Apollo 13: Survival – Film Review
The Apollo 13 story has been told on film several times but this doesn’t make Apollo 13: Survival any less worthwhile – it is a nail-biting and seriously interesting documentary.
On 13th April 1970, NASA endured one of the greatest crises in its history. The Apollo 13 spacecraft containing astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert suffered a catastrophic explosion, causing multiple technical failures. The mission to the moon turned into a race against time and a fight for survival as NASA experts had to come up with a way to get the stranded astronauts home safely in a damaged spacecraft that hadn’t been designed for its new journey.
There have been multiple documentaries about the Apollo 13 story as well as Ron Howard‘s 1995 feature film starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton. So what’s the point of another one? Well, this documentary was made with unrivalled access to the complete recordings of the Apollo 13 mission as well as archival interviews with the crew, their families and those at mission control in Houston. These are combined with representational footage from other NASA missions and reconstructive techniques to fill in the visual gaps.
It places you in that moment in time – you see what the astronauts see from their window, what it was like in their ship, you witness the stressful decision-making process at ground control and hear how Lovell’s wife Marilyn (who the film is dedicated to) coped with the disaster. There are no talking heads and nothing to take you out of the 1970s and into the modern day. It is focused on Jim, Marilyn and their daughters Susan and Barbara and they are the emotional heart of the story.
Even if you have seen previous retellings and know the story, this documentary offers enough new material and is told in such a powerful way that it is still interesting, rich and tense. The climactic sequence is gripping – I think I held my breath – and I became quite moved towards the end. The film also contains some staggeringly beautiful space imagery, such as the astronauts’ view of the moon and Earth.
Don’t write off Apollo 13: Survival because you know how the story plays out – it is a well-made documentary with a lot to offer.
On Netflix from Thursday 5th September