Apollo 13 1995

Although, in fact, there was the paradox that the first production in the history of cinema about the lunar programme narrated precisely its only failed mission, the director decided to build the action on a narrative twist in which elements of varying emotional force intervened. Firstly, the initial fascination with the journey to the Moon (one) - which was to be recreated with documentary fidelity; secondly, the disappointment of the aborted moon landing (two); finally, the drift towards a plot of survival and return home (three). 

A year after the premiere, Ron Howard recalled the importance of the realism factor, both historical and technological. In recreating the action, the production team had the precedent of Chosen for Glory, which won an Oscar for best visual effects. This time the challenge was more far-reaching, as the project was based on a single Apollo mission rather than the isolated fragments of four Mercury missions. With a plot split into three dramatic settings - the crashed spacecraft, mission control in Houston, and the Lovell home - the script unfolded through a succession of distinct episodic blocks that gained in tension, pace, and drama. The criteria of realism and spectacularity, adopted from the beginning of the production, relied on three fundamental tools: detailed documentation of actions and dialogue transcripts; photographs, archive film and television footage; and high-precision visual effects design. Howard was inspired by the visual style employed by Kaufman in 1983, but decided to add a dynamic effect to the production by means of impossible camera placements and movements. The film features numerous scenes of the astronauts floating in zero gravity (four).

The crew of the film's protagonist was in line with the archetype of the pioneer explorer of the last frontier and, according to the epic criterion, that of the authors and witnesses of marvellous events. Thanks to these archetypes, a spirit of the space dream was revived in 1995 that, twelve years after the release of The Right Stuff, would eventually catch on with the viewers of the anxious society of the 1990s. On the other hand, the splitting of heroism between the astronauts in flight and the Houston controllers (five), led by Krantz in his particular rescue mission, would end up consolidating a double archetype simultaneously active in the filmic construction of space plots. Later, this double archetype would be used in other titles of the genre such as Deep Impact, Mars or Hidden Figures, as well as in the series From the Earth to the Moon.

Ron Howard's film presents a firm connection between national home prosperity and travel that facilitated the revival of the space imaginary, in a seemingly inauspicious era. Without appealing to the iconography of the Western, the astronauts demonstrated what it takes to face the dangers of an unknown and hostile space, as well as the experimental nature of the mission itself: the third to set course for the lunar surface. This latter aspect is made clear in the film's opening sequence (six), which situates the start of the Apollo programme with a brief account of the fire on Apollo 204, the third mission to land on the moon.

 Apollo 204 fire, which occurred just three years earlier. On the third day of the journey, the risks of the mission turn into a real crisis after the explosion of an oxygen tank in the service module: an incident which, in addition to damaging a second identical tank, resulted in the loss of three fuel cells. According to initial forecasts, the crew had only a ten percent chance of returning to Earth. Flight Director Gene Kranz immediately called off the moon landing and decided to return the capsule according to an improvised protocol. As a first step, the three astronauts were instructed to leave the astronauts were ordered to leave the Odyssey and move to the Aquarius lunar module (seven) which could only hold two people. In record time, the crew transferred guidance data from one module to the other and shut down the command module, which was to be reserved for re-entry only. Apollo 13 then entered a free-return trajectory to take advantage of the lunar attraction and, after circling the satellite, relied on the satellite's gravitational pull to set a course for Earth. The shutdown of the lunar module and other energy-saving measures caused extreme thermal conditions for the crew. who were also subjected to sleep deprivation and continuous stress. 

Another crisis arose when mission control became aware of rising carbon dioxide levels caused by the presence of three astronauts in the LEM. To avoid saturation of the poisonous gas, the circular CO2 extractors in the Lunar Module needed to be replaced with clean ones, but they only had spare extractors in the Command Module, which were of an incompatible quadrangular design. Mission control engineers designed a system in record time to assemble the extractors, using a hose and other parts from the suits and the spacecraft itself, an invention that saved the crew's lives (eight).  Howard gave special importance to this episode in the dramatic evolution of the film: "It's one of my favourite sequences, and the audience enjoys it because it's an example of that old idea of Yankee ingenuity". 

Once the Moon is left behind, the script picks up another critical moment during the ignition of the LEM in order to perform a new ignition to correct the ship's course (nine). This time, the astronauts were not supported by mission control or the guidance system and performed the operation in manual mode, with the view of the Earth as a reference point on a panel in the module. Meanwhile, astronaut Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) was scrambling in Houston to solve a power failure problem in time, a crisis that had to be resolved before the command module was powered up for re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Mattingly had been replaced by Swigert, to prevent a possible measles outbreak, which never occurred. Howard reinforced the role of the astronaut in the film, as a representative of the collective effort carried out on Earth during the crashed mission. As the director himself explains, "Ken Mattingly told me that, at one point, he thought there might be about 5,000 people from the private industry and research field, as well as the research, as well as component companies, working on the emergency".