Tear Jerker / Apollo 13

• The splashdown: a combination of happy tears and "Oh yes! Oh yes, yes, yes!"
  • Mattingly calling to Odyssey second after tense second as the soundtrack slides away. A bit harder to take after the Columbia disaster, particularly given Charlie Hobaugh's increasingly hopeless attempts to raise the lost shuttle, but...
  • Then there was where once INCO called out four minutes since radio blackout, and there was still nothing, we see the Lovell family, wherever they are watching, fearing the worst-case scenario has happened and the heat shield failed. Kranz is the last to be shown, hanging his head in defeat, thinking everything they've worked for up to that point has been for nothing as Mattingly tries one last time to raise the Command Module, but just then, Kranz lifts his head back up to the sound of radio static, then the video feed glitching before showing the intact CM deploying its parachutes as it makes its final, and safe, descent back to Earth...
    Lovell: Hello Houston, this is Odyssey. It's good to see you again.
• "We just lost the moon."
  • To elaborate, Jim says this once it becomes clear that reaching the moon is impossible and they need to start scrambling to stop the oxygen from leaking out of the Odyssey.
• The Apollo 1 disaster, featured at the beginning of the movie.
• The sequence where Jim Lovell watches the Moon as 13 is speeding past it and imagines himself walking on the lunar surface. Goddamn, every man who flew in Apollo had earned the privilege to be on those flights, but if there was one among the corps who deserved to walk on the moon, it was Lovell.
  • Also during that sequence, they fly over Mount Marilyn, a lunar mountain Jim named in honor of his wife on Apollo 8. Fred says "Jim, you've gotta look at this.", to which Jim answers "I've seen it.".
  • If you listen to the Lovells' DVD commentary during this part, Marilyn Lovell gets very choked up about it.
• In an early scene, Jim is attempting to explain the tragedy of Apollo 1 to his youngest son Jeffrey, and ends up saying that one of the main problems with the ship was that they couldn't open the door. And then scenes later there's Marilyn, trying to explain to Jeffrey what's happening to his father's mission:
  Marilyn: Something broke on your daddy's spaceship. And he's going to have to turn around before he even gets to the moon.
  Jeffrey: Was it the door?
• They unmercifully use the kids as Tear Jerker material. During the re-entry blackout, we cut to a classroom scene in a military school where Lovell's eldest son Jay is sitting upright at his desk, along with the rest of his class, watching the broadcast. It looks very military, and very disciplined, and very cold...until a teacher whose face we can't see walks past the astronaut's son, and, in silence, puts a hand on the boy's shoulder as the broadcast continues.
  • At one point, Jim's daughter doesn't want to see her father's live broadcast, arguing "He won't know we're not there.". Yet later, she's moved by an interview of him, and is tearing up during the radio blackout from reentry.
• As they are first taking off, there's that shot of the rocket blasting away from the Earth . . . and we then cut to two of the astronauts' wives, who are openly weeping with fear and anxiety over their husbands' safe journey.
  • From there, we cut to Ken Mattingly, sitting alone on his car, wishing luck to the men making the trip he should have been on.
    Ken: (To the Saturn V) Come on, baby. Come on.
• The music in that film is James Horner Awesome. Various points where the ground crew and the astronauts' families are waiting and can't do anything. And, okay, the part where Lovell has an Imagine Spot and pictures himself landing on the moon. He really wanted that.
• "Hello Houston. This is Odyssey. It's good to see you again."
  • Cue the waterworks as Mission Control, the Lovells, and the Haise family erupt in joyous cheers and relief that the nightmare is finally over.
• As the astronauts go around the moon, losing contact with Earth, Marilyn weeps uncontrollably as she listens to the static on her radio.
• "Farewell, Aquarius, and we thank you."
  • Verbatim from the air-to-ground recordings, along with Fred Haise's proclamation, "She sure was a good ship."
• Jim begging the sick and freezing Fred Haise to hold on "just a little while longer... a little while longer..."
• In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, Lovell reveals that Swigert was elected to Congress...but died of cancer before his term began.
• The last line of Tom Hanks' narration.
  Jim Lovell: I look up at the moon and wonder, when will we be going back, and who will that be?
• "Gentlemen, it has been a privilege flying with you."
• The scene after splashdown when everyone at Houston is celebrating exuberantly, you see Gene Kranz, who hasn't really sat down since the disaster, collapse into his chair. A few moments later you realize that he is crying tears of joy. He soon recovers and only declares mission accomplished once he hears Lovell announce over the radio of Apollo 13 signing off with them safely back home and being taken by the recovery team to the USS Iwo Jima.
  • The behind-the-scenes special has the real Gene Kranz, while discussing the mission, break down in a similar manner. Ed Harris's performance was based off the real deal.
• The scene where Ken Mattingly is told that he can not go on the mission due to the fear that he may get the measles. Also, during the scene where he watches the lift off away from everyone else pulling up by his car.
• Kranz's bold statement that America has never lost anyone in space while awesome, and true in the time the movie is set in was tragically not true when the movie was actually released, as the Challenger disaster had been almost a decade prior. And assuming that doesn't count because Challenger never technically made it to space (Apollo 1 despite losing the entire crew and happening well before Apollo 13 apparantly didn't count in Kranz's eyes since it also never technically made it to space or even off the launchpad) it would happen without any uncertainty a few years later when Columbia broke up in reentry.

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