One of the 90's Finest Hours...

Rating: 9/10 (17 February 2017)

"Houston, we have a problem".
This simple and yet ominous announcement, ranking fiftieth in the American Film Institute's Top 100 Movie Quotes, became a staple of pop-culture, referencing to any acquaintance with an inconvenience... of as yet undetermined seriousness. Well, problem is the word to underline.
They say in journalism jargon that a train arriving on time is no news but it becomes news when it doesn't. There's a moment in "Apollo 13" where the three men en route to the moon: Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) are clowning around in front of the camera, ignoring that they're not even aired on TV. When Jim Lovell's wife Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan) asks why, the answer says it all: the audience finds moon missions as exciting as a trip to Pittsburgh. But the fact is that Apollo 13 never made it to "Pittsburgh". And that was news, at least, news enough so Ron Howard would make a film of it, a film with actors and screenplay, but with the realism and the accuracy of a docudrama, and quite a good one.
There's some talk now about a Neil Armstrong biopic to be directed by Damien Chazelle but so far, it says a lot that Apollo 11, the one with the small step and giant leap, one of the greatest adventures men ever embarked in (also the most hazardous, according to JFK) never made into a film, not even "The Right Stuff" which ended with Gordo Cooper's flight and mentioned the deaths of astronauts Grissom, Chaffee and White in the infamous 1967 Apollo 1 fire. "Apollo 13" actually starts with that tragic incident as it established its kinship with the other all American space-themed classic. Indeed, "Apollo 13" can be seen as a continuation of "The Right Stuff" with Ed Harris as a common link, Harris playing the Oscar-nominated part of Nasa Flight Director Gene Kranz. And what an irony that it's Apollo 13, the third mission to the moon that made Kranz famous, not the first.
And apart from Armstrong, Aldrin (and to some degree, Collins), I don't think anyone remembers the name of the other astronauts that went to the moon, but I'm sure everyone remembers the story of Apollo 13 and the name of Jim Lovell. Not that posterity matters, but it says something about memory's selectivity: as much as we need heroes to admire, we need danger to emphasize their heroism. I trust Chazelle to inject a sense of danger in the epic odyssey, but will it be as intense and palpable as when the lives of Apollo 13 men were at serious stakes when an explosion deprived the spacecraft from oxygen supply and fuel? One can say the film will have the merit to show the magnificent outcome of human intelligence and a rigorous combination of skills and talents, but isn't it through the miraculous way the NASA crew got their men back home that we could appreciate them the most?
Indeed, we never realize how difficult it is to make these flights possible, especially in a time where IBM computers were the sizes of pool tables, where men could control a spacecraft hundreds of thousands miles away but when remote controls didn't exist. This is how craft and rudimentary the material was and this unique capability of mankind to improvise, to be resourceful, is illustrated to the fullest in the extraordinary adventure of Apollo 13, highlighting each step that made the miracle possible. And there is an extreme attention to procedures: how to stop the oxygen leaking, how to keep enough power to maneuver the spacecraft and make the transmissions possible, even to make the Command Module's square filters work in the Lunar Module's round receptacles with a bunch of space bags and duct tapes the NASA crew worked on it. It's not just about intelligence, but practicality and sheer astuteness.
And there's always the human factor, Lovell recalls a botched mission's that wouldn't have succeeded if his cockpit lights hadn't shorted out. Similarly, when Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) is replaced at the last minute, that makes him available and a much valuable asset during the crisis as he's assigned to find a way to turn on the Command Module systems without drawing too much power, by using the simulator, no one knows the spacecraft better than him. In the 1989 documentary "For All Mind", Mattingly says he doesn't know what the others do, but he knows his part perfectly and it won't crash because of him. With that mindset, it's obvious that "failure isn't an option". They still called the mission a successful failure, but I wouldn't count it as a failure as it succeeded to say more about courage and resourcefulness than any other mission.
And it's a credit to Ron Howard's precision and talent to have recreated everything for his film, not one single footage shot, from the equipment to the weightlessness, this is a remarkable achievement that even didn't get him an Oscar nod, while the fact that he made such a film without CGI is as remarkable as sending men to moon with an equipment that would belong to a museum today. It is also remarkable that Howard didn't inject any artificial subplot but stuck to the core of the story, only allowing to show the "problem" from the emotional perspective of Oscar-nominated Kathleen Quinlan, as the wife who accepts her man's job but would rather see him on the safer side, another element that is handled in the film's bigger brother "The Right Stuff".
Driven by an intelligent and to-the-point screenplay, "Apollo 13" is one of these movies that can be screened in professional environments to show the merits of team work, processes and intelligence for crisis resolutions. And it much deserves its twelfth spot in the American Film Institute's Top 100 Inspiring Movies.