SpectralTime
Since: Apr, 2009
01/16/2024 00:00:00
I actually went to church with one of the guys on the ground at NASA for this and a bunch of other things. He said the main difference was, ironically, in real life there wasn\'t much profanity. I\'ve heard one of the astronauts involved felt pretty strongly about the same thing.
That said, I agree completely about the atmosphere, and about the inspiration of the Space Race generally. I\'m always up for movies like this, or The Martian.
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"With Respect Sir, I Believe This Will Be Our Finest Hour"
When you break it down, Apollo 13 is a simple film about a complex problem. That problem is how to get three astronauts safely home in a broken ship. There's not much to it other than that.
But sometimes you don't need more, as this movie beautifully shows. In fact, it's the relative lack of dramatic flourishes that make it stand out. We get just enough time on Earth to establish the three leads before they're thrust into the main dilemma of the film and have to solve it. They're not alone in this regard of course, as Mission Control is there around the clock working to help. But aside from a few brief scenes with the Lovell family the attention of this film is squarely on bringing our heroes home. It's the classic Man vs. Environment conflict taken to its greatest extreme.
But its through the mundane framing of that conflict that we see just how heroic the real life men at NASA truly were. In making this film as realistic as possible Ron Howard showcased the nigh-impossible odds facing those men and how they overcame those odds. Admittedly, there are some dramatic flourishes in the dialogue. In reality Gene Kranz never said "Failure is not an option!" to the NASA workers on the ground. Still, it works because it perfectly captures the attitude of the room in real life. In the movie he says it for the benefit of the audience. In our world, he didn't have to because that was the universal belief of everyone involved. Those men were going to make it home, and they were going to figure out how.
And that's what makes NASA and the Apollo missions so inspiring. They didn't just travel to the moon, they took humanity to its furthest reaches and back. And through it all, the tragedies and successes, they never lost sight of the value of human life. That's why the story of Apollo 13 is inspiring even today. And its why this film is as well.