Apollo 13

_**Cinematic account of the ill-fated Apollo mission**_ In April, 1970, the Apollo 13 mission to the moon is aborted after an explosion causes internal damage. The three astronauts and Mission Control must now focus on merely surviving and getting back alive, if possible. Directed by Ron Howard, “Apollo 13” (1995) is a solid account of the real-life events and obviously influenced “The Martian” twenty years later, which is even better, albeit not based on historical events. I suppose this zeroes-in on the weakness of this movie: If you’re familiar with the account you know how the story…

This does take a while to get going, but once space-bound, it proves to be quite a compelling tale of three astronauts who find themselves stranded in their spacecraft after an oxygen tank blows up. Ron Howard now presents us with a potently claustrophobic couple of hours and the men - Lovell (Tom Hanks); Haise (Bill Paxton) and Swigert (Kevin Bacon) must work with their ground control colleagues led by Mattingly (Gary Sinese) and Kranz (an excellent Ed Harris) to try to calculate some way of getting them back to safety before their remaining oxygen and fuel runs out. Meantime, we also get a…