Everything Goes Right

Rating: 8/10 (22 July 2019)

This is probably Ron Howard's best film, which although that isn't saying much coming from me (not a fan), "Apollo 13" is exceptional in its mission focus and sustaining the tension through the slew of problems with the historical voyage to the Moon. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, I've been viewing a bunch of lunar and space-related pictures lately, and it's become quite apparent that making the most awe-inspiring and challenging feats people have ever accomplished into sustained movie thrills is not an easy task for many filmmakers. "Marooned" (1969) is an obvious precedent in this case. In fact, there's a nightmare scene here that is said to be based on Marilyn Lovell's real nightmare after having seen "Marooned." While the real disaster is that film itself, it's understandable that the disturbance of it would linger for an astronaut's wife. "Marooned" is a thoroughly inhumane and mechanical exercise where a NASA chief played by an unsympathetic Gregory Peck hardly cares for the lives of helpless astronauts stranded in space. To him and the picture in general, those men floating in a tin can are nothing more than a math problem that he's forced to try to solve because the President of the United States ordered him to; otherwise, his first instinct is that it's not worth it and to give up.
"Apollo 13" is still a series of mathematical and mechanical problems to be solved, but the astronauts are active participants in it, and most of the people at NASA actually care about getting them home. More than the famous line, "Houston, we have a problem," much of the runtime involves continual communication and teamwork between the men in the sky and those on the ground. Whereas "Marooned" divorced the spectator from caring about the astronauts, either, by spending the first part of the film treating them as test subjects for seemingly how nuts they could make them with a long stay in space; "Apollo 13" invests in making their pilots likable. Part of this is just casting proven, well-liked stars: Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon and Gary Sinise. At Mission Control, they put in charge Ed Harris, the guy who played John Glenn in the most-respected prior NASA-related film to that date, "The Right Stuff" (1983). So good so far, but Howard also spends the early part developing the domestic relationships of the Lovell family, which pays off when the film repeatedly returns to the family at home watching the drama in space unfold on TV. Compare that to the lack of dramatic connection of the conversations between the astronauts and their wives in "Marooned." The audience hadn't invested in those relationships or characters, so they didn't care. Here, anyone who knows a bit about recent history knows exactly how the story ends, but it matters because those characters and relationships have been built in the film.
It also helps that the visual effects here hold up well nearly 25 years later, while the blatant matte work of "Marooned" only compound its problems of a picture divorced from its characters. Many shots in "Apollo 13" were even shot in actual zero gravity. Thus, it's simultaneously a more dramatic and more realistic film. Unfortunately, when Howard was entirely untethered from the real world and offered a space picture based on a mythical cosmos with "Star Wars," it bombed. "Marooned," "Solo" (2018) and a host of other movies: those are disasters. "Apollo 13" is a triumph.