Apollo 13: Difference between revisions

[[The Film of the Book|Based on]] Jim Lovell's book on his experience, ''Lost Moon''. In an interesting example, he shot the book idea past publishers, publishers got excited and sent it to filmmakers who immediately started bidding on it, and then someone called Lovell and said Imagine Entertainment was going to make a movie based on it. He hadn't finished the book yet!

 

 

Make sure you listen to the commentary track by the real Jim and Marilyn Lovell.

** The actual mission included two other course correction burns and at least one additional serious problem, not shown in the movie. Ron Howard said he left these out for fear that the real story would be [[Reality Is Unrealistic|too melodramatic]].

* [[Disney Death]]: Communications black out during re-entry, and all the audience can see is Mission Control and Lovell's family awaiting for contact re-established. After three minutes (the longest a blackout had been sustained before a prior crew arrived safely), still no contact. After ''four'' minutes, still no contact. [[Foregone Conclusion|Eventually, there's contact]], but the movie makes sure to make every character and every audience member sweat it out.

* [[Dream Team]]: Gene Kranz's White Team.

* [[Drowning My Sorrows]]: After he gets scrubbed from the mission so soon before liftoff, Ken Mattingly drinks heavily, switching off his TV in disgust at hearing a talk show host talking about his replacement Jack Swigert. He gets over that after learning about the accident.

* [[Magic Countdown]]

* [[Manly Tears]]: Gene Krantz sheds some when they regain communication with the ''Odyssey'' after the ship has safely survived reentry.

* [[Midair Repair]]

* [[Mid-Air Bobbing]]: An artifact of the filming process. The actors in the spacecraft really are in freefall, as mentioned in the [[Artificial Gravity]] entry above, but the set is attached to the KC-135; as the plane is buffeted by the atmosphere, the set actually bobs around the actors, making it look like they're shifting about even when they're not touching any walls.

** A large portion of the spacecraft shots were done on a sound stage in normal gravity, with the actors required to fake weightlessness; however, because the actors had already filmed in freefall, they were able to adjust their behavior accordingly.

* [[Mission Control]]: The real kind.

* [[The Mutiny]]: When the astronauts pull their medical leads off, FLIGHT shrugs it off as "A little medical mutiny", because they've been under an understandable amount of stress.

* [[Sinking Ship Scenario]]

* [[The Sixties]]

* [[Space Is Cold]]: Justified as the real Apollo 13 did ice up. The spacecraft really did lose heat throughout the mission to the point where ice crystals were starting to form. The spacecraft designers knew that the electronics and fuel cells would generate a lot of heat, so they built the LEM and CM with plenty of radiator surfaces to dump the heat out into space. But with the fuel cells out of commission, and not enough power to run the electronics or cabin heaters...

* [[Space Is Noisy]]

* [[Vomit Indiscretion Shot]]: After launching, Fred Haise pukes out some small chunks of food, and some of it [[Camera Abuse|spatters on the camera lens]]. Yum.

* [[What Could Have Been]]: The scene where Jim Lovell notices their landing site is followed by a short day dream sequence scene of Aquarius landed on the surface and Jim taking his first steps in the lunar landscape. Kind of a [[Tear Jerker]], considering he was the only astronaut to visit Moon orbit twice in a row, but never had the opportunity to land there due to bad luck.

* [[Where Are They Now? Epilogue]]

* [[You Had Us Worried There]]