Exhilarating recreation.

Rating: 8/10 (27 February 2009)

This is a recreation of America's third NASA mission to land on the moon in 1970, and the subsequent disaster that almost befell the mission........
Director Ron Howard and his producer Brian Grazer, made a top draw picture about an incident that everyone knew the outcome too. That it engrosses and thrills to make the inevitable denouement a mere component of a whole, is quite a fabulous achievement. Sure it can be said that it lacks a certain political appendage {RE:The Right Stuff}, but for the duration of this picture we are wowed by the design and construction on offer. It would have been easy for Howard to use stock footage of real NASA missions, but all sequences are recreated by the makers with astonishingly impacting results, thus adding authenticity to the palpable tension when things go belly up.
Howard was wise in his choice of leading man, who better than Tom Hanks {Jim Lovell, who's memoirs the script worked from} to portray a bastion of Americana?, nobody, because Hanks is perfect, as are Bill Paxton {Fred Haise} and Kevin Bacon {John Swigart} sitting either side of Hanks, a couple of bona fide solid and respected actors you could not have wished to have. Down on the ground the acting is also exemplary, Kathleen Quinlan as the fraught Marylyn Lovell is fantastic, with Ed Harris {Gene Kranz} and Gary Sinise {Ken Mattingly} adding emotional weight to the unfolding drama. With Howard reining in his trade mark sentimental flourishes, Apollo 13 relies on its story and its craft to steer it safely home, and safely home it gets, just like the men of Apolo 13. To give us a punch the air joy that comes as much out of tension relief as it does because of raw human emotion, quite a picture indeed. 8/10