Year: 1995
Director: Ron Howard
Summary: Stranded 205,000 miles from Earth in a crippled spacecraft, astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert fight a desperate battle to survive. Meanwhile, at Mission Control, astronaut Ken Mattingle, flight director Gene Kranz and a heroic ground crew race against time – and the odds – to bring them home.
Times Watched: 2
My Experience: Howard does a great job here of taking moments that are breathtaking enough in documentary format and ratcheting up the intensity with some amazing tension and crowd-pleasing filmmaking. Unfortunately, the faux-conflict between the astronauts bothers me, as the “Are we going to die?” conflict was good enough I thought. That said, it’s perpetually watchable.
Death By Troggles 
There’s always going to be false tension in film. It eats up time, if nothing else.
This movie is thoroughly Hollywood, but I always liked it fine.
I’ve probably told you this, but I saw this in the theater and after it ended, my girlfriend goes “Can you imagine if that had been a true story?”
WHAA????!!?!? Please share your response.
The place was packed, so I leaned in quickly to alert her that it is, and to keep it down. She acted all surprised and kept going loudly, figuring that she was one of many people in the theater that had no idea Apollo 13 was a real thing. People were glancing over at me, smirking, knowing I was in hell. They did at least seem to be showing remorse for me.
The bizarre thing is, this girl wasn’t stupid. She just had stupid “pockets” or something. She was very good at math and science, and was a decent writer. Then she’d drop some bomb on me. Like, she said “signal” for “single” and vice versa (not on occasion. All the time). She couldn’t tell left from right. Ever. She locked up when I told her which way we had to go.