Houston we have a problem, our movie is to long.

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2010)

I am one of those who was really happy when "Brave Heart" beat this movie out for the Oscar in 1996. Nothing against this movie or Ron Howard, but that was a vastly superior movie to this film. Of course, I do not particularly like this one all that much either as I gave it a six, it has some good stuff in it, but it is also rather long and you feel the length of it. Not in the bathroom way of say a "Lord of the Rings" movie where it is just super long so you are bound to feel the urge to go, but long in the "man it is taking forever for this film to end". The story chronicles a true event where a space mission had problems and the astronauts had to scrape their moon landing and just figure a way to get back home and it has some interesting moments. It also has way to much Tom Hanks for my tastes. He is not the only one in space yet he is the headline name so the other two astronauts are just not the focus which kind of sucks as I love both Bacon and Paxton, two underrated actors who usually do not get the bigger movies and when they do they are regulated to backup duties. For some reason Ed Harris got an Oscar nod for this film and his performance in this one is not as good as the one he had in the Sean Connery thriller "Just Cause" which got him nominated for nothing. His performance here is oddly like another performance he would have three years later in "The Truman Show" another film he mysteriously got an Oscar nod for. There is some nice space scenes though and at times you really worry about the guys in the dire situation they are in. So it is a watchable film, there is just to many times in this one that I was more worried about when it would end.