- 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?
- 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: [facepalms] Tell me this isn't a government operation.
Engineer 2: This just isn't a contingency 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. - Genius Bonus: When Lovell is boasting that his landing will be "better than Neil Armstrong... and way better than Pete Conrad!" he wasn't just bragging. As Apollo 11 approached the landing site, the crew could see it was covered in boulders, requiring them to continue hovering until they could find a clear patch to set down, with only about thirty seconds worth of fuel remaining. Apollo 12 was actually a very precise landing, within a short walk to the Surveyor 3 probe, a major objective of the mission. But again, the original site was too rough, and Bean and Conrad ended up landing on the side of a hill, which caused the engine to cut off a little too early and left the LM sitting on an angle.
- 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.
- Heartwarming in Hindsight: The film ends with Lovell narrating "I look at the moon and wonder, when will we be going back, and who will that be?" The real Lovell ultimately lived long enough to see the beginnings of the Artemis project that would take people back to the moon and the astronauts chosen for it, before his passing in 2025.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: The MADtv (1995) parody "Apollo the 13th: Jason Takes NASA
" became this once Jason X came out, since Jason himself went to space. - 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
- 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.
- Spiritual Successor:
- The Tom Hanks produced HBO anthology From the Earth to the Moon covered the Apollo missions one by one, from one to seventeen. Obviously, it would have been redundant to retell the story of Apollo 13, so instead, the episode covered the media perspective of the potential disaster.
- Gravity (2013) could be seen as one, as it is a 'serious' space disaster film based on current technology and starring astronauts rather than a straight sci-fi. Ed Harris even resumes his role as Mission Control.
- The Martian could also be seen as one, with the problems cranked up to eleven.
- The movie is a successor to The Right Stuff as a look at the American space program in the 1960s. And again, Ed Harris stars in both films (In The Right Stuff, he starred as John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth).
- Suspiciously Similar Song: During the liftoff—-it sounds extremely like Art Garfunkel's "All I Know" .
- 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.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ymmv/Apollo13
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