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Director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer secured the production rights to Jim Lovell’s book about his 1970 Apollo 13 mission, “Lost Moon,” before it had even been published and you can understand their enthusiasm. Triumph can make for good drama, but the twisted truth is that failure frequently makes for even better drama. And the Apollo 13 mission, as a line in Howard’s 1995 movie says, was considered NASA’s most successful failure, one in which the third mission to the moon transformed into a mission to return to earth when an unexpected explosion aboard the service module disabled its electrical and life support systems. That explosion is what accounts for the famous real-life line, “Houston, we have a problem,” one spurring “Apollo 13” the movie’s best moment. Once Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) advises mission control of a serious complication, chaos ensues as the three astronauts and the whole terrestrial NASA gang attempt to ascertain that complication. Eventually, Lovell notices oxygen is leaking aboard the spacecraft, engendering an eerie calm that Howard and his Oscar-nominated editors Mike Hill and Daniel P. Hanley create from almost nothing but faces, close-ups and medium shots as everyone registers the problem, giving way to controlled pandemonium as they then get to work solving it. It evokes the immense craft of “Apollo 13,” direction, editing, music, and writing harmonizing to maximize drama but also to effectively streamline a non-stop flow of information and terminology through whip-smart similes and clever dramatizations.
Given that Lovell and his two other crew members, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), are forced to minimize power aboard their spacecraft and wait on instructions from mission control, it can sometimes feel as if “Apollo 13’s” heart is situated more on earth than it is up in space. Indeed, Howard proves much more adept at conveying straightforward problem-solving than the encroaching isolation in space. Hanks’s preternatural calm as Lovell is convincing, though not necessarily interesting, and Haise and Swigert remain underdeveloped, a brief moment of tension between the two feeling a paint by numbers for such an intense situation. The similar preternatural calm of Ed Harris as flight director Gene Kranzen hits harder as does the angst that Gary Sinise quietly carries in his performance as Ken Mattingly, the crew member forced by Lovell to bow out when he is exposed to measles (which he never contracts).
Much was made of “Apollo 13’s” technical accuracy and it is on full display, often infusing the finished product with the feel of a docudrama, albeit a stirring one. But that emphasis on precise detail over complicated emotion is also what hinders it. Apart from Lovell’s wife and family watching from back home in Houston, “Apollo 13’s” one other subplot involves America’s waning interest in moon landings, evoked in a live broadcast from the spacecraft before things go wrong that the networks drop in the middle to show something else. No one tells the astronauts, which may or may not have been true, but either way, goes to show how the movie itself never wrestles with this flagging interest in any real way. Howard clearly wants to reignite our nation’s passion for space beyond a mere space race, but by never much broadening his viewpoint beyond the mission itself, “Apollo 13” never suggests why America might have become apathetic in the first place, as if afraid of introducing pesky politics. And if the argument is that the thrill of going to space is the end unto itself, Howard’s style is not the kind to illustrate the wonder of spaceflight, more suited to the drama of returning home.
