Don't worry about the capsule - Tom Hanks is aboard

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 1999)

Every other February an old debate is revived: how, people ask, can a movie POSSIBLY be nominated for Best Picture without its director being nominated for Best Director?
`Apollo 13' shows how this can be so and rightly so. It's good, to be sure, but what MAKES it good? The story (amazingly, a true one) and the subject matter. Neither of these were Ron Howard's doing. He transferred the story and subject matter to the screen and created a good film which, given the potential, falls a bit flat. Considering the grandeur of space and the unspeakable emotions of astronauts trapped in a flying sardine can, in constant contact with the human race but thousands of miles from the nearest atmosphere, it ought to have been a knockout.
But the problem is that there's the usual Howard mannerisms: formula, graceless direction, no taste whatever in music, and, worst of all, an inane trust in brawn, leadership and the power of positive thinking. This is a film in which engineers and scientists are made to look like ineffectual fools, where people can be made to do the impossible if - and only if - someone shouts at them loudly enough. I don't want to press this point. `Apollo 13' is far from being the worst offender of its kind. Most of the film's energy is concentrated where it should be: on the space capsule and the difficulties it faces.
A more serious drawback is Tom Hanks. Somehow it's always Tom Hanks who talks sense, Tom Hanks who settles disputes, Tom Hanks who manifests initiative, nobility, perfect health and good cheer. The other two astronauts might as well be made of wood. For a film about three people who share exactly the same fate and have exactly the same claim upon our sympathy, this looks suspiciously like a star vehicle. I personally find this particularly hard to take, since the star in question gives a typically leathery performance. More than anyone else he looks as if he never left Earth.
Still, he hasn't given a better performance and Ron Howard certainly hasn't made a better film. It COULD have been much better - but superb though the subject matter is, the film wasn't GUARANTEED to be engrossing - and yet it is.