Here’s a look back on a film that encapsulated an incident exemplifying what happens when near everything that can go wrong, does go wrong—and how to preserve through it anyway. With the recent passing of the real-life hero Jim Lovell, I was already considering going back to Ron Howard’s dramatization of Apollo 13.
The incident took place, as the film notes, in that period post the Neil Armstrong moon landings when interest in the space program began to wane off quite a bit—after all, who cares about second or third place? Though the US government had their prestige coup, astronauts and scientists at NASA were still invested in carrying on their program for exploration itself—among them was of course Lovell, who had been a backup commander for the first landings themselves. The irony of course was that he got himself into the history books, just not for what he foretold.
Lovell is played by Tom Hanks with his affable yet determined manner—joining him is Kevin Bacon as Jack Swigert and Bill Paxton as Fred Haise, all of them used to effects-heavy production. Rounding out the cast is Ed Harris as mission controller Gene Kranz, for such was Harris’ typecasting as the authoritative one—though amazingly, with an actual head of hair in this one. Either way, it was a solid enough cast for an effort like this one—and one that took production a step further by filming most of the zero-gravity scenes in a high-altitude aircraft for that extra realism.
As a film, well, we have of course Hanks as a man who’s keen on making his own mark in the deep void in space—with all the tensions of losing out on the prestige of a moon trip with mission members contracting diseases. Some of the portents for what’s to come might feel a bit heavy-handed, but then again, this was a real-life case of the number thirteen being as unlucky as foretold.
The real meat begins, of course, at that critical moment back in 1970 when a component in the space module went haywire—leaving a trio of men stuck in effectively in a tin can, struggling to preserve oxygen, their sanity, and every drop of fuel to return to Earth. Their controllers at NASA didn’t have algorithms and simulations like they might now, with room-sized computers just for calculations—things had to be worked out on blackboards and model mockups, with simple human ingenuity and cool heads being as ever the most reliable means for seeing through something disastrous.
As things go on, our characters fray as they did somewhat in real life (at times the film had to exaggerate things—while some of the real astronauts did get cranky in their radio messages, by all accounts Lovell remained a paragon of composure). Here, we see the effects of lack of sleep, of not even being able to recognize one’s own handwriting any more…and of course trying to fly back a craft not even meant for such a trip, where an inch to the side from a control stick meant flying off to oblivion.
Sure, some of it may feel a bit Hollywood…but then again, for the most part, that’s pretty much how it went. For a moment, the whole world was cheering on three men in the most lethal environment to humanity—and in the decades since, we’ve never really had anything like that since…
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