Apollo 13 / To the Edge and Back
The solid Ron Howard film, and the better PBS documentary.
Apollo 13 (1995). Grade: B-. Apollo 13: To the Edge and Back (1994). Grade: B
By now I assume everyone’s either seen Apollo 13, or is vaguely familiar with the story, right? It’s a 1970 moon mission that had a problem. There’d been an explosion in one of the oxygen tanks; the fire immediately went out, but the ship was now low on oxygen. And each method used to remedy this situation had to be thought up ASAP, and some of the methods caused other problems that needed other methods to fix. It was frequently a case of “this buys us some time so figure out what to do next.”
Basically, it’s just incredibly lucky that all these guys didn’t die. Hard work, too, and good-old-fashioned American ingenuity and bravery and gumption; with a whole lotta luck involved.
I actually find the patriotic angle to movies like this a little silly. There’s nothing particularly “American” about bravery in the face of danger, or clever people solving difficult problems; there were both on display in the Japanese and Ukrainian reactions to Fukushima and Chernobyl. I get why people look back on the space race rather fondly, as it was one part of the Cold War that didn’t involve embargoes or missile buildups or ugly protracted wars; and we did “win,” by getting to the moon first.
But we put people in danger by doing so, and several died. Test pilots, astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire and later on two Space Shuttles. That doesn’t make the rescue story of Apollo 13 any less compelling; it does make it seem more of an unnecessary risk.
I hadn’t seen the Ron Howard movie when it came out; I was kind of iffy on Ron Howard movies overall. I liked Night Shift and Splash well enough; the forced drama and sentiment of movies like Cocoon, Far and Away, and Backdraft irritated me. (And his later career would be very spotty, too — producing the terrific Arrested Development and giving the world three more Dan Brown movies than the world ever needed.)
I finally did get around to seeing it, and it’s not bad; the production’s solid, and the effects must have seemed very realistic for 1995. The script’s pretty unimaginative, but it gets the job done. What’s best about it are the performances; it’s especially nice to see Bill Paxton again in a sane person role before his far-too-early death.
It's funny that Ed Harris plays the head of Mission Control here, since he was so terrific in The Right Stuff. Which had what this movie lacks, the effect of all that astronaut heroism on their families; that's touched on here, not nearly as well. Harris has one of the best moments in The Right Stuff when he sticks up for his wife’s right not to have her privacy invaded.
Despite all the crashes and explosions and near-death experiences in The Right Stuff, the movie is very stirring at times; this really isn’t. That movie actually does make space flight seem brave and majestic; Apollo 13 makes me think we should never do crewed spaceflight again.
I do understand the argument Neil DeGrasse Tyson makes, that the moon landing inspired millions of young people to take an interest in science. Yes, but what if everyone on Apollo 11 had horribly died? (And that mission wasn't routine, either, as the one excellent scene in First Man makes clear.)
Apollo 13 (and the documentary) are Hooray For Nerds movies; the sheer cleverness and creativity of their problem-solving is amazing. (And carrying out jerry-rigged repairs in zero-gravity.) The effect, though, is like watching people survive in a zombie movie. They shouldn't have been in this predicament to begin with.
That documentary was one of the reasons I hadn’t seen Apollo 13 for so long; I assumed it couldn’t be as good as the non-fiction version. Well, it’s not — but it’s a perfectly honorable effort, and not strictly a money grab. (Attempted money grabs were things like how Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk fed off the far superior documentary Man on Wire, and his Welcome to Marwen fed off the vastly sperior documentary Marwencol.) Apollo 13 was already in production when To the Edge and Back was first shown on TV; they just happened to be about the same subject.
What really can’t be topped about the documentary is seeing the actual people — the family members and engineers on the ground — talk about how absolutely terrified they were, and how elated that everyone made it back safely. When you hear buzzcut toughy Gene Krantz’s voice start to crack, you understand why. (It’s the role Ed Harris played in the fiction film.) That guy deserves to be proud of what he did and what his team did. It was an amazing accomplishment.
You know what else is an amazing accomplishment? The Voyager missions. The probes we’ve now sent to every planet (and largest non-planet objects) in the Solar System. The information these missions, and our space telescopes, help collect about the mysteries and history of our universe. These are wonderful, wonderful things, and I abolutely support funding them.
Let's not kill any more astronauts, please! (Or any more Soviet dogs.) Besides, the biggest voices calling for human-crewed Mars missions are crazed Bond supervillians — do you think they’d care if one of their rockets blew up with people on board? Of course you don’t, because of course they wouldn’t! They’d probably love the free publicity it got them for future rocket launches. Let’s do uncrewed exploration, and celebrate the Nerds who saved those lives in 1970, instead.