Jeremy’s Tophunder №24: Apollo 13
Back to Back Hanks? Don’t mind if I do.
Here’s the second-highest ranked Hanks movie on my list, and another movie featuring a wonderful ensemble cast that complements each other, even though many of them never appear in the same scene.
I really grew to appreciate Apollo 13 in college, mostly through laziness. I was in a writing class about depictions of real-life tragedy and disaster in literature. We read books like Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Night and some book about Hurricane Katrina that I can’t quite remember. Anyway — the final assignment for the class was to choose an event that we hadn’t yet covered in class, find a fictional piece of media that depicts it, research the actual event, and then write a paper comparing the two stories and critique the artistic license taken by the creators.
I didn’t feel like reading a book. So I watched Apollo 13 instead.
Like, once a day for a week.
I kept having to re-watch it, because I needed to pull quotes of dialogue for the essay, so I would think of a scene, skip ahead to that scene, copy down the dialogue, and then end up just watching the rest of the movie from that point. Trust me, it’s -very- rewatchable. The tension in the second half of the movie is palpably gripping, regardless if it’s your first viewing or your forty-first.
I’m kind of a junkie for the Academy Awards, even though it seems like they usually make the wrong call. In 1996, Ed Harris was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. I was able to remember that off the top of my head. It was a no-brainer — he dominates every scene he’s in. Obviously the most memorable line in the movie is Hanks’ “Houston, we have a problem,” but my favorite line in the movie is after the explosion in space, there’s a meeting of minds at NASA trying to figure out how to get everyone home safely. Harris grows frustrated with the lack of progress and finally just walks out of the meeting, declaring “We’ve never lost an American in space, we’re sure as hell not going to lose one on my watch. Failure is not an option.” It’s a great scene. A two-minute tour de force. Thinking of the scene, and remembering that he was nominated for the Oscar, I wondered if he won or not — that part I couldn’t remember.
So I looked it up. He lost to Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. Yeah, that seems about right.
If we were re-voting on the Oscars 20+ years later, given the fall from grace that Spacey has seen over the last few years, Harris probably takes this one home. (Another fun fact — James Cromwell from Babe was also nominated that year.) But the fact remains, Harris was magnificent in this movie. Maybe one of my 10 or 15 favorite acting performances ever.
Other high points:
- Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon arguing loudly with each other in space, when suddenly Houston calls them. Hanks is pissed off, wondering if Houston has been hearing their entire argument. When he realizes they haven’t, he’s able to quickly go from 60 to 0 and calmly respond to the call. A nice laugh in the middle of a tense scene.
- Gary Sinise and Loren Dean (the most underrated performance in the movie) working in the flight simulator, trying to figure out how to re-start the command module without drawing too much power. I personally loved Gary Sinise chastising a NASA engineer for trying to hand him a flashlight different than the ones the astronauts in space would have. “That’s not what they have up there. Don’t give me anything they don’t have on board.”
- A team at NASA trying to — literally — figure out how to fit a square peg into a round hole.
- The film crew used actual NASA training practices to simulate the weightlessness of space. The crew and actors got onto a KC-135 airplane, which can fly in parabolic arcs to create about 20–25 seconds of weightlessness at a time. NASA affectionately calls this plane “The Vomit Comet.”
- John Travolta was originally offered the role of Jim Lovell (Hanks’ role), but turned it down. When Lovell wrote his book “Lost Moon,” and the movie rights were being shopped, he imagined Kevin Costner in the role. I think Costner would have done well, but I can’t possibly imagine John Travolta in this movie.
- Kathleen Quinlan played Tom Hanks’ wife and delivers a few great scenes. After the television networks decided to not air the astronauts live broadcast from space (before the accident), they suddenly become very interested once the astronauts’ lives are in danger. The networks want to put a transmitter on her lawn to broadcast live from her house. She tells the NASA PR person “Landing on the moon wasn’t dramatic enough for them — why should NOT landing on it be?” Then, with her voice breaking, she says “Those people don’t put one piece of equipment on my lawn. If they have a problem with that, they can take it up with my husband. He’ll be home on Friday.” It always gets me a little choked up. It’s a great line and a great delivery.
This is the second day in a row where the movie stars Tom Hanks, who is one of my handful of favorite actors ever, and yet, Hanks probably isn’t in the first three or four things that I love about either movie. It’s kind of a testament to his style of acting — he doesn’t really disappear into a character the way a Daniel Day-Lewis or Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Christian Bale would. His characters become Tom Hanks. Both yesterday’s movie (Catch Me If You Can) and this one here are movies where it just works perfectly. He delivers a great performance in each movie, but at no point do you forget that you’re watching Tom Hanks. I know this kind of sounds like a criticism, but I swear it’s a compliment. With both movies, it’s nice to know that you can jump in at any time and Tom Hanks is going to be acting like Tom Hanks. It’s comforting. It makes them very re-watchable, which is a big piece of the criteria here.
Ultimately, Apollo 13 has been a part of my life for almost 25 years. I can’t remember the first time I saw it, but it can’t have been too long after it came out. It’s not like it’s a seedy story that would be inappropriate for a kid to see — there’s just some language and intense moments. Over the course of time, though, I’ve grown to appreciate different things about the movie. I’m always picking up new things and finding new quirks and small moments. If there’s a movie that I’ve seen dozens of times over the course of two-plus decades and I can still enjoy it every time and still notice new things about it, it’s probably one of my favorite movies ever. Apollo 13 clocks in at №24.
(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)
Here’s the progress of the list so far:
24. Apollo 13
