Great on Technical Stuff, OK on Characters

Rating: 8/10 (8 July 2013)

I'll start out by saying I'm a fan of old, classic films and don't watch new movies at all. As a matter of fact, this is the most recent movie I've ever seen. I watched it because I am interested in the history of the space program, was a space junkie when I was a kid, and am old enough to vividly recall the entire event of Apollo 13. I am not familiar with the actors in the film, who, from reading other reviews, are big names to movie fans. So I come to the film uninfluenced by my like or dislike of the actors, which often distorts one's view of a film, and I watched it mainly to see how "right" they "got it".
I think they mostly got it right. Visually, the film is beautiful. Having lived through the time myself, I think they got the look of the period perfectly. This isn't always easy to do, and the filmmakers should be credited with their dedication to accuracy. Hollywood hasn't always been so vigilant, even on such relatively recent events. One need only watch a 1940's film depicting the 1920's, to see how the filmmakers feel the need to "modernize" styles, not trusting the audience to "get it", that it's a period piece. Cars, furniture, houses, clothes, hair styles, everything looks right in this picture. If you have a disposition towards accuracy, the research needn't be that deep—just dig up a 1970 Sears Catalog; but even this effort often seems too much for Hollywood.
Same with all the rocket stuff. I'm not an engineer or scientist, but I have a fair layman's knowledge of the Apollo gear, from 40+ years of interest in the subject, and I didn't notice any glaring mistakes. I'm sure there were some, but you'd have to be annoyingly obsessive to be offended by, or to even notice, them.
A couple of things bugged me, striking me as hokey. First, was the argument between Haise & Swigert in the LEM. I guess this was added to create dramatic tension. I suppose you need this to make it a "story" instead of a documentary, but it is simply not credible. Second was the part at the end when TK Mattingly takes over as CapCom during the reentry. This scene smacked of old time Hollywood bathos, and I wasn't buying it. Third, making Grumman the goat in a couple of scenes where an unnamed Grumman executive is depicted as being hesitant, obstructive and noncommittal. I guess every movie needs a villain and it's easy to pick a now non-existent corporate entity to be the villain in a film where everybody else bonds together in a spirit of cooperation, but it's a libel on the company that, after all, built the spacecraft that saved the crew's lives.
The acting was good, but the writing was often clichéd. A lot of it reminded me of things like "Back To Bataan" or the "Sands of Iwo Jima", only moving the scene from the beachheads of World War II to the vacuum of outer space. Watching the film, I got the feeling the actors looked a little too young for the parts they were playing, especially the guy who played Jack Swigert. Swigert was a tough, hard looking guy, while the actor portraying him looked almost adolescent.
The actor playing Lovell did a good job in playing "A" part, but he didn't come across to me as Jim Lovell, whose public persona I've been familiar with since I was in the first grade. Lovell always came across as one of the more glib and well spoken of the astronauts, with a strong sense of humor, and we don't sense this in the film. I think ii's more a product of the writing than the acting, but the Lovell character in the film seems more like a generic movie action hero than the real life Jim Lovell. This, I think, is the main shortcoming of the film, that the crew members, Lovell, Swigert, Haise & Mattingly, seem like 4 interchangeable guys, rather than distinct personalities. Again, I feel the fault is in the writing, not the acting.
A couple of the characters are never really named in the film (that I noticed) but it's obvious who they were supposed to be—mainly Sy Liebergot and John Aaron. I don't necessarily think an actor in a film needs to look exactly like the historical figure he's portraying, but the actor playing Liebergot looked nothing like the real Liebergot. I did find it interesting that the actor playing the unnamed CapCom through most of the film looked a whole lot like John Young. I wondered if this was done on purpose, because in the photos and films of the actual event, Young is often seen around the CapCom desk, though he never was CapCom on this flight. This didn't bug me, but it was interesting. (Also, the other CapCom in the film strongly resembled Stuart Roosa, Apollo 14 Command Module pilot, and I wondered if this, too, was intentional. Like Young, Roosa was never a CapCom on this flight.)
But for all the complaints, I did like the film. You have to expect a certain level of hokeyness when Hollywood tackles a serious subject. There's a happy ending when the astronauts return safely, and an even happier ending for Mattingly (in real life, not the film) when he was assigned to Apollo 16, a much longer, more interesting, mission, in which he got to do his own EVA, a deep flight space walk, which he would not have done had he not been booted from 13. Hopefully some of the folks seeing this film will be interested enough to read up on the subject, and then look at other missions of the Apollo (and Mercury and Gemini) programs, because it's all fascinating stuff. US space history doesn't begin with Apollo 11 and end with Apollo 13.