ohn paper, the survival of three astronauts aboard Apollo 13, a Nasa spacecraft on its way to the moon and endangered by a near-fatal explosion in April 1970, is nothing short of astonishing. The explosion, 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, nearly suffocating days in a lunar module designed for just two people and 45 hours, with only a few light bulbs’ power. The unprecedented and untested maneuvers to get them home – manually transmitting flight data to the “lifeboat” module, catapulting the moon into orbit, manually directing an unpredictable rocket blast at Earth – were each difficult and high risk, which required precise accuracy to avoid certain death. The composite chance of their survival was slim.
As arranged in Apollo 13: Survival, a new documentary about the flawed mission, these facts somehow seem much drier, though meticulously and lavishly rendered through restored archival footage. Director Peter Middleton recreates a play of the six-day mission – aboard Apollo 13, at mission control in Houston and in living rooms across the country – mainly through archival footage, old interviews with the crew and never-before-seen footage from the spacecraft. ground control and the astronauts’ families. The result is a faithful and explanatory, if sometimes too clinical, depiction of a fateful chapter of the US space program that seems as suitable for a classroom as it is couch entertainment.
Part of that is due to the fact that, even in crisis, the (almost entirely) Nasa men are almost psychotically cool cucumbers, relaying stressful information – “Houston, we have a problem,” the problem is ‘ a catastrophic explosion, etc. like reading Ikea furniture directions. (The Hollywood-ready emotions are left to Ron Howard’s 1995 blockbuster film the recreation of Apollo 13.) And part is the arc of the actual Apollo 13 mission, much admired for its unlucky number and seemingly cursed from the start: after several delays, astronaut Ken Mattingly passed out the night before launch due to exposure to rubella ; shortly into the flight an engine failed. These very ominous developments are crisply conveyed via Nasa audio recordings interspersed with subtle re-enactments (an “abort” alarm, a “warning” 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, bait or cheesy re-enactments, but also leaves the viewer confused about the game.
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 documentarywhich surprisingly revives and restores a lot of archival footage from the first moon landing, Apollo 13: Survival Spills talking heads, cuts out or modern-day explainers, and instead lets the archive – including rudimentary 1970s news graphics – speak for itself. And this archive is remarkable, from crew recordings during two key engine bursts, to video of mission control showing a random CO2 filter from cardboard and a sock, to pictures of Marilyn reacting to every hair-breadth success on the news. The compilation of this cornucopia of material, however understated it may be, is nonetheless fascinating.
Although at 96 minutes I found myself in the rare position of wanting more — context, perhaps, on the Apollo missions at this point (interestingly, news reports from the time note that journalists were apathetic about coverage of Apollo 13) , or a greater understanding of how this proto-reality TV story played out in real time. Or a deeper postscript about the astronauts’ still incredible, and incredibly tense, return to Earth’s atmosphere.
I’m slightly skeptical of co-pilot Swigert’s view, played in an undated interview recording over non-English front-page news footage, that “Apollo 13 did something that had never happened before in human history—that for a short sample 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 detail – a true, rare and breathtaking story of survival and ingenuity, clearly and meticulously told.
