Apollo 13

Apollo 13 is a 1995 American space docudrama film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris. The screenplay by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert dramatizes the aborted 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission and is an adaptation of the book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 by astronaut Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. The film depicts astronauts Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise aboard Apollo 13 for America's third Moon landing mission. En route, an on-board explosion deprives their spacecraft of most of its oxygen supply and electric power, forcing NASA's flight controllers to abort the Moon landing, and turning the mission into a struggle to get the three men home safely.

Howard went to great lengths to create a technically accurate movie, employing NASA's technical assistance in astronaut and flight controller training for his cast, and obtaining permission to film scenes aboard a reduced gravity aircraft for realistic depiction of the "weightlessness" experienced by the astronauts in space.

Released to cinemas in the United States on June 30, 1995, Apollo 13 was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture (winning for Best Film Editing and Best Sound). In total, the film grossed over $355 million worldwide during its theatrical releases. The film was very positively received by critics.

Plot
In July 1969, astronaut Jim Lovell hosts a house party where guests watch Neil Armstrong's televised first human steps on the Moon. Afterwards Lovell, who had orbited the Moon on Apollo 8, tells his wife Marilyn that he intends to return to the Moon to walk on its surface.

Three months later, as Lovell conducts a VIP tour of NASA's Vertical Assembly Building, his boss Deke Slayton informs him that because of problems with Alan Shepard's crew, his crew will fly Apollo 13 instead of 14. Lovell, Ken Mattingly, and Fred Haise train for their new mission. A few days before launch, Mattingly is exposed to German Measles, and the flight surgeon demands his replacement with Mattingly's backup, Jack Swigert. Lovell resists breaking up his team, but relents when Slayton threatens to bump his crew to a later mission. As the launch date approaches, Marilyn has a nightmare about her husband getting killed in space, but goes to the Kennedy Space Center the night before launch to see him off.

On April 11, 1970, Flight Director Gene Kranz gives the go-ahead from Houston's Mission Control Center for the Apollo 13 launch. As the Saturn V rocket climbs through the atmosphere, a second stage engine cuts off prematurely, but the craft reaches its Earth parking orbit. After the third stage fires to send Apollo 13 to the Moon, Swigert performs the maneuver to connect the Command/Service Module Odyssey to the Lunar Module Aquarius and pull it away from the spent rocket.

Three days into the mission, the crew makes a television transmission, which the networks decline to broadcast live. After Swigert turns on the liquid oxygen tank stirring fans as requested, one of the tanks explodes, emptying its contents into space and sending the craft tumbling. The other tank is soon found to be leaking. They attempt to stop the leak by shutting off fuel cells #1 and #3, but to no avail. With the fuel cells closed, the Moon landing must be aborted, and Lovell and Haise must hurriedly power up Aquarius to use as a "lifeboat" for the return home, as Swigert shuts down Odyssey before its battery power runs out. In Houston, Kranz rallies his team to come up with a plan to bring the astronauts home safely, declaring "failure is not an option". Controller John Aaron recruits Mattingly to help him invent a procedure to restart Odyssey for the landing on Earth.

As Swigert and Haise watch the Moon pass beneath them, Lovell laments his lost chance of walking on its surface, then turns their attention to the business of getting home. With Aquarius running on minimal electrical power, the crew suffers freezing conditions, and Haise contracts a urinary infection and resulting fever. Swigert suspects Mission Control is withholding their inability to get them home; Haise angrily blames Swigert's inexperience for the accident; and Lovell quickly squelches the argument. When carbon dioxide approaches dangerous levels, ground control must quickly invent a way to make the Command Module's square filters work in the Lunar Module's round receptacles. With the guidance systems on Aquarius shut down, the crew must make a difficult but vital course correction by manually igniting the Lunar Module's engine.

Mattingly and Aaron struggle to find a way to turn on the Command Module systems without drawing too much power, and finally transmit the procedure to Swigert, who restarts Odyssey by transferring extra power from Aquarius. When the crew jettisons the Service Module, they are surprised to see the extent of the damage. As they release Aquarius and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, no one is sure that Odyssey's heat shield is intact. The tense period of radio silence due to ionization blackout is longer than normal, but the astronauts report all is well and splash down in the Pacific Ocean.

As helicopters bring the three men aboard the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima for a hero's welcome, Lovell's voice-over describes the subsequent investigation into the explosion, and the careers of Haise, Swigert, Mattingly, and Kranz. He wonders if and when mankind will return to the Moon.

Cast
Apollo Flight Crew:
 * Tom Hanks as Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell: Jim Lovell stated that before his book Lost Moon was even written, the movie rights were being shopped to potential buyers and that his first reaction was that Kevin Costner would be a good choice to play him. However, by the time Howard acquired the director's position, Costner's name never came up in serious discussion, and Hanks had already been interested in doing a film based on Apollo 13. When Hanks' representative informed him that a script was being passed around, he had the script sent to him. John Travolta was initially offered the role of Lovell, but declined.
 * Kevin Bacon as Apollo 13 backup Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert
 * Bill Paxton as Apollo 13 Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise

Mission Control:
 * Gary Sinise as Apollo 13 prime Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly: Sinise was invited by Howard to read for any of the characters, and chose Mattingly.
 * Ed Harris as White Team Flight Director Gene Kranz: Harris described the film as "cramming for a final exam." Harris described Gene Kranz as "corny and like a dinosaur", but respected by the crew. Apollo 13 would be Harris' second space travel-themed movie; he had starred as pioneering astronaut John Glenn in 1983's The Right Stuff.
 * Chris Ellis as Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton
 * Joe Spano as "NASA Director", a composite character loosely based on Chris Kraft
 * Marc McClure as Black Team Flight Director Glynn Lunney
 * Clint Howard as White Team Electrical, Environmental and Consumables Manager (EECOM) Sy Liebergot
 * Ray McKinnon as White Team Flight Dynamics Officer Jerry Bostick
 * Todd Louiso as White Team Flight Activities Officer
 * Loren Dean as EECOM John Aaron
 * Jim Meskimen as White Team Telemetry, Electrical, EVA Mobility Unit Officer (TELMU)
 * David Andrews as Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad
 * Christian Clemenson as Flight Surgeon Dr. Charles Berry
 * Ben Marley as Apollo 13 backup Commander John Young
 * Brett Cullen as Capsule Communicator (CAPCOM) 1
 * Ned Vaughn as CAPCOM 2
 * Carl Gabriel Yorke as SIM (Simulator) 1
 * Arthur Senzy as SIM 2

Civilians:
 * Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn Gerlach Lovell, Jim's wife
 * Xander Berkeley as Henry Hurt, a fictional NASA Office of Public Affairs staff member.
 * Tracy Reiner as Haise's wife Mary
 * Mark Wheeler as Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 Commander
 * Larry Williams as Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot
 * Mary Kate Schellhardt as Lovell's older daughter Barbara
 * Max Elliott Slade as Lovell's older son James (Jay), who attended military school at the time of the flight
 * Emily Ann Lloyd as Lovell's younger daughter Susan
 * Miko Hughes as Lovell's younger son Jeffrey

Pre-production
The screenplay by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert was rewritten by John Sayles after Hanks had been cast and construction of the spacecraft sets had begun.

While planning the film, director Ron Howard decided that every shot of the film would be original and that no mission footage would be used. The spacecraft interiors were constructed by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center's Space Works, which also restored the Apollo 13 Command Module. Two individual Lunar Modules and two Command Modules were constructed for filming. While each was a replica, composed of some of the original Apollo materials, they were built so that different sections were removable, which enabled filming to take place inside the capsules. Space Works also built modified Command and Lunar Modules for filming inside a Boeing KC-135 reduced-gravity aircraft, and the pressure suits worn by the actors, which are exact reproductions of those worn by the Apollo astronauts, right down to the detail of being airtight. When suited up with their helmets locked in place, the actors were cooled by air pumped into the suits, and so that they could breathe, exactly as in launch preparations for the real Apollo missions.

The real Mission Control Center consisted of two control rooms located on the second and third floors of Building 30 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. NASA offered the use of the control room for filming, but Howard declined, opting instead to make his own replica from scratch. Production designer Michael Corenblith and set decorator Merideth Boswell were in charge of the construction of the Mission Control set at Universal Studios. The set was equipped with giant rear-screen projection capabilities and a complex set of computers with individual video feeds to all the flight controller stations. The actors playing the flight controllers were able to communicate with each other on a private audio loop. The Mission Control room built for the film was on the ground floor. One NASA employee, who was a consultant for the film, said that the set was so realistic that he would leave at the end of the day and look for the elevator before remembering he was not in Mission Control. By the time the film was made, the USS Iwo Jima had been scrapped, so her sister ship, the USS New Orleans, was used as the recovery ship instead.

Howard anticipated difficulty in portraying weightlessness in a realistic manner. He discussed this with Steven Spielberg, who suggested using a KC-135 airplane, which can be flown in such a way as to create about 23 seconds of weightlessness, a method NASA has always used to train its astronauts for space flight. Howard obtained NASA's permission and assistance in filming in the realistic conditions aboard multiple KC-135 flights.

Filming
In Los Angeles, Ed Harris and all the actors portraying flight controllers enrolled in a Flight Controller School led by Gerry Griffin, an Apollo 13 flight director, and flight controller Jerry Bostick. The actors studied audiotapes from the mission, reviewed hundreds of pages of NASA transcripts, and attended a crash course in physics. Astronaut Dave Scott was impressed with their efforts, stating that each actor was determined to make every scene technically correct, word for word. Scott was the chief technological consultant for the film.

Soundtrack
The score to Apollo 13 was composed and conducted by James Horner. The soundtrack was released in 1995 by MCA Records and has seven tracks of score, eight period songs used in the film, and seven tracks of dialogue by the actors at a running time of nearly seventy-eight minutes. The music also features solos by vocalist Annie Lennox and Tim Morrison on the trumpet. The score was a critical success and garnered Horner an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.

Release
The film was released on June 30, 1995 in North America and on September 22, 1995 in the UK.

In September 2002 the film was re-released in IMAX. It was the first film to be digitally remastered using IMAX DMR technology.

Box office
The film was a box-office success, bringing in $355,237,933 worldwide. The film's widest release was 2,347 theaters. The film's opening weekend and the following two weeks placed it at #1 with a US gross of $25,353,380, which made up 14.7% of the total US gross.

Critical reception
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that the film has an overall approval rating of 95%, based on 85 reviews, with a weighted average rating of 8.2/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "In recreating the troubled space mission, Apollo 13 pulls no punches: it's a masterfully told drama from director Ron Howard, bolstered by an ensemble of solid performances." Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews from mainstream critics, gave the film an average score of 77 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Home media
A 10th-anniversary DVD of the film was released in 2005; it included both the theatrical version and the IMAX version, along with several extras. The IMAX version has a 1.66:1 aspect ratio.

In 2006, Apollo 13 was released on HD DVD and on April 13, 2010 it was released on Blu-ray disc as the 15th-anniversary edition on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 13 accident. The film was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on October 17, 2017.