Apollo 13

This film has a extremely stressful viewing experience for the audience, as many problems occur during the Apollo 13 (planed) flight to the moon. The film succeeded in keeping the viewers on their edge almost the entire film. This is mainly due to the fact that the different incidents are shown with great story-telling ability and the (compared with real historic events) dramatization of the situations. A fact we can witness when we compare the scene from the main incident ( in the oxygen tank) with the real audio footage of the astronauts report. And a situation also expressed by the real astronauts of the Apollo 13 flight. Amazingly we can hear on the historic audio tape that the astronauts were calm as hell, a fact that made my admiration for these men and the way they did their job even grow more. But that is more of a statement then a critic as I highly appreciated the excitement that is always on a peak but does not move the focus from other great parts of the film.

The integration of the scientific facts and explanation astonished me. First of all because it is not oversimplified for the film and almost all main problems and also little problems connected with the safety plan to return the astronauts were in a way present at the film.

Given the high amount of difficult film material according to this scientific situations, the film got the balance nearly perfect in my opinion. This is accomplished with the needed (scientific) facts explained by the old TV coverage footage, the great idea to also include the mission control room that much and making good scenes out of it.

The film even gains more respect when compared to modern space films like for example "The Martian". As the constant stress and struggle of the viewer who wants these astronauts to come back on earth, is held upward all the film look. By this the viewer as always the feeling everything can still go bad and is never sure of the anticipated save return. Even after the 3 rd watch it keeps me on the edge of my seat almost through the entire movie. Coming back to the example even though "The Martian" was a good movie I never really was worried for the main character. Something I can not say about Apollo 13.