship might have already been near terminal velocity at that point, in which case gravity would be normal, and even if it wasn’t, it was approaching it, so you’d still have partial g.
This scene was the inspiration for the series “Junkyard Wars” - the producer of the show got the idea while watching the movie.
My daughter was about 10 or 11 when we saw this movie. Looking at the Lovell kids, she asked if the movie was set at Halloween - I had to tell her that, no, that is how kids dressed in the early '70s.
Actually, once the capsule has entered the upper atmosphere, it is shedding orbital velocity and moving faster than “terminal” speed, so the accelerations can be significant (for the Apollo astronauts and the trajectory as shaped, the peak accelerations were between 2-3 times surface gravity, opposite the direction of motion). Terminal velocity is simply the speed at which drag from the atmosphere equals the the force due to gravitational acceleration.
:smack: Yes, of course, Stranger. The acceleration in a re-entering spacecraft could, in principle, be anything. I guess I’m too used to thinking in terms of things dropped from rest, in the Earth’s frame.
It can’t be that absurdly difficult or expensive – Mike Jittlov (maker of The Wizard of Speed and Time ) shot one of his films in such a zero-gee parabolic flight(I don’t know if it was the Vomit Comet or a private effort). I’ve seen it.
You realize, of course, that the film Apollo 13 was made on a sound stage, not on the moon? The shadows are all wrong, there are no stars in the sky, and the LEM couldn’t survive the Van Allen belts…
Well, of course, silly! They never made it to the moon! You see, there was this explosion and Forrest Gump made up some stuff with duct tape, odds & ends and then got them home!
I like this movie! Apollo 13 is a rare, perhaps singular, case where Hollywood started with a great historic drama and did not FUBAR it. There was no stripper girlfriend on the mission. There was no alien invasion. Neither Houston nor Cape Canaveral were buried under glaciers in minutes. The explosions in the flick were limited to the ones that actually happened. The movie is a good dramatic story told well, and told accurately in big and small strokes. The IMDB goofs page states that the large number of goofs listed is disproportionate, since the events in the film were so thoroughly documented.
