Amazon.com Essentials:
NASA's worst nightmare turned into one of the space agency's
most heroic moments in 1970, when the Apollo 13 crew was forced
to hobble home in a disabled capsule after an explosion seriously
damaged the moon-bound spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill
Paxton play (respectively) astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and
Fred Haise in director Ron Howard's intense, painstakingly authentic
docudrama. The Apollo 13 crew and Houston-based mission
controllers race against time and heavy odds to return the damaged
spacecraft safely to Earth from a distance of 205,500 miles. Using
state-of-the-art special effects and ingenious filmmaking techniques,
Howard and his stellar cast and crew build nail-biting tension while
maintaining close fidelity to the facts. The result is a fitting
tribute to the Apollo 13 mission and one of the biggest
box-office hits of 1995. --Jeff Shannon
Amazon.com video review:
Relying primarily on actual footage shot by NASA and by news organizations,
this video documents the drama of the aborted Apollo 13 mission, in which
three astronauts came close to losing their lives in space. The actual
recording of commander Jim Lovell telling Houston about the "problem" made
famous in the Hollywood version of Apollo 13 is presented, and the
scenes showing distressed engineers in the actual control room in Houston
are in some ways much more dramatic than anything seen on the big screen.
This is, after all, reality, with real people scrambling under intense
pressure to save real lives. Besides the footage inside mission control,
the video also showcases invaluable flight footage shot by the astronauts
aboard the crippled spaceship. This video takes an
essentially chronological approach, but the technique of using the crew's
postflight news conference to serve as narration, while it is at first
confusing, serves a useful purpose. This is a no-frills production, but
the excitement as NASA engineers mobilize and the whole world watches the
news about the stricken spaceship is so gripping that any flourishes would
only seem to get in the way. --Robert J. McNamara
