Houston, We're Hanging In There

Bear with me as I feature one more movie set in twentieth-century America. Next time we'll mix it up with another century and another location, I promise!

I chose this movie for its two core principles:

1. everything that can go wrong probably will, BUT

2. smart people who care deeply are working to find a way through it so that Richard Nixon isn’t in charge of our eulogies

On the one hand, Ron Howard’s 1995 masterpiece Apollo 13 probably shouldn’t count as a period drama, given that it’s set a measly quarter-century before it was made. On the OTHER hand, this newsletter’s only unbreakable rule is to never recommend appeasing N*zis. I’ve created a content tag called “Not Really a Period Drama But Indulge Me” in case you’d like to filter out imposters when perusing the Historical Flicktion archive. For now, though, please join me on this journey to an era when Americans looked up at the stars and thought “Wow, wonder what’s out there” instead of “How can a billionaire monetize this?”

It’s 1969. Walter Cronkite gives a rapt nation a play-by-play of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. This is the most emotive he’ll get until he voices Benjamin Franklin in the post-9/11 fever-dream cartoon Liberty’s Kids.

But Walter’s not our protagonist. Make way for astronaut Jim Lovell! Tom Hanks has played America’s #1 Dad in conjunction with every mode of transportation known to humanity: plane, train, boat, scooter, car, horse, foot, toy rocket… and here, spaceship.

Not yet, though. Jim’s currently standing still, between missions, staring at a TV screen. He watches enviously with his family and coworkers as Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to walk on the Moon. He also gently mandates a haircut for the oldest of his four children, played by an actor whose facial structure suggests he was cast when Kevin Costner was expected to play Jim. That would’ve been a mistake btw; Kevin Costner is NOT my dad and cannot tell me what to do.

After the watch party, Jim’s wife, Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan), establishes herself as my kind of lady: “I can't deal with cleaning up. Let's sell the house.” She settles for a reminder that Jim named a slice of lunar topography “Mount Marilyn” in her honor during his Apollo 8 drive-by mission (true!).

Jim’s scheduled to finally get some foot time on the Moon in a couple more Apollos. But according to the media, if you’ve seen One Small Step you’ve seen ‘em all, so the space program’s national attention—and with that, its funding and/or mojo—may dry up before Jim’s turn. Still, he trains for the hoped-for mission with his crew-slash-BFFs, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton, in his second-most-harrowing space movie) and Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise, the cast’s foremost Ronald Reagan fan). When fellow astronaut Alan Shepard is benched for an “ear infection”—technically Ménière's disease, but as we’ll see, our guys aren’t especially invested in medical nuances—Jim’s crew is bumped up to replace Shepard’s on Apollo 13.

Upon hearing the news, Marilyn mutters, “Why thirteen?” and Jim replies, “It comes after twelve, hon,” at which point Marilyn starts digging a grave in the backyard. Jk—all she does is RSVP “maybe” to the launch, which disappoints Jim but makes sense given the sheer number of school lunches she’s expected to make in a week.

Months later, mere days before the April 1970 launch, we get our first big TWIST: Our guys have been exposed to measles. Jim and Fred have immunity via previous infection (the vaccine’s only been around since 1963), but Ken doesn’t. The flight surgeon wants Ken to skip the mission. He’s the pilot; if he gets sick 200,000 miles from Earth’s surface, he could send all three of them on a one-way trip to Game Over.

Sidenote: The flight surgeon is the only real person who’s depicted as deeply unlikable. (Our other villain-adjacent folks are composite characters.) Everybody treats him with contempt—Look at this freakin’ nerd—even though they’re ALL nerds! Any one of them could do physics calculations on the back of a napkin in less time than it takes me to remember what day of the week it is! Let this guy do his job!

Ken’s extremely cheesed off when Jim agrees to sideline him. “I don't have the measles. I'm not gonna GET the measles.” Oh, okay, as long as you’re sure!!! The Surgeon General does now recommend willpower as the first and only line of defense against viruses, so this attitude has aged splendidly!

Replacing Ken is hotshot Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon),¹ whom the movie paints as a Casanova by showing him with a blonde on the night of the Apollo 11 landing and a brunette on the morning he gets promoted from 13’s backup crew. These events occur almost nine months apart, a completely reasonable amount of time in which to date two different people, but as a kid I definitely saw Jack as an unserious person for not having a wife and a minimum of three offspring.

Sidenote: Fred’s wife, Mary, is pregnant with their fourth child, unaware that Fred will be ditching her and remarrying before that child turns nine, so as an adult I consider him the questionable one of the bunch.

Speaking of wives, Marilyn comes to the launch after all, to Jim’s delight: “You can’t live without me,” he teases her. Mutually assured destruction! Adorable. (Also true!! IRL the Lovells were married for SEVENTY-ONE years, from June 1952 until Marilyn’s death in August 2023. Lovell signed off just two years later, in August 2025, at age 97.)

The launch goes mostly fine, orchestrated by NASA’s Mission Control in Houston.² It’s wall-to-wall white guys—as NASA’s Black personnel are still putting the “hidden” in Hidden Figures—but eventually you can tell most of them apart. Their fearless leader is flight director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris), sporting a lucky vest his wife made for him (true!).

Post-launch, Jack connects the Command Module, aka Odyssey (their main ride) to the Lunar Module, aka Aquarius (their Moon-mobile). So far so good. UNTIL IT’S NOT.

Here’s an incomplete list of problems the crew encounters a few days into the mission:

• Their scheduled live TV broadcast gets canned because the networks think space travel is boring, per fictional NASA hype-man Henry (an absolute Eeyore who’s manifestly in the wrong line of work). Luckily the guys are unaware that they’re only live-streaming to Mission Control and have a blast hamming it up.

• When Jack does a routine stir of the oxygen tanks, the astronautical version of busy-work, an exposed wire short-circuits, causing one tank to explode and damaging the other.

• A series of resulting issues that the movie largely blames on Ron Howard’s brother at Mission Control (justice for Sy Liebergot—this wasn't really his fault) leaves the crew with two empty oxygen tanks and insufficient fuel to land on the Moon. The mission objective rebrands from “collect literal tons of Moon rocks” to “get home in one piece.”

• Fred throws up, spikes a fever, and whines about his failure to use birth control. (Are you getting the sense that Fred is my least favorite?) Tbf Haise had a UTI during the mission, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Well, anyone in this movie.

• Life support’s failing, so to conserve oxygen and avoid Sudden Death, the crew does a ton of math, shuts down Odyssey, and moves into Aquarius, which was supposed to be the space version of a rowboat and is now the space version of a lifeboat.

• Battery power’s low, so Aquarius is running on extreme eco mode: cold, dark, and analog.

• They’ll still need Odyssey to land back on Earth, so they’ve got to find the absolute most efficient way to reboot its system when the time comes. Otherwise they’ll run out of power and proceed straight to Sudden Death.

• Fred (fictionally) blames Jack for the big boom, and even Jim’s/Hanks’s most hardcore dad vibes can’t prevent a (fictional) fight.

• Aquarius’s carbon dioxide filter maxes out, once again putting everybody at risk for Sudden Death, and Odyssey’s filters are a different, incompatible shape.

The movie pins the filter issue on Fred, who realizes he only calculated for the CO2 production of two people instead of three. (Tag yourself: I for sure would be the guy who messes up the basics under pressure.) IRL, Aquarius just wasn’t designed to support three people. But in the movieverse, Fred’s mistake humbles him and prompts him to ease up on Jack—plus it gives us Jack’s best line: “Maybe I should just hold my breath.” That should be printed on US currency.

Everybody does a bunch more math and makerspace-type experimenting. They modify an Odyssey CO2 filter to work for Aquarius by using plastic packaging and a sock. Mission control personnel break out their slide rules to verify the crew’s various calculations. (POCKET CALCULATORS DO NOT EXIST YET. THESE PEOPLE ARE JUST RAWDOGGING THE NUMBERS.) When the crew needs to do a controlled burn of the engines to stay on course, they MANUALLY PILOT the spacecraft, EYEBALLING their navigation via the view of Earth³ in Aquarius’s tiny window. I, on the other hand, haven’t successfully parallel-parked since 2009.

Let’s pause here to appreciate how funny this movie manages to be despite the characters’ near-constant stress. The humor—even the dunking on the poor flight surgeon—is notably warm, sharp but not snide, always believable, never too slick. Some favorite moments:

• During the pre-catastrophe broadcast, Jack confesses, “If anyone from the IRS is watching, I forgot to file my 1040 return,” (true!) and Clint Howard at Mission Control notes, “That’s no joke! They’ll jump on him!”

• When a message from Mission Control interrupts the crew’s big argument, Jim shouts “ARE WE ON VOX?”, learns from Fred that they're not in fact voice-transmitting, flips on his space walkie-talkie, and greets Houston with the volume and tone of a Mr. Rogers fireside chat.

• Jim’s elderly mom (played by Ron Howard’s mom; his whole family’s here) asks Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, “Are you boys in the space program too?” Houston, I’d like to report a murder.

The film also expertly tugs at our heartstrings, from Jim’s youngest kid worrying about his safety to James Horner’s soundtrack blasting the very concept of “chill” into the stratosphere.

Sidenote: Horner presumably relistened to the score he wrote for 1989’s Glory, told himself “Hold my beer,” and took the epic choral music to even greater extremes. No complaints!!!

Eventually the magic of gravity slingshots our guys around the Moon, giving them enough momentum for the return journey, literally and figuratively. After pondering what might’ve been, Jim urges the others to focus on what matters most: getting home so Jack can file his taxes.

Speaking of home, Marilyn is keeping up with Walter’s live updates, trying to get her family through this nightmare, and fending off invasive reporters because of course NOW they’re interested! This woman deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. By contrast our PR guy Henry, when asked at a press conference about the spacecraft’s CO2 level, says, “It’s, uhh, climbing” and immediately calls on someone else. I know Henry’s fictional but he should be fired. He’s decades too early to pull off that kind of clown show. Marilyn ultimately gets to yell at him, which I endorse.

At Mission Control, I assume everyone’s relying on a period-accurate amount of cocaine to get through these four days. From the moment Gene declares “Failure is NOT an option”⁴ to the moment he kicks a wall and yells “I don’t want another estimate—I want the procedures! NOW!” these folks don’t ease up on the throttle. The only person who’s not making the cast of The West Wing seem languid is Joe Spano’s “NASA director,” a composite character who just hovers in the background looking ominous, like Mission Control’s collective sleep paralysis demon.

As for future HHS idol⁵ Ken Mattingly? Yeahhhhh, he’s not sick. He makes better use of his health than most quarantine dodgers, trying countless variations of Odyssey’s startup sequence until he finds a method that won’t drain too much power. He even swans into the control center to personally talk the crew through the process. (That part didn’t happen, and the movie really milks it at Jack’s expense, but who can argue with narrative payoff?)

Yet perils remain! The absence of a Moon rock haul has thrown off the spacecraft’s weight and therefore its trajectory, so the guys hastily move stuff from Aquarius into Odyssey to bulk up before Aquarius is jettisoned ahead of reentry. Jack is one wrong button away from detaching Aquarius too soon with Jim and Fred still inside, but he averts disaster by taping over the Eject switch with a note that says “NO.” There’s a typhoon warning near the splashdown site (true!) but it’ll probably miss them. (“Only if their luck changes,” says Gene.)

Oh, and Odyssey’s heat shield might’ve been damaged in the initial explosion. If it fails during reentry—you guessed it: Sudden Death. Nothing to be done about this one. Gotta just hope for the best.

Listen, I’ve seen this movie more times than Tom Hanks has had “captain” on his call sheet. I know what happens. But even on this rewatch, as the crew reentered the atmosphere after Jim’s “Gentlemen, it’s been a privilege flying with you,” I was like Dear God, let that heat shield hold. I almost cried. That’s the power of cinema, people.

Final TWIST: They make it!

Until the typhoon hits.

Kidding!!! Although that could’ve been a great Twister crossover.

In the movie’s ONLY artistic misstep, Jim closes us out with a voiceover, noting that Apollo 13 was his last mission; that Jack died young in a case of “May you be in heaven before the devil knows you ran for Congress as a Republican”; that Ken never got the measles (insert eyeroll); and that he hopes we—humanity—will someday return to the Moon.

Plot, pacing, and structure: 5. There’s not an extraneous second in the 140-minute runtime. Hard to believe this triumph of craftsmanship was brought to us by the director of Hillbilly Elegy. Much credit goes to screenwriters William Broyles Jr and Al Reinert. The script is taut yet fully fleshed out. The dialogue is smart yet accessible. The tone is seamlessly fun, tense, and poignant by turns. Screentime is perfectly balanced among the crew, Mission Control, and the home front. Naturally the Best Picture Oscar went to f—ing Braveheart.⁶

Characters: 5. I would like Hanks’s Jim and Harris’s Gene to adopt me. Marilyn is an excellent role model for an anxious person. Jack is doing his best! Everybody’s doing their best at all times! Everybody’s very smart and capable except Henry, who’s not even real!

Historical accuracy: 4. The movie was closely based on Lovell’s book, Lost Moon. Creative liberties mainly involved making people less calm and less prepared (aka more relatable!) than they were IRL.

Themes: 4. I deduct one point for, jointly, “measles is a hoax” (you got LUCKY, Ken!!!) and the ethos behind the line “Imagine if Christopher Columbus had come back from the New World and no one had returned in his footsteps” (gotta say I see upsides). Otherwise, all winners: A “successful failure” is nothing to sneeze at. As Gene puts it, “I don’t care about what anything was DESIGNED to do; I care about what it CAN do.” And don’t give up even when the odds are grim, because, as Jim says, “You never know what events are going to conspire to get you home.”

1  Brad Pitt turned down the role of Jack Swigert to do Se7en, which… A) lol and B) thank goodness.

2  Excluded from my praise of featured NASA personnel is Guenter Wendt, who helps Jim get suited up. On this rewatch, Scott and I both instantly said, “Was Guenter a N*zi???” and SURE ENOUGH, dude was fully in the Luftwaffe. That wasn’t a “whoops I just got drafted” branch, ftr. See the aforementioned newsletter policy on N*zis.

3  IRL they used the Sun and the Moon for navigation, which is no less impressive!

4  Kranz didn’t say this exact phrase, but after the movie he ran with it. It’s the title of his autobiography and of a speech he regularly gives, because have I mentioned that as of 2025 he’s still alive?! He and Haise may outlive us all.

5  The only thing preventing RFK Jr. from using this movie as propaganda is the risk of alienating the base with depictions of math and competence.

6  Best Adapted Screenplay went to Sense and Sensibility, which I can accept.