(Not quite) to the moon, Alice!

Rating: 8/10 (27 April 2020)

Launching on the 13th of April 1970 (just over 50 years ago as I write this review) Apollo 13 was NASA's near-miss, finest hour, successful failure, almost disaster that had the whole world holding its breath, waiting to see if the three unlucky astronauts within would splash back to Earth in one piece. I grew up not knowing anything about it until this movie came out in the summer of 1995, releasing the same weekend as Under Siege 2, which is the weekend I started getting very sick, an illness that came to define my teens. I finally saw Apollo 13 when it released in the UK, in screen 2 of the Edinburgh Odeon on September 23rd 1995, the day before my 15th birthday (my actual birthday movie was Speed on widescreen VHS), with a sold-out audience.
In the US a lot of tall buildings miss floor 13, skipping from 12 to 14, fearing bad luck. They fail to realize that floor 14 will still be the 13th floor. For some reason this logic always reminds me of Nigel Tufnel. Pilots, sea captains, and astronauts are a very superstitious lot, so I don't get why NASA let two number 13s slip in there. Not that it would ANY difference at all, but they could have maybe launched on the 12th and called the mission Apollo 12.5. Maybe?
There's a lot of effort made to keep this movie as accurate as possible to real life, from analysing NASA transcripts right down to the fashions and style within the Lovell household. There's no exaggeration or dramatic licence here. We're very far from Michael Bay's Armageddon. A routine mission to the moon, ignored by the media, is thrown into chaos when an oxygene tank blows, ripping open the side of the spacecraft. With the extremely limited technology of the time (the average iPhone has million times more computing power) the astronauts on board, the increasingly exhausted team at mission control, and the rejected third crew member struggle to keep things hanging together as they slingshot around the moon (so close, yet so far, in a bittersweet scene), and head back to Earth running on empty.
Ron Howard details the long, torturous journey full of clammy, claustrophobic impatience on both the spacecraft and at control as everyone tears out their hair thinking of various last-minute solutions to every new problem, but it's not a film assembled by nervous, chaotic editing (I already said that this is not Armageddon). The pace and succession of events is laid-back and measured, a style of editing that is not too common now. James Horner provides one of his better scores, with some haunting touches, that lend the movie a timeless dignity.
Apollo 13 shoots for the moon and back again and does so with more unpretentious dignity than virtually all of the similar blockbusters that followed. It's a Sunday afternoon movie, not a Saturday night special, and none the worse for it.