Sitting in the theatre as a kid, I was nothing short of mesmerized after watching Apollo 13. I marched out with my parents and proudly announced, “I want to be an astronaut and to go the moon.”
“They already went to the moon; pick something else.” And so my mother dashed my hopes of repeating the journeys of Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, Jack Swaggart, Armstrong, Aldrin, and the like. Despite my mother’s dream-crushing, I have held with me for a long time the wondrous experience of those hours with Apollo 13.
The story of Apollo 13, however dramatized, is engaging and inspiring on its own, but add in the brilliant acting, the directing, cinematography, and score, and the journey becomes extraordinary. For me, honestly, the music is what makes Apollo 13 as great as it is. The clips where the astronauts look out of the shuttle as they pass around the moon, as they look out at the venting oxygen, as they splash down in the ocean… I can hear the soundtrack in my head, even as I write, and I still manage to get a chill.
I’ll share my favorite scenes as well – initially when Jim Lovell is outside and gazes up at the moon, blocking it from sight with his thumb, then uncovering it, followed much later with a repeated gesture from space to the earth; the arrival of Gene Krantz’s vest from his wife; Jim’s wife telling the reporters that they can take up the issue of putting cameras on her lawn when her husband returns; the scene when Gene Krantz draws in a solid line over the dotted line as they have saved the flight crew; even the supers at the end listing what became of all the involved players.