10 / 10
Official trailer
Apollo 13 is among the best films of the 1990s and among the best procedural dramas ever made.
Ron Howard directed. Tom Hanks led. Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris filled the major supporting roles. The film recreated the April 1970 lunar mission that nearly killed three astronauts when an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the moon. The recreation honors the actual events with discipline that procedural dramas rarely manage. The 10/10 is honest. The film hasn’t aged. It won’t age.
I’ve watched Apollo 13 more times than I’ve counted. The film rewards repeat viewing because the substance is procedural instead of dramatic in the conventional sense. The viewers know the astronauts survive and the rescue succeeds. They still find the film tense because the procedural details about how the rescue worked are interesting and haven’t been seen in most viewings. Each rewatching reveals additional engineering content the previous viewing missed. The film is built for rewatch.
When somebody tells me procedural drama is boring, Apollo 13 is the film I’d point to.
Everybody knows how it ends, and my shoulders creep up toward my ears anyway when the carbon dioxide readings start climbing. Howard trusted the engineering to carry the tension, and I think that trust is the gutsiest thing a studio picture did in the nineties. The 10 comes from not being able to find a scene I’d cut.
The Source
The film is adapted from Lost Moon, the 1994 memoir by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. Lovell had commanded the actual Apollo 13 mission. He wrote the book with Kluger, a senior writer at Time magazine.
The memoir is one of the better space exploration memoirs of the twentieth century because Lovell was a precise observer and Kluger was a competent journalist. The combination produced source material that gave the film accurate technical foundation without sacrificing narrative drive.
William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert wrote the screenplay. Both writers had real space-program background. Broyles had founded Texas Monthly and had written extensively about Texas culture including the NASA-adjacent Houston community. Reinert had directed the documentary For All Mankind in 1989, which used original NASA footage from all the Apollo missions. The screenwriters knew the material before adaptation. They didn’t have to research the space program. They had been writing about it for years.
Howard cast Hanks because Hanks was at the peak of his career and because Hanks was a known space enthusiast. Hanks would later executive produce the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. That expanded the Apollo material across twelve hours. Hanks brought to the Lovell role the kind of restrained leading-man presence that Henry Fonda had brought to 12 Angry Men three decades earlier.
The performance is calibrated for accuracy instead of for dramatic peaks. Lovell as commander doesn’t have many big emotional scenes.
Hanks plays him at the level the actual commander would have worked, the level the film required.
The Cast
Tom Hanks plays Jim Lovell as a professional doing his job under impossible circumstances. The performance is the structural foundation of the film. Hanks doesn’t raise his voice. Hanks doesn’t deliver speeches. Hanks responds to incoming information with the rapid calm of an actual command pilot. The film required this kind of performance because the actual Lovell had been this kind of commander. Histrionic acting would have damaged the film’s documentary feel. Hanks knew this. He delivered exactly what the material required and nothing more.
Bill Paxton plays Fred Haise. Haise was the lunar module pilot.
Paxton brings the kind of working-class American likability he’d developed across multiple supporting roles in 1980s and 1990s cinema. Haise gets sick during the mission. The illness becomes a secondary dramatic thread. Paxton plays Haise’s deteriorating physical condition without making the deterioration the center of the performance. The character maintains professional competence while increasingly ill. The performance is one of Paxton’s best supporting turns.
Kevin Bacon plays Jack Swigert. Swigert was the late replacement for Ken Mattingly, who had been grounded for measles exposure. Swigert hadn’t trained with Haise and Lovell as extensively as Mattingly had. The character carries the additional pressure of being the replacement crew member who may not be up to the task. Bacon plays the pressure without overplaying it. Swigert eventually performs the critical engine burns that save the mission. The performance shows a man rising to the occasion under conditions he hadn’t adequately prepared for.
Gary Sinise plays Ken Mattingly. The character is grounded before the mission begins but returns to play a serious role in the simulator at NASA, where he works out the power-up procedures the crew will need to execute on the return. Sinise spends most of his screen time in a simulator that’s dark, cold, and silent.
The character is reconstructing the spacecraft’s electrical systems while sleep-deprived. Sinise plays the technical focus with the same conviction other actors bring to dramatic scenes.
I think the simulator scenes are the quietest tension in the film, and they’re my favorite stretch of it. Sinise sits in the dark flipping switches and counting amps, and I’m more nervous watching him work out the power budget than I was during the explosion. I’d have happily given him another ten minutes in that box.
Ed Harris plays Gene Kranz, the flight director.
The performance is the centerpiece of the Houston ground control material. Harris had spent considerable time with the actual Kranz before filming. He absorbed the man’s mannerisms, his vocabulary, his decision-making style, and his physical bearing. The performance is one of the better real-person depictions in 1990s American cinema. Kranz himself reportedly approved of the portrayal. The famous white vest Kranz wore during the mission is preserved in the film. Harris wears the same vest in the same circumstances.
Kathleen Quinlan plays Marilyn Lovell. The role is structurally important because Marilyn is the audience surrogate during the home-front sequences. The audience experiences the crisis through her eyes when the film isn’t inside the spacecraft or inside Mission Control. Quinlan plays Marilyn as a woman holding her family together while watching her husband potentially die on national television. The performance is grounded. Marilyn doesn’t have hysterical breakdowns. She also isn’t stoic in ways that would feel inhuman.
Quinlan finds the middle ground where most actual astronaut wives worked during actual emergencies.
For Writers
Apollo 13 shows how to write procedural drama that maintains tension when the audience knows the outcome. The astronauts survive. The audience knows this. The film generates tension by making the procedural details about the survival interesting on their own terms. The carbon dioxide filter sequence works because the audience doesn’t know how the filter is going to work until they watch the engineers work it out. The power-up sequence works because the audience doesn’t know the order in which the systems must be activated.
The skip-out reentry concern works because the audience doesn’t know whether the reentry angle has been calculated correctly.
Each procedural sequence has its own internal tension generated by real technical content. The lesson for writers is that you can generate drama through process instead of through outcome. If your audience knows the ending, focus the dramatic tension on the steps that produce the ending. Make the steps interesting. The reader will engage with the steps even when they know the outcome.
The Zero Gravity
Ron Howard made the choice that defines the film’s distinctive look. He filmed the weightlessness sequences using actual reduced-gravity flights aboard a NASA KC-135 aircraft. The aircraft flies parabolic arcs that produce approximately twenty-five seconds of weightlessness at the top of each arc. The production flew approximately six hundred parabolas across multiple flights to capture the necessary footage. The actors floated. The objects drifted. The water droplets moved in zero gravity.
The choice was rare for a feature film.
No previous Hollywood production had filmed weightlessness aboard a parabolic flight aircraft. Howard had to negotiate access through NASA. The production had to bring lightweight cameras and lighting that could function during the brief weightless intervals. The actors had to be trained for the physical demands of the flights. The cinematographer had to learn how to compose shots during twenty-five seconds of free fall. The investment was considerable.
The result is the most physically convincing weightless footage in any film made before the digital effects revolution. Audiences who have grown up with CGI weightlessness still find Apollo 13 more visually real because the actors move the way bodies move in zero gravity.
The CGI productions get the visual approximation right. Digital simulation can’t match the actor performance content. Hanks’s hair moves the way hair moves when not subject to gravity. Paxton’s body adjusts when he reaches for objects because his body had to adjust.
The weightlessness is real because the filming was real.
The Carbon Dioxide Sequence
The carbon dioxide filter sequence is the structural center of the film’s middle act. The crew’s lunar module is producing too much carbon dioxide because three astronauts are breathing in a module designed for two. The command module’s carbon dioxide filters are the correct shape but can’t fit into the lunar module’s filter slots. The square filter must be made to fit a round hole. The engineers at NASA must develop the modification using only materials available to the astronauts inside the spacecraft.
The sequence runs for several minutes. The audience watches engineers at NASA dumping the available materials onto a table. Plastic bags. Duct tape. Cardboard from procedure manuals. A hose from a spacesuit. The engineers begin assembling. The audience watches them work. The film doesn’t cut away or explain. It simply documents the engineering process. The audience receives the assembly in approximately real time and understands the solution because they watched it being developed.
The astronauts then build the same contraption aboard the spacecraft from instructions read over the radio. We’ve just watched Houston make the prototype, so now we watch the crew make the copy, and the cross-cutting lets both versions take shape at once. When the carbon dioxide levels finally drop, I exhale right along with the crew. That table of plastic bags, duct tape, cardboard and a spacesuit hose is my favorite set piece in American film, and it’s a big part of why this gets a 10.
The Reentry
The reentry sequence is the structural climax. The spacecraft must reenter Earth’s atmosphere at a specific angle. Too shallow and it skips off into space. Too steep and it burns up. The angle had been calculated based on the spacecraft’s expected mass. The loss of the lunar module and the expended fuel had altered the mass. The calculations had to be redone with degraded systems. The crew had to execute the burns by stopwatch and visual reference because the guidance computer had been powered down to save electricity.
Howard handles the reentry with patience the actual reentry required. The spacecraft enters communications blackout when the plasma sheath forms around the heat shield. The blackout normally lasts approximately three minutes. The Apollo 13 blackout extended an additional ninety seconds. Howard makes the audience experience the extended silence.
The Mission Control room sits in growing tension. The Lovell family watches the television coverage in silence. The film doesn’t cut away to artificial relief.
The Hanks performance during the reentry is one of the better quiet performances in 1990s American cinema. Lovell doesn’t speak. Lovell doesn’t pray. Lovell doesn’t deliver speeches. Lovell sits in the command module knowing he may be about to die and does the job he’s been trained to do. Hanks calibrates the performance for the actual situation instead of for the dramatic possibilities the situation contains. Hanks understood that drama would have damaged the documentary feel. He delivered minimum necessary performance. The minimum was exactly right.
The Score
James Horner composed the score. Horner had previously scored Aliens, Field of Dreams, Glory, and other major productions. He’d later score Titanic and Avatar. Apollo 13 is one of his more restrained scores. The musical material supports the procedural content without dominating it. The major themes use brass and percussion that evoke American military and exploration tradition. The quieter material uses piano and strings for the home-front sequences with Marilyn Lovell.
The score’s most famous moment is the reentry, where Horner brings in a wordless choir that builds across the communications blackout. The voices have no lyrics. They give you the feeling of three men beyond anybody’s reach. Horner was smart to hold back here, because a lesser composer would’ve buried those extra ninety seconds of silence under brass, and the silence is the point of the scene.
The score also includes major period music from 1970. The astronauts’ wake-up music. Marilyn’s car radio. The contemporary news broadcasts. The period material grounds the film in the actual era instead of allowing the score to drift into generic Hollywood emotional territory. Howard understood that period accuracy required period music. The choices reinforce the documentary feel that the production was working to maintain.
For Writers
Apollo 13 shows how to handle real-life adaptation when the source events are well known. The audience entering the film already knows the astronauts survive, along with the major dramatic beats. The film can’t generate surprise about the outcome. It must generate engagement through the detail of how the outcome happened. The detail is the substance, and in the documentary procedural mode it’s everything. Howard preserved the detail through his casting choices, his location choices, his cinematography choices, and his musical choices.
Every decision pushed toward realism instead of toward dramatic invention.
The lesson for writers is that real-life material rewards fidelity to actual detail over dramatic license that may seem more cinematic. The actual story is often more interesting than the version dramatic instincts would produce. Trust the source. Honor the detail. The audience will respond to realism in ways they won’t respond to invention.
The Famous Misquote
Lovell’s actual words during the explosion were “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
The film changes the line to “Houston, we have a problem” because the present tense reads more dramatic on screen than the past perfect tense the actual Lovell used. The change is the one major liberty the production took with the actual historical record. Lovell himself accepted the change. The phrasing has now become more famous than the original. Most people who quote the line are quoting Hanks instead of Lovell.
The change is defensible. The film isn’t a documentary. The film is dramatized recreation. Small adjustments to dialogue for dramatic effect are within the boundaries of dramatized recreation. The change matters because it shows the small ways the film departed from strict historical accuracy. The film is unusually close to the actual record. The changes that exist are calibrated instead of careless. Apollo 13 is the example case of historical drama that respects its source while making the adjustments dramatic form requires.
The Kranz Vest
Gene Kranz wore distinctive vests during NASA missions.
His wife made them for him. The white vest he wore during the Apollo 13 mission is now in the Smithsonian. The film recreated the vest precisely. Ed Harris wears it throughout the Mission Control sequences. The detail is one of many that shows how seriously the production took accuracy.
Kranz also didn’t say “Failure isn’t an option” during the Apollo 13 mission. The phrase was synthesized from his memoir for the film. Kranz later adopted the phrase as his own personal slogan and used it as the title of his autobiography in 2000. The film created the phrase. Kranz incorporated it retroactively into his own biographical narrative. The interaction between the film and the actual historical record is one of the more interesting examples of how dramatic recreations can shape the way history is later remembered.
I enjoy that line, and I enjoy its history even more.
The screenwriters invented it, and Kranz liked it enough to put it on the cover of his memoir. It tells you how completely Harris owned the part. When he says it in that control room I believe him, and I don’t care that the real Kranz never said it that day.
The Awards
Apollo 13 was nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Ed Harris, and Best Supporting Actress for Kathleen Quinlan. The film won two Academy Awards: Best Film Editing and Best Sound. It lost Best Picture to Braveheart. The decision has aged poorly. Braveheart is good. Apollo 13 is better.
Other major awards also brought the film nominations and wins.
The Screen Actors Guild gave it the award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. It was a relatively new award at the time. The ensemble award correctly recognized that the film was a cast achievement instead of a single-lead achievement. The recognition has held up. Apollo 13 is one of the better ensemble achievements in 1990s American cinema.
Craft Note
Craft Note
For procedural drama as a viable theatrical genre, Apollo 13 is the example case. Most filmmakers assume audiences want personal melodrama with procedural elements as background. Howard and his team reversed the priority. The procedural content is the foreground. The personal melodrama is the background. The film trusts that engineering problems and their solutions are dramatic enough on their own terms to sustain audience attention. The trust was rewarded with massive commercial success and heavy critical recognition.
On a fifty-two million dollar budget, the film grossed three hundred fifty million dollars.
The success showed that audiences will engage with technical content when the content is presented clearly and when the characters working through the content are recognizable human beings doing recognizable work. The lesson for writers is that audiences are smarter than most writers assume. If your story is about people solving problems, focus on the problem-solving. Trust the audience to follow.
The procedural drama tradition has produced some of the best American filmmaking of the past century. Apollo 13 stands at the center of that tradition. The film is the model. Other filmmakers should study it.
Is Apollo 13 as good as people say?
A 10/10. Apollo 13 is among the best films of the 1990s and among the best procedural dramas ever made. Ron Howard directed with the patience the material required. Tom Hanks led the cast with the kind of restrained leading-man performance that 1990s American cinema produced less often than its reputation suggests. Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris, and Kathleen Quinlan delivered supporting work that deserved every nomination the film received.
The technical achievement of filming weightlessness aboard NASA reduced-gravity aircraft was rare and produced visual content that later CGI productions can’t match. The script honored the source memoir while making the small adjustments dramatic form required.
I give Apollo 13 its 10 without a second’s hesitation, because every department pulled in the same direction. Hanks underplays, Harris burns and Horner holds back, and Howard turns a table of spare parts into the most gripping scene in the picture. It belongs in any serious conversation about the best American films of the last fifty years, and if I had one scene to show somebody why, I’d pick the carbon dioxide sequence.
