National Post (National Edition)
Chris Knight returns to Apollo 13, the movie, which turns 25 this year, and the mission, which turns 50 this week
Even in 1995, Tom Hanks was the hero we need today, says
It’s nice to celebrate a movie when it hits a milestone. Director Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 now has two. The movie stars actornaut Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell – Hanks had long wanted to put on a spacesuit and play an astronaut – and it came out in 1995, which makes it 25 years old this year. And the mission, in which an explosion crippled the moon-bound spacecraft, took place 50 years ago this week. Apollo 13 launched atop a Saturn V rocket on Apr. 11, 1970, and ultimately returned safely to Earth six days later — after a harrowing swing around the moon, the ship’s breathable air and electrical power diminishing.
The web site apolloinrealtime. org/13/ contains an amazing collection of audio and video files and the complete transcript of the mission, which you can experience in real time from any point during the flight. But for a more concise trip there’s the movie, available through Amazon Prime and also from Apple TV.
Howard went to great lengths to get the science right, hiring astronaut Dave Scott (Gemini 8, Apollo 9, Apollo 15) as the chief technological consultant, and putting his mission control actors through a tutorial led by an Apollo 13 flight director, Gerald Griffin, plus a crash course in physics for good measure.
He also shot much of the footage aboard the “vomit comet,” an aircraft that flies a parabolic arc to simulate weightlessness. (It also frequently makes passengers sick; hence the nickname.)
Hanks is just about perfect as Lovell. I once interviewed the actual astronaut, who told me: “He and I don’t look alike, but the way he portrayed me in my mannerisms and things like that was excellent.” You can actually see both men together in the film when the Apollo 13 crew, played by Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, are brought aboard the recovery ship in the Pacific. Lovell has a cameo as the ship’s captain.
Apollo 13 pretty much kicked off Hanks’ series of “hero” roles, which grew to include a D-Day soldier (Saving Private Ryan), an FBI agent (Catch Me If You Can), Walt Disney (Saving Mr. Banks), lawyer James B. Donovan (Bridge of Spies), pilot Chesley Sullenberger (Sully), journalist Ben Bradlee (The Post) and Mr. Rogers (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). He also recently hosted the return of Saturday Night Live after returning from Australia, where he’d tested positive for COVID-19.
“Why me as host?” he asked. “Well for one I have been the celebrity canary in the coal mine for the coronavirus. And ever since being diagnosed I have been more like America’s dad than ever before, since no one wants to be around me very long, and I make people uncomfortable.”
As Lovell, he’s the epitome of calm and grace under pressure in Apollo 13, which could not have been a more nail-biting mission had the screenwriters made it all up. To start, there’s the personal drama of a last-minute change in the crew, after command module pilot Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) was grounded over fears he might have caught the measles.
Then the explosion, which meant the command module lost almost all power, and the crew had to use the lunar module (LM) as a lifeboat, and its engine to help boost them back to Earth in good time.
The ship got cold. Condensation gathered on delicate instrument panels. The carbon monoxide scrubbers on the LM overloaded, forcing the crew to jury-rig a new filter. One of them came down with a urinary tract infection and fever. Debris from the explosion made navigation by sighting stars impossible.
Finally an unusually shallow reentry, itself caused by steam venting from the LM, meant the radio blackout during the plunge through the atmosphere lasted far longer than normal. By the time someone at mission control notes a possible typhoon but says it might miss the ship after splashdown, flight controller Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) quips: “Only if their luck changes.”
Apollo 13 took home two Oscars, for best sound and best film editing, but it was nominated in seven other categories, including for James Horner’s dramatic score and for best picture. But it also serves as a time capsule of a near-disaster that Kranz would later characterize as “NASA’s finest hour.” And for the inevitable pandemic tie-in, there’s the measles-quarantine subplot and the cooped-up-in-a-spaceship feeling with which we can all empathize.
Finally, there’s the almost documentary quality of the film. In my interview with Lovell he remarked: “They can use it as history. They can go back generations from now and learn from the movie what happened. There are a couple of pieces of artistic license that were taken but it didn’t reflect on the actual conditions or the events that occurred.”
It truly is history now; the last astronauts to land on the moon were the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972. NASA has set a deadline of 2024 for the next crewed lunar landing, but even before the coronavirus threw the economy into turmoil, few thought it a feasible goal. In the meantime, we can listen to Hanks’ words from the final scene of Apollo 13. “I look up at the moon and wonder: When will we be going back, and who will that be?”