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The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twenty-Nine: Apollo 13
Dec. 30th, 2025 04:56 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Apollo 13 is a film that sits atop a small but diverse and, for some people, extremely enjoyable sub-genre of film: Competence Porn. This has nothing to do with actual pornography (well, I guess it could, given the right pornographic film, but I am not aware of one, nor am I going to stop writing to find out) and everything to do with competence: exceptionally smart and capable people doing exceptionally smart and capable things in moments of crisis where the alternative to being competent is, simply, disaster. There are other very good movies in this genre — The Martian is a favorite of mine, and rather more recent than this film — but the added edge that Apollo 13 has over so many other of its competence porn siblings is this: It really happened.
And, to a degree that is unusual for Hollywood, the real disaster and journey of Apollo 13 happened very much like it happens in this movie. There is a missed telemetry burn here and a scripted argument there (and a few other minor things) to separate the two, and Tom Hanks doesn’t really look much like Jim Lovell, the astronaut he portrays. But in terms of film fidelity to actual events, this is about as good as it gets. With an event like this, you don’t need too much extra drama.
The event in question is a big one: On the way to the moon in April 1970, the Apollo 13 mission experienced a major mishap, an oxygen tank explosion that threatened the lives of the crew members, Jim Lovell (Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Sweigert (Kevin Bacon), and would prevent the Apollo 13 crew from touching down on the moon. The three astronauts and the entire mission control crew back in Houston, led by Gene Krantz (Ed Harris) and bolstered by astronaut Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinese), improvised a whole new mission to get the Apollo 13 crew back home, alive.
On one hand, there is irony in declaring this film to be about extreme competence when it is about a technical incident that jeopardized three lives, and, had the rescue attempt ended tragically, could have curtailed the entire Apollo program after only two moon landings. But on the other hand, there is the competence involved in getting things right, which while ideal, doesn’t offer much in the way of drama, and then there is competence involved in saving the day when things go south, which is inherently more dramatic. I’m sure if you were to have asked Lovell, commander of the mission, he would have told you that he’d prefer that everything had gone according to plan, because then he would have landed on the moon. But after that explosion, he probably appreciated that everyone in Houston turned out to have the “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” type of competence as well.
This sort of competence happens several times in the film, but the scene for me that brings it home is the one where carbon dioxide levels start to rise in the lunar lander module, and the crew in Houston has to adapt the incompatible air scrubbers of the command module to work in the lander — literally putting a square filter into a round hole. This is possibly the most unsexy task anyone on any lunar mission has ever been tasked with, given to (we are led to believe) the people at NASA not already busy saving the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts. Unsexy, but absolutely critical. How it gets done, and how the urgency of it getting done, is communicated in the film, should be studied in cinema classes. Never has air scrubbing been so dramatically, and effectively, portrayed.
This brings up the other sort competence going on in this film, aside from what is happening onscreen. It’s the competence of Ron Howard, who directed Apollo 13. Howard will never be seen as one of the great film stylists, either in his generation of filmmakers or any other, but goddamn if he’s not one of the most reliably competent filmmakers to ever shoot a movie. Howard’s not a genius, he’s a craftsman; he knows every tool in his toolbox and how the use it for maximum effectiveness (plus, as a former actor himself, he’s pretty decent with the humans in his movies, which is more than can be said for other technically adept directors). Marry an extremely competent director to a film valorizing extreme competence? It’s a match made in heaven, or trans-lunar space, which in this case is close enough.
Howard and his crew, like the Apollo 13 mission control crew, also had the “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” point of view when it came to how to solve some of its own technical problems, such as, well, showing the flight crew of Apollo 13 in zero gravity (yes, I know, technically microgravity, shut it, nerd). This film was being shot in the first half of the 1990s, when CGI was not yet up to the task of whole body replacement, and most practical solutions would look fake as hell, which would not do for a prestige film such as this one.
So, fine. If Howard and his crew couldn’t convincingly fake zero gravity, they would just use actual microgravity, by borrowing the “Vomit Comet,” the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker NASA used to train their astronauts. It very steeply dives from 38,000 feet to 15,000 feet, giving everyone inside the experience of weightlessness for 23 seconds or so each dive. Howard shoved his Apollo 13 spacecraft sets into the plane and rode up and down and up and down and up and down, filming on the dips, until the movie had all the zero-gravity scenes it needed. Then the actors had to go back and re-record all their dialogue for those scenes, because it turns out filming on a vomit comet is a very loud experience.
I think this all very cool and also I am deeply happy I was not on that crew, because I would have never stopped horking. I believe every member of the cast and crew who were on that plane should be known as honorary steely-eyed missile people.
Apollo 13 is, to my mind, the best film Ron Howard has yet made, the one that is the best marriage of his talents to his material. Howard was, frankly, robbed at the Oscars that year, when the Academy chose Braveheart over this film and Mel Gibson as director over Howard. These were choices that felt iffy then and feel even more so now. Howard would get his directing Oscar a few years later with A Beautiful Mind (plus another one for producing the film with Brian Glazer). That film was an easy pick out of the nominees that year — 2001 was not an especially vintage year in the Best Picture category, which helped — and also I feel pretty confident that the “Al Pacino factor” (i.e., the award given because the award should have been given well before then) was also in play. An Oscar is an Oscar is an Oscar, especially when you get two, so I’m sure at this point Howard doesn’t care. He did get a DGA Award for Apollo 13, so that’s nice.
I haven’t really talked much about the cast in this film, except to note who plays what. That’s because, while everyone in this film is uniformly excellent, competence requires everyone on screen to mostly just buckle down and do the job in front of them. With the exception of one argument up in space, no one from NASA gets too bent out of shape (and tellingly, the argument in the film didn’t happen in real life because astronauts just do not lose their shit, or at least, not in space). This works in the moment, and Howard and his team do a lot of editing and music and tracking shots and such to amp it all up, but it doesn’t translate into scene-chewing drama. This film lacks a Best Actor nomination for Tom Hanks, which might have hurt its chances for Best Picture. Its acting nominations are in the supporting categories, and it’s true enough that Kathleen Quinlan, as Jim Lovell’s wife Marilyn, gets to have a wider range of emotions than just about anyone else (Ed Harris was also nominated; his performance is stoic as fuck).
(To be fair, Hanks was coming off back-to-back Best Actor wins. It’s possible Academy members were just “let someone else have a turn, Tom.”)
Every film ages, but it seems to me that 30 years on, Apollo 13 has aged rather less than other films of its time (and yes, I am looking at you, Braveheart). Again, I think that this comes down to competence, on screen, and off of it. The story of hard-working people saving the day ages well, and Howard’s choices (like the actual microgravity) mean that the technical aspects of the film don’t give away it’s age like they otherwise might.
The thing that ages this film most, alas, is nothing it has anything to do with: the recent decline in the application and admiration of competence, in many categories, but in science most of all. Watching Apollo 13, one acknowledges that those were indeed the good old days for competence. Hopefully, sooner than later, those days will return.
— JS
Fully remastered and features previously unreleased B-sides, rarities and remixes by Todd Terry, The Beatmasters, Sly & Robbie and more.
The Raspberries blazed briefly but brightly.
Even on her debut EP, at just 22 years old, 
Late last year, Bruce Wolosoff made a strong impression with 
…John Belushi’s widow Judy Belushi Pisano recently rediscovered the live album, which features 13 previously unreleased recordings. The musicians backing up “Joliet” Jake E. Blues and Elwood J. Blues (Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, respectively) are the original band members, a who’s who of notable soul men and bluesmen: members of Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the Bar-Kays, Howlin’ Wolf’s band, and the Saturday Night Live band at the time, including Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Matt Murphy, and Paul Shaffer. The set list includes songs that appeared on the group’s 1978 album, Briefcase Full of Blues.
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