Great movie making but misses the big picture

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2000)

This movie in 50 years will be viewed as a semi documentary of the Apollo 13 mission. Pity, because as a piece that claims to be accurate from a historic point of view it misses the mark by a wide margin. My main problem with the film is how the story and characters were changed for dramatic effect. The best example of this is Jack Swigert. In the film he was shown as an inexperienced rookie who had to constantly prove his worth. Meanwhile Ken Mattingly is shown to be the great hero and the only one who knows the command module well enough to save it. The truth is Jack Swigert wrote the emergency procedures for the command module, the very ones the crew used when the emergency happened. It was said they were lucky Swagert was on the flight as he was one of the best to handle the situation. Mattingly meanwhile was also a rookie astronaut and it was in fact Gene Cernan and other veteran astronauts who worked out the problems in the simulators. A good film that tries to be very accurate in the look and feel but fails to be accurate in it's script as it goes for old Hollywood dramatics instead.