Apollo 13 [HD DVD]
Why Buy A Apollo 13 [HD DVD]?NASAs worst nightmare turned into one of the space agencys 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 Howards 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
Customer Reviews & Opinions
Great movie
Great movie. Fast-paced, great character development, plus you get the feeling about how important (or not) the space program had become by this time. Very interesting to see how this flight affected the family, as well as how it affected the actual astronauts. Kathleen Quinlan as Mrs. Lovell is outstanding.
Awesome!
A classic. True to life. A great piece of history portrayed well. Tom Hanks at his best. Entertaining… Ron Howard you did it again, the best!
Absolutely fantastic!
Many people expected Apollo 13 to be a “routine” mission to the moon. If successful, it would have been the 3rd lunar landing. The mission did not, however, turn out to be routine. About 3/4 of the way to the moon a faulty piece of electronics caused an explosion that put the three-man crew in great danger.
This movie does an outstanding job of telling the story of the astronauts on this mission, as well as of the NASA ground crew that had to solve problem after problem in order to find a way to have a chance of getting the crew home safely.
Why this film is great:
1) The acting is top-notch. With actors like Tom Hanks, Gary Sinise, Bill Paxton, Ed Harris, and Kevin Bacon, how could it NOT be? The entire cast did an outstanding job.
2) This film is based on a true story that held the entire nation, perhaps the entire world, in its grip (and personally, I tend to prefer a good true story to a good fictional one)
3) The re-eneactements of the critical thinking and work of the NASA ground crew, scientists, and technicians added the realism needed to pull off a realistic telling of this story
4) I’ve visited the NASA Johnson Flight Center in Houston, and the original ground control room is still there (though there is now a new one that ground control uses). I don’t know if filming actually took place in that original flight control room, but it sure looked like it to me, That also added to the realism.
5) The intertwined storylines, including the crew, the NASA ground staff, and the astronauts’ families made for a gripping tale.
6) The music was awesome
7) Ron Howard is an AMAZING director.
I can’t really think of anything that would make me consider anything less than a 5-star rating for this amazing show.
There is, you may want to know, a smattering of mild language scattered throughout the movie and a some innuendo, and one blurred shower scene that I know I could have done without, adn that in my opinion didn’t really add to the show.
Regardless, this is a 5-star show through and through.
Ain’t no problem here Houston
On April 13th, 1970, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert, are sent to the moon for a lunar landing to gather moon rocks for scientific study. The race for the moon is over, and America isn’t even interested anymore in `routine’ flights to the moon anymore. That is until reports come in that there is major trouble going on on the spacecraft. As the pilots are on their way to the moon, an explosion happens somewhere inside their ship. Major problem after major problem begins to happen. The routine mission to the moon has just become an intellectual fight for survival… and now a mission to get home. 250 thousand miles in space inside a ship that feels like the size of two phone booths, Jim, Fred, and Jack use their brains and their guts to fly to the dark side of the moon to slingshot themselves hopefully back to earth. Power is diminishing, Carbon Dioxide is building, engines are failing, and the freezing cold is piercing. The true story of Apollo 13.
Never gets old. No matter how many times I see this movie, it just never gets old. I’ve probably seen it at least 5 times now and I’m still glued to my seat. How is this a real story? Honestly it’s so miraculous and incredible the things that happened and the things that were done to get these guys home that it seems fake. But it’s not. It’s crazy to think how close to death these guys were in such a foreign area such as space. Even the guys in Houston were having a hard time believing that so much was going wrong at one time. At one time the crew had to sit in the lunar lander to fly home. The thing about that is that most of the walls are just a millimeter thick (not even that much). So they had to watch where they stretched out so they didn’t puncture a whole in the wall and suck themselves out.
Ron Howard’s direction of the movie was incredible. Not once did I get bored. Everything was done just right. From the story, to the characters, the little jokes here and there, to the action, to the suspense. It’s got it all. And with a cast that consists of Tom Hanks (Lovell), Bill Paxton (Haise), Kevin Bacon (Swigert), Gary Sinise (Ken Mattingly), and Ed Harris (Gene Kranz), how could you really go wrong? Every performance was littered with emotion for the story or for who they were playing. It seemed like everyone wanted to do their best to make this movie memorable for us as the viewer, and more importantly for the people who they portrayed and the story that was being told.
After the movie was over this time, I was still caught up in the story so I immediately pushed play on The Making of Apollo 13. I HIGHLY recommend watching this. There was a LOT of real footage used in this documentary. From Nixon’s speech to seeing the actual ship that exploded float off to space while we get to see the actual damage. Incredible. Also it’s really neat to see how spot on the movie was to the actual event that happened. While the doc is going on, parts of the movie would happen, and then we’d see or hear the actual events happen (or vice versa…I can’t remember). It was really cool to hear “Houston we have a problem” from Lovell himself. And while they do show a lot of actual events, they also show some really funny stuff too. Watching how they did the floating in space parts was really cool. I’ve known about airplane flights that take you up and then drop real fast to give you the zero gravity feel. I actually looked into doing last year but it’s a tad expensive (like a thousand bucks…eesh). I just didn’t really think they would do it. But they did. A lot of the shots are actually in an airplane doing this and the actors all did it. It was funny to watch them floating around and then hit the bottom of the plane when the plane would come up from the dive.
In the end, I highly recommend this movie for anyone. Incredible movie on an incredible true event in America’s history.
P.S. What happened to Kevin Bacon? Like he looks like a normal guy in this movie, but man he’s starting to look a lot like Skeletor in more of his recent movies.
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