Apollo 13

Apollo 13 dramatizes the April 1970 mission that lost most of its power and oxygen to an explosion on the way to the Moon, forcing NASA to abandon the landing and improvise a way to bring Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise home. Ron Howard directed from a script by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert, adapted from Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger's 1994 book Lost Moon. Tom Hanks played Lovell, Kevin Bacon played Swigert, Bill Paxton played Haise, Gary Sinise played the grounded Ken Mattingly and Ed Harris played flight director Gene Kranz.

Howard wanted it technically right and decided no mission footage would be used; every shot would be new. Hanks, Paxton and Bacon went to Space Camp in Huntsville, where Lovell and Apollo 15's David Scott ran them through simulator training. On Steven Spielberg's suggestion, the weightless scenes were shot for real aboard NASA's KC-135, the aircraft that gives about 23 seconds of free fall per parabola: three hours and 54 minutes of filming across 612 zero-g maneuvers, with every line redubbed afterward because the plane was too loud to record. NASA offered its real Mission Control, and Howard built a replica instead. Lovell himself appears as the captain of the recovery ship, in his own Navy uniform, at his real retired rank.

Universal opened it on June 30, 1995, to $25.4 million, the biggest opening weekend Hanks had yet had, and it finished with about $355 million worldwide, third among the year's films. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture and won two, for editing and sound. The famous lines are the film's own: the transcript has Swigert saying "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here," and Kranz never said "failure is not an option." The screenwriters built that one from an interview with flight controller Jerry Bostick, who told them that when things went wrong, the room laid out the options and failure was not one of them.