Apollo 13 [DVD] [1995]

Ron Howard’s Academy Award-winning take on the Apollo 13 story. The mission, manned by astronauts Lovell (Tom Hanks), Swigert (Kevin Bacon) and Haise (Bill Paxton), starts out as a routine space flight which generates little media interest. But all that changes when an oxygen tank explosion cripples the ship and prompts the famous line, ‘Houston, we have a problem’. Now Lovell and his crew have to struggle to keep going, while at Mission Control their colleagues Kranz (Ed Harris) and Mattingly (Gary Sinise) do everything they can to bring them home.
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