Someone around here once described a genre of movies as getting-shit-to-work films; those where the central conflict isn’t any sort of character interaction, but is some sort of physical, technical challenge. Heist and prison-break movies tend to fall into that category.
Apollo 13 doesn’t need nuanced human characters; the movie isn’t about them. The shit that they have to make work is very well fleshed out.
[quote=“Stranger_On_A_Train, post:5, topic:408618”]
[li]Much dramatic tension is made about Swigert’s alleged lack of preparation and possible incompetence. In fact, Swigert was acknowledged as being an accomplished CM pilot and had been involved early on in developing control systems and operating procedures for the LM, including emergency procedures. Lovell reported that he had no concerns about Swigert’s ability to substitute for Mattingly, although he argued for leaving Mattingly on crew even if he was ill. [/li][/QUOTE]
This was my big problem with Apollo 13. I think Jack Swigert was treated very unfairly, probably just to drum up some good old Hollywood tension. The backup crews were trained identically, and Swigert had literally written the book on command module emergencies - they were fortunate he was on that flight.
The other one that annoyed me only a little was the building of the CO2 filter. They made it look like that was done without prior preparation. In fact, that was a known issue and a procedure was in place for that contingency, although they didn’t think it would come to that. Same for Lovell using the Earth as a point of reference for the correction burn - he had helped write that procedure years before.
/hijack: I got Eugene Cernan’s book “Last Man on the Moon” (based on a Doper recommendation in another thread).
In it, he states that the O2 bottle that suffered a failure on Apollo 13 was originally installed, but then removed (I forget why) from Apollo 10 (his first Apollo mission). He kinda states this in a “what if” kinda way in his book.
Check out the section on a porno supposedly filmed in zero-g in Mary Roach’s “Packing for Mars.”
I’m not sure how expensive really doing this would be (compared to the normal expense of a big budget movie) but I think it would sure be difficult.
The O2 tank was dropped during prep for installation on Apollo 10 vehicle. Rather than risk it, it was pulled to be tested. They replaced it on Apollo 10 with another unit.
The dropped tank was tested and proven to work correctly. However, manufacturing tolerances created a situation where the tank could not be depressuraized nominally. They had an alternate procedure for cooking out the oxygen, but during the process the power supply they used was not compatible and had a much higher voltage. The excessive voltage failed thermal relief switches closed so they would not work properly, and also the extended duration of 8 hours under high voltage created failures in the insulation on the heater wiring. This was not realized or detected, the tank was assumed good because of the completed test, and was installed on Apollo 13.
During use on Apollo 13, the shorted switches meant the tank could not properly shut off the heaters, and so the pressure inside the tank began to build up. Electrical shorts in the wires for the tank started a fire with the insulation, and the fan stirring up increased the pressure more, which triggered the relief valve to vent. Venting oxygen fueled the insulation fire, which caused the tank to rupture. The rupture of the tank tore the panel off, and the damage vented that oxygen line.
The root cause of the failure was the improper power supply voltage used to cook out the oxygen from the tank. The prior incident did not cause the tank failure. The tolerance issues that didn’t allow nominal detanking did not cause the failure, only drove the alternate detanking process. Correct power supply equipment on the backup detanking process would have protected the hardware, prevented the thermal switches from failing and the wires from being damaged. Then the tank would probably have worked normally on Apollo 13.
It sounds like the tank would have actually worked correctly on Apollo 10, but the test to verify the tank worked ended up creating the conditions that caused the failure on Apollo 13.
Wow! Thanks!
Everything after “Ron Howard” is implied by the phrase “Ron Howard”.
I don’t know if I’d agree… the book was all about “the great Ziggurat of flying”, and how the astronauts basically reached the apex because of media coverage, not necessarly peer respect and admiration.
The movie didn’t really go into that- the bits about Yeager always seemed a little bit disconnected to me- it wasn’t ever clear WHY he was a character, or what his point was. They also seriously downplayed the absolute deadliness of the test pilot profession- you get the impression it was dangerous, but not nearly as much as you do in the book.
But I do agree with you that Apollo 13 wasn’t about grand scale themes- it was a movie about a particular crisis event, and how the astronauts, their families and the ground support team dealt with it.
I read Lovell’s book, but off the top of my head can’t recall whether or not the gauges were read before the tanks were stirred… anyone know? (Haise yells at Swigert about this suggesting Swigert caused the explosion).
As for the movie, I loved it when I saw it in the theater. So much so, I saw it three times. The space scenes, the liftoff and re-entry, everything involved with the space flight were just amazing. I especially loved when Lovell is imagining himself on the moon surface looking at the earth-rise. That was a powerful image, and gave me an “It was like I was actually there” feeling.
However, most of the Ron Howard family filler crap was bad. On subsequent viewings of the film since the theater release, these scenes annoy me more and more.
The already mentioned scene where whiny daughter won’t go to see the broadcast because of the Beatles break-up.
Lovell’s mother sitting alone in a side room in front of a TV by herself, while the rest of the family and friends are in another room. She then sends Armstrong and Aldrin in to keep the old bat company and distract her until the “predictions start coming in”, and she doesn’t even know who they are. :rolleyes:
Lovell’s kid watching at school, and the teacher walks by him and squeezes his shoulder. Bizarre, cheesy and very Ron Howard.
Visiting grandma at the old folks home, and also grandma unable to see the broadcast “it’s that damn TV guide again”.
The generally poor to average acting and forced “filler” scenes.
The good news is that the action scenes still hold up well, mainly because as everyone has said, it was documented so well and they wanted to keep things accurate. Unfortunately, the other parts of the movie are crap and get worse with each viewing.
One interesting tidbit. The bedspread in the Lovell’s bedroom, seen when Lovell’s wife is sitting in the bedroom alone listening to the NASA radio as the crew went around the dark side of the moon, was the same exact bedspread my parents had in the 70’s. I even have a picture of it to prove it! 
Two points: maybe Grandam had Alzheimer’s? I always thought the Lovell teen daughter was a hottie.
If I recall correctly, she had recently had a stroke (discussed when Marilyn is telling Lovell she won’t be at the launch).
I thought Yeager’s character complemented the astronauts perfectly. It showed the changing of the guard from the workmanlike anonymous heroics of Yeager against the new movie star pilots, while still maintaining the respect each had for the other.
I never got the feeling that Yeager ever came to respect the astronauts. A little jealous of them maybe but still not willing to pimp himself out in order to be one.
I can’t remember the exact line, but there’s a scene in Pancho’s bar toward the end of the movie where the other pilots are denigrating the astronauts, and he says something about them being pilots nonetheless, as if he’s accepting the changing of the guard, and that he’s not a part of it. Since his words carry weight, the other pilots accept it.
“Are you boys in the space program too?” Come now, that was the funniest line in the entire movie!
And I don’t understand why everyone feels the need to denigrate Ron Howard’s “hambone sentimentality” style of directing – yes, it’s true, and it may not always be appropriate, but NOBODY does hambone sentimentality better than Howard. He’s the grandmaster of feel-good schmaltz.
If the movie has any major fault, it’s the tendency to “dumb down” the dialogue. Seems like every other scene has one of the NASA engineers saying, “The lunar module just became a lifeboat,” or “If Swigert can’t lock that hatch, we don’t have a mission!” It’s like they didn’t trust the audience to comprehend the drama and the imminent danger if they couldn’t translate the techno-speak. But that’s hardly unique to this movie.
Nitpick: the format for “Junkyard Wars” was exported to the US after the UK show “Scrapheap Challenge”, but otherwise you’re correct:
Reading Yeager’s own autobiography and other books about him, he has always come across to me as a spiteful prick.
For example, in Andrew Chaikin’s book A Man on the Moon he describes Yeager trying to keep Bill Anders from being accepted into the astronaut corps because he hadn’t been through his test pilot school. Anders later flew on Apollo 8.
Hell, yes. Blanche Lovell got the two best lines in the movie, that one and, “Don’t you worry. If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it.”
Great, great movie. I watch it every couple of years, it seems, and enjoy it all over again.
I thought the funniest line in the movie was delivered to Mattingly in the hotel when the guy from NASA came to get him. “Good, you’re not dead.”
The second point you make is a good one. “Come on rookie, park that thing” type dialog *was *annoying.
For me, the non-space flight scenes get worse and worse during subsequent viewings, but the rest of the movie holds up very well. When I saw it once, those annoying lines didn’t bother me, but upon further review, they annoy the hell out of me more and more.
As an aside, the poise with which those guys handled that event continues to amaze me even to this day. The NASA recordings of the communication between Apollo 13 and the ground in Houston were remarkably calm considering the dire situation they were in.
My first reaction to reading this is that you have it totally backwards. I saw The Right Stuff as Yeager’s story, one man doing what he was driven to do, almost alone except for a few other pilots and technicians. And this was contrasted against the astronauts and the space program, which was armies of men and billions of dollars. I saw it as a story of one man who lived on the edge, more or less laughing at the dog and pony show that NASA became.
But as I think about it more, I think both interpretations are valid, and that is one of the reasons it is, IMO, a much better film that Apollo 13, which was made the more limiting style (again, IMO) as a docudrama.