On paper, the survival of three astronauts aboard Apollo 13, a Nasa spacecraft bound for the moon and imperiled by a near-fatal explosion in April 1970, is nothing short of astounding. The explosion, over two days and 210,000 miles into the mission, nearly drained the three-part spacecraft of oxygen and electrical power. The three astronauts – Fred Haise, Jack Swigert and mission commander Jim Lovell – were forced to spend four harrowing, near-suffocating days in a lunar module meant for just two people and 45 hours, with just a few light bulbs’ worth of power. The unprecedented and untested maneuvers to get them home – transferring flight data by hand to the “life boat” module, catapulting off the moon’s orbit, manually aiming an unpredictable rocket blast at the earth – were each dicey and high-risk, requiring exact precision to avoid certain death. The compounded odds of their survival were slim.
As arranged in Apollo 13: Survival, a new documentary about the flawed mission, these facts somehow seem much drier, though meticulously and sumptuously rendered through restored archival material. Director Peter Middleton re-creates a play-by-play of the six-day mission – aboard Apollo 13, at mission control in Houston and in living rooms across the country – primarily through archival recordings, old interviews with the crew and never-before-seen footage of the spacecraft, ground control and the astronauts’ families. The result is a faithful and explicative, though at times too clinical, depiction of an ill-fated chapter of the US space program that seems as fit for a classroom as it is on-couch entertainment.
Part of that owes to the fact that, even in crisis, the (almost entirely) men of Nasa are near-psychotically cool cucumbers, relaying stressful information – “Houston, we have a problem,” the problem being a catastrophic explosion, etc – as if reading Ikea furniture directions. (The Hollywood-ready emotions are left to Ron Howard’s 1995 blockbuster film re-creating Apollo 13.) And part is the arc of the actual Apollo 13 mission, much ballyhooed for its unlucky number and seemingly cursed from the start: after several delays, astronaut Ken Mattingly dropped out the night before launch due to rubella exposure; shortly into the flight, an engine failed. These many ominous developments are crisply relayed via Nasa audio recordings spliced with subtle re-creations (an “abort” alarm, an “alert” button, the view from space) and post-facto interviews with the astronauts and Lovell’s wife, Marilyn, to whom the film is dedicated (she died in 2023). Such an approach avoids sensationalism, baiting or cheesy re-enactments, but also leaves the viewer murky on the stakes.
Still, it’s hard to imagine a better approach to this story than in-the-moment and archive-forward. As with Todd Douglas Miller’s 2019 Apollo 11 documentary, which astoundingly resurrects and restores reams of archival footage of the first moon landing, Apollo 13: Survival jettisons talking heads, cutaways or present-day explainers, instead letting the archive – including rudimentary 1970 news graphics – speak for itself. And this archive is remarkable, from crew recordings during two crucial engine bursts, to video of mission control devising a haphazard CO2 filter from cardboard and a sock, to photos of Marilyn reacting to each hairs-breadth success on the news. The assemblage of this cornucopia of material, understated as it may be, is nonetheless fascinating.
Though, at 96 minutes, I found myself in the rare position of wanting more – context, perhaps, on the Apollo missions at this point (intriguingly, news reports from the time note that journalists were apathetic on coverage of Apollo 13), or a greater understanding of just how in real-time this proto-reality TV tale played out. Or a deeper postscript on the astronauts’ still incredible, and incredibly suspenseful, return to Earth’s atmosphere.
I’m slightly skeptical on co-pilot Swigert’s view, in an undated interview recording played over footage of non-English front page news, that “Apollo 13 did something that’s never happened before in the history of man – that for a brief instance of time, the whole world was together.” (Surely, in their own way, Titanic and the Hindenburg did, too?) But Middleton’s film makes the case for remembering the Apollo 13 mission in all its mundane, dated, precise details – a real, rare and breathtaking tale of survival and ingenuity, clearly and painstakingly told.
