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  • Award Snub:
    • A number of people believe that this film should've won Best Picture over Braveheart at the Academy Awards. Even more upsetting is that Ron Howard wasn't even nominated for Best Director.
    • Another disappointing snub was Tom Hanks' distinct lack of a nomination of Best Actor, although he did just win two Oscars in consecutive years.
  • Awesome Music:
    • The whole score. Particularly the liftoff and reentry. Much like his score for The Rocketeer, James Horner really captures the wonder of flight. He would soon do Titanic (1997), and it shows. (Those of us who'd followed his musical career since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan already expected as much of him.) Leading to another Award Snub: You could argue that Horner's chances of taking a Oscar for this score were already low due being nominated for Braveheart. But both of them losing to Il Postino? Ouch.
    • Then there's Annie Lennox's amazing vocal work.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Potentially running out of oxygen and suffering from asphyxiation from too much carbon dioxide? Rather terrifying prospect. Discovering that the filters for the command module won't work in the lunar excursion module? Kind of funny, but also rather worrying. Krantz's response? Hilarious.
    Krantz: What about the scrubbers on the command module?
    Engineer 1: They take square cartridges...
    Engineer 2: ...and the ones on the LEM are round.
    Krantz: (face palms) Tell me this isn't a government operation.
    Engineer 2: This just isn't a contigency we've remotely looked at. Those CO2 levels are gonna be getting toxic.
    Krantz: Well, I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole. Rapidly.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The worries over whether Apollo 13 would make it in its reentry are more painful after the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia in its reentry in 2003.
    • Being a movie about flight, James Horner dying in a plane crash in 2015 can hit a little too close to home for some people.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • In 2013, Tom Hanks would play another captain in another film based on a real disaster that traps his character in a lifeboat. How many times do you have to play a role for it to qualify as Typecasting? Even more hilarious following his casting in Sully as the titular captain of US Airways Flight 1549. This resulted in the "Never Travel with Tom Hanks" meme.
    • The MADTV parody "Apollo the 13th: Jason Takes NASA", once Jason X, came out.
    • Ed Harris is briefly heard as the voice of Mission Control in Gravity. Between these two films, this is not the voice you want to hear when you're in space.
      • Especially since one of his earlier films featured him as John Glenn experiencing a similar situation with his reentry heat shield.
    • Likewise, Chris Ellis (Deke Slayton) was recruited by Armageddon (1998) as a voice in mission control.
    • This wouldn't be the last time that Ron Howard directed a space movie...
  • Ho Yay: In one scene of the movie, Lovell is shown warming up a sick and freezing Fred Haise by hugging him and rubbing his back. In a case of Suspiciously Specific Denial, Lovell on the audio commentary track insists that he warmth-hugged Fred Haise from behind, not from the front as shown in the film. He had to defend his manhood, after all.
  • Narm:
    • The Nightmare Sequence where the Apollo 13 craft suddenly malfunctions and Jim is violently blown into space should be terrifying, but it's so random and over-the-top that it looks completely ridiculous.
    • Similarly, Jim Lovell's Imagine Spot of him walking on the lunar surface; not only is it rather silly and incongruous with the grounded tone of the film but it doesn't convey anything that the film didn't already do perfectly well through subtext and characterization. It's so on the nose it borders on Viewers Are Morons.
  • Narm Charm: Marilyn losing her wedding ring in the shower shortly before the accident would come off as a ridiculous piece of melodrama, except that it really did happen. note 
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: During the liftoff—-it sounds extremely like Art Garfunkel's "All I Know"
  • Special Effects Failure: When Mattingly goes to watch the rocket launch, he is very clearly looking at a CGI rocket that has been superimposed into the shot.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: They even managed to fool the NASA guys who worked on that launch. NASA's public relations department, represented by Buzz freakin' Aldrin, asked for permission to use clips from the movie.
    • This was after Buzz asked where they had gotten this footage, because it was so realistic they fooled a man who had been in the Apollo Program.
    • There's also Makeup, Costume, and Cast Selection Effects of Awesome: Ed Harris playing Gene Kranz looks literally exactly like him, or at least exactly like him circa 1970; put photos of the two side-by-side and you would not be able to tell the difference.note  Also, Kranz's wife made him a vest to wear for each mission (he's seen removing it from the box before launch); they simply borrowed the originalnote  and had Harris wear it.
    • Also, the Mission Control room was so similar to the real one that one of the men in there (who had worked with the real deal) kept forgetting where he was and would unsuccessfully try to find the elevator to leave the place at the end of the day, as the actual room was located on the third floor. The real Mission Control room, preserved as a National Historic Monument to this day, was actually too small for the camera equipment at the time, necessitating its recreation on a Hollywood set.
    • Notice how realistic the zero-G effects are? That's because they're not effects. They filmed them using NASA's "vomit comet".
    • The launch of the Apollo 13? Audiences and even voters thought that it was Stock Footage. Nope, they were actually visual effects.

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