Apollo 13
There is a moment early in "Apollo 13" when astronaut Jim Lovell is taking some press on a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, and he brags that they have a computer "that fits in one room and can send out millions of instructions." And I'm thinking to myself, hell, I'm writing this review on a better computer than the one that got us to the moon.
"Apollo 13" inspires many reflections, and one of them is that America's space program was achieved with equipment that would look like tin cans today. Like Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic in the first plane he could string together that might make it, we went to the moon the moment we could, with the tools that were at hand.
Today, with new alloys, engines, fuels, computers and technology, …show more content…
Those qualities were never demonstrated more dramatically than in the flight of the 13th Apollo mission in April 1970, when an oxygen tank exploded en route to the moon. The three astronauts on board - Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert - were faced with the possibility of becoming marooned in space. Their oxygen could run out, they could be poisoned by carbon dioxide accumulations, or they could freeze to death. If somehow they were able to return to the Earth's atmosphere, they had to enter at precisely the right angle.
Too steep an entry, and they would be incinerated; too shallow, and they would skip off the top of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond, and fly off forever into …show more content…
All these images are from the documentary, all look almost exactly the same in the movie, and that is why Howard has been at pains to emphasize that every shot in "Apollo 13" is new. No documentary footage was used. The special effects - models, animation, shots where the actors were made weightless by floating inside a descending airplane - have re-created the experience exactly.
The astronauts are played by Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon. The pilot originally scheduled for the Apollo 13 mission was Ken Mattingly, who was grounded because he had been exposed to the measles. The key figure at Houston Mission Control is Gene Kranz. Clean-cut, crew-cut, wearing white collars even in space, the astronauts had been built up in the public mind as supermen, they were more likely to be hot-shot test pilots than straight
There is a moment early in "Apollo 13" when astronaut Jim Lovell is taking some press on a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, and he brags that they have a computer "that fits in one room and can send out millions of instructions." And I'm thinking to myself, hell, I'm writing this review on a better computer than the one that got us to the moon.
"Apollo 13" inspires many reflections, and one of them is that America's space program was achieved with equipment that would look like tin cans today. Like Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic in the first plane he could string together that might make it, we went to the moon the moment we could, with the tools that were at hand.
Today, with new alloys, engines, fuels, computers and technology, …show more content…
Those qualities were never demonstrated more dramatically than in the flight of the 13th Apollo mission in April 1970, when an oxygen tank exploded en route to the moon. The three astronauts on board - Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert - were faced with the possibility of becoming marooned in space. Their oxygen could run out, they could be poisoned by carbon dioxide accumulations, or they could freeze to death. If somehow they were able to return to the Earth's atmosphere, they had to enter at precisely the right angle.
Too steep an entry, and they would be incinerated; too shallow, and they would skip off the top of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond, and fly off forever into …show more content…
All these images are from the documentary, all look almost exactly the same in the movie, and that is why Howard has been at pains to emphasize that every shot in "Apollo 13" is new. No documentary footage was used. The special effects - models, animation, shots where the actors were made weightless by floating inside a descending airplane - have re-created the experience exactly.
The astronauts are played by Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon. The pilot originally scheduled for the Apollo 13 mission was Ken Mattingly, who was grounded because he had been exposed to the measles. The key figure at Houston Mission Control is Gene Kranz. Clean-cut, crew-cut, wearing white collars even in space, the astronauts had been built up in the public mind as supermen, they were more likely to be hot-shot test pilots than straight