Apollo 13 (1995)
Imagine Entertainment

Description

NASA's worst nightmare turned into one of the space agency's most heroic moments in 1970, when the Apollo 13 crew was forced to hobble home in a disabled capsule after an explosion seriously damaged the moon-bound spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton play (respectively) astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise in director Ron Howard's intense, painstakingly authentic docudrama. The Apollo 13 crew and Houston-based mission controllers race against time and heavy odds to return the damaged spacecraft safely to Earth from a distance of 205,500 miles.

Tags

Moon, Apollo

Collected reviews and ratings

10 digitallyobsessed.com | Dan Heaton

This picture succeeds largely due to the efforts of a remarkable ensemble cast who embodied the spirit of the original participants. Hanks, Paxton, and Bacon also perform solidly, but the most effective job comes from Gary Sinise as Ken Mattingly.
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10 Empire | Mark Salisbury

It may not be the best film of the year, but it's certainly made of the right stuff, and even though the tension dissipates ever so slightly towards the end, this is an exhilarating and believable journey to the dark side of the moon and (thankfully) back again. A blast.
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10 Empire | Mark Salisbury

It may not be the best film of the year, but it's certainly made of the right stuff, and even though the tension dissipates ever so slightly towards the end, this is an exhilarating and believable journey to the dark side of the moon and (thankfully) back again. A blast.
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10 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

This is a powerful story, one of the year's best films, told with great clarity and remarkable technical detail, and acted without pumped-up histrionics.
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9.2 DVD Verdict | David Johnson

Apollo 13 is a great movie. It succeeds not just because it does one thing well, but because a confluence of effective themes come together.
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8.0 BBC | Carmel Gallagher

Ron Howard had a difficult task with the film as on the whole, the hi-tech terminology might not have made too much sense to the audience. However, he pulls everything together and manages to create tension and drama when disaster strikes.
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7.0 Variety | Todd McCarthy

The film works in a primal way as the story of three brave explorers who manage to find a way home in the face of hazardous obstacles and heavy odds. The verisimilitude with which the mission has been visualized is impressive, and the positive, virtuous, "failure-is-not-an-option" posture of the characters has been adopted winningly by the entire cast and crew.
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7.0 Washington Post | Joe Brown

Where "The Right Stuff" emphasized the larger-than-life heroism and myth-making of the astronauts and the space program, "Apollo 13" is about how human and vulnerable, brave and foolish, these dreamers are.
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6.0 Boxoffice Magazine | Christine James

There is a long stretch of slow-paced dragging as crisis after crisis develops and we wait and wait for the outcome. The barriers are especially frustrating to modern-day audiences accustomed to Star Trek levels of technology, in which space travel is taken for granted as a routine means of transportation.
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6.0 DVD Talk | Joshua Zyber

I still don't love the movie, but Apollo 13 is a crowd-pleaser with plenty of fans.
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5.0 TV Guide

Truly a director for the '90s, Ron Howard has mastered the art of spinning big, old-fashioned yarns without any discernible point of view, and his movie is curiously empty and instantly forgettable.
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