Apollo 13 (1995)
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 140m
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon
Synopsis:
The 1970 NASA lunar mission encounters problems on Day 3 that endanger its life support capability and it requires all the ingenuity and resource of those at Houston to get the three astronauts safely back to Earth.
Review:
Director and star notwithstanding, this on the whole avoids the dewy-eyed stuff and opts for more of a documentary approach, though in every sense a dramatised one. It grips for pretty much all its length, managing to get in the air relatively early, and then sustaining tension through the long flight scenes. There is the shred of a subtext about the public's boredom with space programmes being pepped up by the current crisis, though without a trace of self-reflexive irony, as one might expect, concerning the film's own choice of subject matter. Special effects are impressive and convey the outer-spatial vistas and conditions of weightlessness (achieved in steep-diving jet planes) with unprecedented clarity, and the blast-off sequence is something of a pièce de résistance. A shame that the final wait on re-entry and its pay-off shot of the chutes just opening on the module is so calculated and perfunctory.
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 140m
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon
Synopsis:
The 1970 NASA lunar mission encounters problems on Day 3 that endanger its life support capability and it requires all the ingenuity and resource of those at Houston to get the three astronauts safely back to Earth.
Review:
Director and star notwithstanding, this on the whole avoids the dewy-eyed stuff and opts for more of a documentary approach, though in every sense a dramatised one. It grips for pretty much all its length, managing to get in the air relatively early, and then sustaining tension through the long flight scenes. There is the shred of a subtext about the public's boredom with space programmes being pepped up by the current crisis, though without a trace of self-reflexive irony, as one might expect, concerning the film's own choice of subject matter. Special effects are impressive and convey the outer-spatial vistas and conditions of weightlessness (achieved in steep-diving jet planes) with unprecedented clarity, and the blast-off sequence is something of a pièce de résistance. A shame that the final wait on re-entry and its pay-off shot of the chutes just opening on the module is so calculated and perfunctory.
Country: US
Technical: col/scope 140m
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon
Synopsis:
The 1970 NASA lunar mission encounters problems on Day 3 that endanger its life support capability and it requires all the ingenuity and resource of those at Houston to get the three astronauts safely back to Earth.
Review:
Director and star notwithstanding, this on the whole avoids the dewy-eyed stuff and opts for more of a documentary approach, though in every sense a dramatised one. It grips for pretty much all its length, managing to get in the air relatively early, and then sustaining tension through the long flight scenes. There is the shred of a subtext about the public's boredom with space programmes being pepped up by the current crisis, though without a trace of self-reflexive irony, as one might expect, concerning the film's own choice of subject matter. Special effects are impressive and convey the outer-spatial vistas and conditions of weightlessness (achieved in steep-diving jet planes) with unprecedented clarity, and the blast-off sequence is something of a pièce de résistance. A shame that the final wait on re-entry and its pay-off shot of the chutes just opening on the module is so calculated and perfunctory.