When it comes to biopics and movies based on actual events, it’s all very well and good building up your real life heroes and virtuous go-getters, but we rarely get to the real meat of the matter until certain shade of shit hits a particular brand of fan. Overcoming adversity is where it’s really at, and when it comes to straightening out an almighty screw-up on a massive canvas, they don’t come more impressive than Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.
Telling the story of the disastrous, thirteenth lunar mission that saw the launch occur at 13:13 CST and experience massive problems a few days later on April the 13th (these NASA types are not big on superstition, then), no one seemed better placed than Howard to deliver some solid, all-American gumption as math, determination and some arts and crafts skills worthy of Blue Peter are brought to bear in order to bring a stranded trio of astronauts back down to terra firmer. Houston had a problem, but do we?
Astronaut Jim Lovell has already been to space when he orbited the moon during the Apollo 8 mission, but unlike Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11, he’s never actually set foot on that cratered, white ball that circles us in the heavens. However, his wish is suddenly granted when he and his expectant crew of Ken Mattingly and Fred Haise are suddenly bumped from the Apollo 14 mission up to 13, which means that they had better step up their training. However, unbeknownst to everyone born without the aid of precognition, this is only the first hiccup in a looooong list that’ll see the mission brought to the edge of disaster.
First, with only day to go until launch, Mattingly is pulled after suspected exposure to German measles, leaving the crew precious little time to gel with his replacement, Jack Swigert. As tension builds within the Lovell home, launch day arrives and sees the intrepid space farers hurl themselves into the cosmos; but while Lovell and his team are excited to take their place in history, his wife is heartbroken that due to reduced interest in space launches in the years since landing on the moon, means that the mission isn’t garnering any real media coverage.
Of course, the mission soon becomes newsworthy when, three days into the mission, an electrical short cause a liquid oxygen tank to explode and shed its load into the stars. Worse yet, their remaining tank seems to be leaking, so it seems that this moon landing is disappointingly a wash. However, the resulting damage now raises something of a chilling problem. How the hell are NASA going to get these guys back home when their oxygen levels are so badly compromised? Soon everyone on the ground is working around the clock to engage in some of the most intense puzzle solving you’ve ever seen, but for every issue that gets solved, two more pop up to challenge them. Can guts, determination and good old smarts manage to get Lovell and the gang back to mother earth?
Despite the fact that Ron Howard’s jack-of-all trades nature has seen him bounce from genre to genre like some sort of ginger, cap-wearing Super Mario, I really don’t think there’s a director on this earth that was more suited to tackling the knuckle-gnawing tension and uplifting can-do spirit of Apollo 13. Simply put, Howard’s always been a sort of meat and potatoes kind of filmmaker, grounded, yet versatile, and his no-nonsense stance slots perfectly into a film where coffee drinking, tie wearing, bullshit-free pragmatists use incredibly un-cinematic methods to save the day. It’s unequivocally all-American (Tom Hanks plays a fucking astronaut for God’s sake) and it treads the line between disaster flick, science-fact and stirring real life account in a way that’s just as measured as those number crunchers at NASA.
Dedicating his style to only what could conceivably be achieved physically on camera, Howard redefines cinematic space travel as something deceptively tangible – which helps immensely when it comes to pitching the fact that space travel is essentially just duct tape and math. Despite having then-state of the art CGI at his disposal, the film skips the atmosphere-free ballet of Stanley Krubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and instead places the camera only where it could genuinely be. Similarly, extensive his use of the vomit comet (a fast descending aircraft that simulates weightlessness for real), adds to the gritty realism even further, removing the need for hokey pen-on-a-wire tricks. However, while Howard is concerned by making space travel impressive by stripping the glamour out of it, he can afford to do so thanks to a ridiculously solid cast who all come to work with their jaws well and truly clenched.
Obviously, Tom Hanks is Captain Solid when it comes to these sorts of things, and does his job so well, you realise that we were all initially confused when it was announced he wasn’t playing the spaceman when Toy Story was first announced. But elsewhere he’s backed up by a murderers’ row of supporting cast gold, who come at the ever growing tension with increasing seriousness. Sharing being entombed by endless buttons and switches in their tiny capsule is both Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, and narrowly missing out on the claustrophobic mission due to that illness is Hanks’ old Forest Gump mucker, Gary Sinese. Elsewhere, Kathleen Quinlan remains strong for her stranded hubby and Ed Harris bellows orders while armed with a flat-top straighter than Gozer the Gozerian, while he marshals his various eggheads to offer up solutions to things no one has ever planned for. But while the acting and direction are as solid as you’d expect, the real meat here is that problem solving.
While all of Apollo 13’s parts are working to perfection, Howard’s meat and potatoes approach leads to a meat and potatoes movie. If you know the story, there’s no real surprises to be had when compared to the more fantastical likes of more modern, fanciable fare like The Martian and Project Hail Mary – however, the film’s greatest strength is that even if you know how it all pans out, the story’s dedication to figuring out the constant stream of problems (not enough air, freezing temperatures, urinary infections for some reason) still somehow manages to have you on the edge of your seat, even when the scene is just a bunch of super serious white guys sciencing the living shit out of the latest problem that’s arrisen – be it retro-fitting a filter to literally fit a square peg into a round hole, to doing mental gymnastics about trying to keep the hapless, stranded trio from dying over 240,000 miles away from home.
While it may be missing some overtly spectacular bells and whistles, Howard’s Apollo 13 stands as a near-perfectly built machine that does exactly what it needs to do to in order to maximise the stress of being stranded off-world. As thoroughly dedicated to the job as the actual guys who lived it, it’s never-give-up, let’s-get-this-done attitude virtually launches off the screen…
Houston, there’s no problem. Trust me.
Where to watch Apollo 13: