Human resilience is a miracle

Rating: 10/10 (25 January 2018)

Strangely enough, this film is a real story and the story of a phenomenal US defeat in their conquest of the Moon that they turned, in the very heart of a disaster, into a victory, not as for landing on the Moon but as for bringing the three astronauts back home alive.
Apart from that, there is little to say or add. The disaster came when a small industrial defect caused a catastrophe with an explosion that destroyed a great part of the oxygen reserve and impaired then the feasibility of the mission. The second lesson is that NASA was totally unprepared to such a situation and they had to improvise with the skills and knowledge they had or were able to mobilize, but especially with the resilience of the three men on board whose lives were at the extreme point of immediate danger.
The film insisted on the atmosphere in the two technical teams in Houston and at Kennedy Space Center. It showed how unprepared they were and yet they managed to mobilize all their energies beyond the differences that were theirs, mostly technical differences since some engineers brought up their particular calculations on oxygen on carbon dioxide, on fuel and electricity and some of these figures were dramatic since the spacecraft could not come back home. They had to invent economies, ways to save electricity, oxygen, eliminate carbon dioxide, etc. Engineers generally can only see their own domain of competence and they only consider the proper route to make it work and succeed. So they find it very difficult to imagine defeat, failure, and how to cope with such a perspective. Strangely enough, they can only find their footing in such a situation if they are several people with different skills and if they confront their skills, compete with one another for the common goal of getting it right. The film shows that very well.
The families are of course taken care of and the film does not emphasize this side of the story and avoids all the dramatic scenes there must have been and there should have been in real life. But after all, the main point of the film was not the reactions of wives, children, parents, and relatives but clearly enough the human technical exploit.
It makes an easy entertainment, especially if you can feel some empathy for the three astronauts, and also for the bureaucrats of science, technology, and politics in such a situation. Nixon was nevertheless sidelined, sidetracked and simply pushed out of the way.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU