Deep Space

Rating: 10/10 (9 May 2016)

August 19, 2015
This is one of the best films of the year. Ron Howard knows how to make a great movie, visually and creatively. Tom Hanks is a great actor and this creative team of actor/director takes me all the way back to 1984 when Howard directed Hanks in "Splash," one of my favorite pictures of love, magic, and beauty. "Apollo 13" is a visual masterpiece that is based on the real-life ill-fated mission to the moon that happened 25 years ago.
It begins on July 20, 1969, with an astronaut, Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) who has orbited the moon on "Apollo 8." Jim tells his wife he wants to walk on the moon's surface and he gets his chance when he is selected to take flight in "Apollo 13," instead of "Apollo 14." Jim, along with his flight crew, blast off into space with minor difficulties. En route to the moon, one of the crew members performs a routine housekeeping procedure that causes one of the ship's liquid oxygen tanks to spill out into space while the other explodes and sends the ship tumbling. The mission to land is canceled and the crew becomes trapped in space. With time running out, Lovell and his crew must now work together to figure out a way home before it's too late.
The "Apollo 13" mission was launched on April 11th, 1970 from Cape Kennedy, Florida. It was the seventh manned mission in the Apollo space program. Two days later, an oxygen tank exploded and crippled the service module for which the command module depended on. The three astronauts became trapped with the loss of power, loss of cabin heat and loss of oxygen while mission control worked desperately to try and find a way to get them home safely. They faced almost impossible odds and the fact that they might just end up marooned in space, frozen to death.
I can just imagine what the cast went through for this movie because their performances are stellar and you can see they were well prepared. It opens with a surprise party for Jim. We meet his wife, Marilyn Lovell (Kathleen Quinlan) who is always worried about her husband going into space and not coming back. She follows him through his training and eventually she shows up to the launch party to see her husband take off into space. Kevin Bacon is fantastic as Jack Swigert who feels responsible because he, unknowingly, flipped the switch that caused the explosion and Bill Pullman is Fred Haise, the man who hangs on to every last minute he may have. Ed Harris plays Gene Kranz, the chain-smoking mastermind at Houston Mission Control who tries to figure out if the Apollo 13 crew can safely make it home. He doesn't take "no" for an answer and commands his team to work effortlessly to keep them from dying in space.
Originally, Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) was supposed to fly the "Apollo 13" mission but was grounded due to possibly being exposed to the measles. Early in the picture, Ken is diagnosed and we see that Gary Sinise might be limited in his screen time but he's not. He becomes some of the brains to figure how to get the ship home. He works tirelessly in a simulator to figure out a way to power the weakened batteries on the Lunar module exploration device (a lifeboat) so they can swing around the moon and flame burst the ship home.
What Ron Howard manages to create is a technically accurate film with a crew that floats around "weightless" in the spaceship and we see some visual shots of earth from a space-eye view. He takes all the technical work and makes it shine. At one point, the crew is freezing out in space and suffering from carbon dioxide poison. Back on earth, a group of engineers is put together to creatively build something that will clean the air. The come up with a jerry rig that the crew can make materials out of on board the shuttle to give them more times. These are the intense sequences that really make you pace and wonder what will happen next and wonder if the crew will make it home alive.