Apollo 13: Survival Review – fascinating, if clinical, retelling of space history | Documentaries

OOn paper, the survival of three astronauts aboard Apollo 13, a NASA spacecraft headed for the moon that was endangered by a near-fatal explosion in April 1970, is nothing short of amazing. The explosion, which occurred more than two days and 209,000 miles into the mission, nearly depleted the three-part spacecraft of oxygen and power. The three astronauts – Fred Haise, Jack Swigert and mission commander Jim Lovell – spent four agonizing, near-suffocating days in a lunar module designed for only two people, lasting 45 hours and providing only as much power as a few lightbulbs. The unprecedented and untested maneuvers to bring them home – manually transmitting flight data to the “lifeboat” module, being catapulted out of lunar orbit, manually directing an unpredictable rocket explosion toward Earth – were all risky and hazardous, requiring the utmost precision to avoid certain death. Overall, their chances of survival were slim.

In the portrayal of Apollo 13: Survival, a new documentary about the failed mission, these facts somehow seem much drier, even though they are carefully and lavishly presented using restored archival footage. Director Peter Middleton reconstructs the six-day mission step by step—aboard Apollo 13, at mission control in Houston, and in living rooms across the country—using mostly archival footage, old interviews with the crew, and never-before-seen footage of the spacecraft, ground control, and the astronauts' families. The result is a faithful and explanatory, if sometimes overly clinical, portrayal of an ill-fated chapter of the U.S. space program that's as suitable for classroom instruction as it is for couch-watching.

That's partly because the (almost exclusively) men of NASA are almost psychotically cool even in times of crisis, relaying stressful information—”Houston, we have a problem,” the problem is a catastrophic explosion, etc.—as if they were reading the instructions for Ikea furniture. (The Hollywood-ready emotions are left to Ron Howard's 1995 blockbuster movie re-creating Apollo 13.) And partly it's because of the story arc of the actual Apollo 13 mission, which attracted much attention for its unlucky number and seemed cursed from the start: After several delays, astronaut Ken Mattingly aborted the night before launch because of rubella; shortly after the flight began, an engine failed. These many ominous developments are conveyed clearly through NASA audio recordings, stitched together with subtle reenactments (an “abort” alarm, an “alarm” button, the view from space) and posthumous interviews with the astronauts and Lovell's wife, Marilyn, to whom the film is dedicated (she died in 2023). Such an approach avoids sensationalism, provocation, or cheesy reenactments, but also leaves the viewer unclear about what is at stake.

Still, it's hard to imagine a better approach to this story than one that comes in the moment and from the archive. Like Todd Douglas Miller's 2019 Apollo 11 documentary, which astonishingly revives and restores reams of archival footage of the first moon landing, Apollo 13: Survival eschews talking heads, cutaways, or topical explainers and instead lets the archive—including rudimentary news graphics from the 1970s—speak for itself. And that archive is remarkable, from the crew's recordings during two crucial engine bursts to a video of mission control hatching a haphazard CO plan.₂ From filters made from cardboard and a sock to photos of Marilyn reacting to every little success in the news, the compilation of this cornucopia of material, as understated as it may be, is nonetheless fascinating.

After 96 minutes, however, I was in the rare situation of wanting more – perhaps context on the Apollo missions at that point (interestingly, news reports from the time noted that journalists were indifferent in covering Apollo 13), or a better understanding of how this proto-reality TV story played out in real time. Or a more detailed epilogue to the astronauts' still incredible and incredibly thrilling return to Earth's atmosphere.

I am somewhat skeptical of the testimony of co-pilot Swigert, who, in an undated interview recording played over non-English front-page news footage, says, “Apollo 13 did something that has never been done in human history – that for a brief moment the whole world was united.” (That didn't happen, in their own way, with Titanic and Hindenburg, did it?) Middleton's film, on the other hand, makes the case for remembering the Apollo 13 mission in all its mundane, outdated and precise details – a true, rare and breathtaking story of survival and ingenuity, told clearly and faithfully.