Apollo 13 anniversary edition book

Al Reinert and William Broyles also paced the story in a quite leisurely way, placing the incident about fifty minutes into the movie and focusing heavily on the events leading up to the launch including a last-minute astronaut replacement and a detailed view behind the scenes at the space agency. While the story was centered around the catastrophy, it also became a detailed account of a typical Apollo flight of the late s and early s. In contrast to Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and its film adaption by Philip Kaufman, the authors had refrained from giving the movie a satirical or humoristic slant as requested by Jim Lovell and the filmmakers.

There is a little bit of good-natured humour in the dialogue, but the story takes itself very serious - fortunately never so dead serious that it gets boring. Despite the well-known outcome of the plot, the authors switched gears brilliantly and made Apollo 13 a first-class thriller full of suspense and even surprise. The script also did not lack another most important ingredient: the awe, respect and enthusiasm for the space program and its achievements, unfortunately coupled with a fair amount of American patriotism which may be a bit too much for non-American viewers.

W hen Ron Howard and Brian Grazer had first talked to Jim Lovell, the former astronaut had remarked that he looked a lot like Kevin Costner when he was younger - which was actually true, but unfortunately the actor was not interested in the project.

Someone else, however, was: Tom Hanks had been a "closet astronaut" since his childhood and was very enthusiastic about the idea of portraying Jim Lovell and his immense knowledge about the space program made him not only a substitute, but the prime choice for the lead role of Apollo Hanks was at the height of his career in the mids and had both the superstar status needed to ensure a boxoffice hit and the necessary experience as both a comedian and as a serious and very versatile actor.

He made no attempt to disguise himself, but rather played a close approximation of Jim Lovell without really imitating him. The filmmakers originally had planned to cast Lovell's crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise with completely unknown actors, but this idea was abandoned because the filmmakers feared that only one leading star would be bad for the publicity of the movie.

The last two thirds of what was basically an ensemble cast for the majority of the movie was nevertheless very carefully cast - the filmmakers had chosen Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton to portray Jack Swigert and Fred Haise.

Both actors were not yet as huge stars as Tom Hanks, but together formed an impressive trio portraying the crew of Apollo 13 in a very realistic and completely natural way.

A nother very important secondary character had been equally carefully chosen - Gene Kranz, the flight director mostly responsible for the safe return of Apollo 13, was played by none other than Ed Harris, who had also portrayed John Glenn in The Right Stuff more than a decade before. Nevertheless, the actor succeeded in separating his two characters completely and gave a very authentic and intensive performance as Gene Kranz.

Gary Sinise, who previously had appeared alongside Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump took the role of Ken Mattingly, the unfortunate crewmate of Lovell and Haise grounded by the measels, while Kathleen Quinlan, and old friend of Ron Howard from his days as an actor, portrayed Marilyn Lovell.

While the focus was primarily on the astronauts and their families, showing the events in the control room made a huge cast necessary, because the filmmakers insisted of complete accuracy - and that meant two complete shifts of flight controllers at the consoles, The large crowd of flight controllers was played by a group of relatively unknown actors, because the filmmakers had wisely refrained from stuffing the casting with cameos - the only really familiar face is Ron Howard's brother Clint, who plays an approximation of Sy Liebergot, one of the more famous flight controllers.

Real cameos were found elswhere in the movie - in an old tradition Ron Howard gave almost his whole family small appearances and also his former mentor Roger Corman. Jim and Marilyn Lovell of course also make a small appearance. News anchor Walter Cronkite only appeared in stock footage, but to the amazement of the filmmakers was so generous to re-record some of his voiceovers to match them better to the movie's pace.

B efore the production began, the filmmakers made sure that the three lead actors were fit to portray the astronauts by getting them as close to the experience of spaceflight as possible. This military version of a Boeing performed parabolic flights, making short periods of about half a minute of weightlessness possible - with all its effects and repercussions, hence the nickname of the plane. The filmmakers did not force their actors to take the flight, but everybody was a good sport and took this unique chance to experience weightlessness at least for a short time.

Originally there was just one flight with the KC planned, but then Steven Spielberg, a good friend of the filmmakers, had the idea to actually use the parabolic flights for filming instead of painstakingly simulating weightlessness in the studio.

Because there were no commercial companies offering weighless flights yet in the s, the big question was if NASA would cooperate. The space agency obliged and reserved one of their KC planes over the course of six months for the production of Apollo With special sets, which had to fit into the interior of the plane, over six hundred weighless periods were used to film short takes, which were then seamlessly matched with studio footage.

This allowed the movie to be the first one to portray actual weightlessness and the actors and filmmakers managed to hold up so well in zero-g that they even earned the respect of the plane crew, who had no high expectations of them. The actors portraying the ground crew also went through extensive preparations, visiting the real mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and attending a basic flight controller school led by Apollo 13 flight director Gerry Griffin and Jerry Bostick, the father of producer Michael Bostick.

They ensured that the portrayal of the control center was as close to reality as possible, something which had never been properly attempted before in a movie. T he two main locations, the spaceship and the mission control center in Houston were completely recreated by production designer Michael Corenblith and set designer Merideth Boswell at the Universal Studios in Hollywood. While NASA had offered one of the original control rooms at the Johnson Space Center for filming, the filmmakers decided to build their own versions to allow for more flexibility during the shooting since the actual control rooms were quite spacey, but still not big enough for a full film crew.

The four-walled set was so detailed that even former NASA people working on the movie saw little difference to the real thing and were amazed by the high authenticity. Two separate, but visually identical versions of the Odyssey command and service module, the CSM and the lunar lander, were constructed - one for the use in the KC plane and one for the studio shots.

They were built by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, the home of many examples of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo ships and many more artifacts of the early american space program. During the film's production, the engineers were working on the restoration of the actual Apollo 13 command module and were able to use real spare parts for the film recreations.

Like the control center, everything was as real as possible while allowing for the flexibility like opening the set to allow room for the camera. From the beginning, the filmmakers had decided that their movie would do without any of NASA's stock footage because the quality was not quite good enough for the big cinema screens Apollo 13 was designed for.

For this ambitious task, the filmmakers did not go to Industrial Light and Magic, but a new company called Digital Domain, which had only been founded recently in by filmmaker James Cameron, special and visual effects creator Stan Winston and a former studio executive of ILM, Scott Ross.

The visual effects relied heavily on computer graphics, but because Ron Howard insisted on highly detailed images needing to hold up even on the largest cinema screens, some shots were still created with the help of traditional models, but were later digitally composited. The effects, particularly those in the launch sequence, looked so realistic that even Buzz Aldrin thought that they were undiscovered original NASA footage.

D espite the elaborate visual effects, Apollo 13 focused heavily on storytelling and the characters, making the movie almost a stage play driven almost completely by dialogue. The plot may happen in space, but the locations are limited to the spaceship, the control center and only few other places like the Lovell's house. Ron Howard, Al Reinert and William Broyles brilliantly understood to combine and balance the three different perspectives and exactly knew how to keep the much needed suspense going.

This sometimes meant a little bit of plot fabrication, notably some tensions between the astronauts which originally did not happen, but there were not many other liberties taken for dramatic reasons. While the patriotism is in places a little too strong for european viewers, there is only a surprisingly low amount of hero worship going on - instead the astronauts and flight controllers are not portrayed as invincible superhumans, but very normal people who have trained hard to handle exactly such a life-threatening situation.

Consequently, Apollo 13 is actually a complete ensemble story and not the Tom Hanks solo show some of the advertising material suggests. The catastrophy itself is not sensationalised too much, but the movie makes the excellent point that spaceflight in these days was an even riskier endeavour than it is today. The script also succeeds in integrating many of the technical details directly into the plot without making the movie too complicated.

F or the musical accompaniment, only three of the great "space" composers, Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams or James Horner were really qualified and the filmmakers ultimately chose the latter one. Instead of strong opera-like sounds, he used a much less bombastic and more quiet style. Sweeping, often even melodramatic sounds with a noticeable militaristic and patriotic undertone were a far cry from his Star Trek scores, which Apollo 13 sadly only resembles very faintly.

Strange is also the use of Annie Lennox as a singer, who occasionally doubles the melody in a much to emotional way standing out like a sore thumb in the orchestral score - fortunately this mistake is mostly limited to the closing credits.

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Movie Studio: Universal Studios. Movie Genre: Drama. Run Time minutes : Software Format: Blu-ray. Language: English. Street Date : June 2, TCIN : The aptly named Command Module Odyssey and the reluctant Lunar Module - lifeboat Aquarius were to take the three men to a date with the lunar highland area known as Fra Mauro but fate and a faulty circuit in one of the vehicle's oxygen tanks would irrevocably alter their plans and turn the flight of Apollo 13 into an epic to rival the original Odyssey.

After an explosion in the Service Module crippled the spacecraft while it was still outward bound the crew would spend several harrowing days in near frigid temperatures while the technicians at home worked around the clock to devise new and ingenious ways to keep them alive and bring them home safely. In some considered Apollo 13 a catastrophic failure but it has since been recognised as one of NASA's truly great moments, when the spirit of daring and ingenuity came to life in the team at Mission Control as they successfully brought the crew home.

In "Apollo 13 The NASA Mission Reports" some of the rare official documentation of the voyage of Apollo 13 is collected and made commercially available for the first time.