Sometimes, a really great story needs telling more than once. Here’s our Apollo 13: Survival review.
The first problem with making a documentary about the Apollo 13 mission is Ron Howard’s already stolen the best title. The second problem is he stole most of the facts, too. With a story as remarkable as this one, the Oscar-winning drama took surprisingly few liberties with the source material – any documentary runs the risk of remaking the 1995 classic with less Tom Hanks in it.
Apollo 13: Survival isn’t immune to either problem. It doesn’t offer much in the way of a new angle, and despite using plenty of never-before-seen footage, shocking revelations and new insights are pretty few and far between. It’s a testament to Peter Middleton’s skill as a director and the power of the story itself that the result is still consistently thrilling when we know plenty of the details already.
Assuming you’ve somehow avoided said details before – and realistically it seems few people will be approaching the new documentary without some appreciation of the mission and its legacy – the documentary follows the story of three astronauts (Fred Haise, Jack Swigert and the mission’s commander, Jim Lovell) as they prepare and carry out either the luckiest or unluckiest moon mission in the history of spaceflight (which side you fall on really depends on your perspective on life).
When an onboard explosion drains their craft of most of its power, oxygen and functional landing apparatus, Lovell and his team are forced to use grit, spit and a whole lot of fancy space duct-tape to get themselves home. It is, not to be too hyperbolic, a really, really good story.
Survival wisely restricts itself almost entirely to archive footage, with recreations limited to the odd distractingly clean-shot button press and close-ups of big flashing warning lights (as you might imagine, there’s a few of them). Instead, we see plenty of previously unseen shots of Jim Lovell and his wife, Marilyn, who forms the focus of much of the documentary’s 98 minutes.
With an emphasis on the event’s human drama over NASA’s technical wizardry, Survival wisely takes what makes the story of Apollo 13 so compelling and runs with it. It wraps up plenty of what we’ve seen before and crams it into a tight, breathlessly paced documentary – it might not be rocket science, but its emotional impact is still a little bit like magic.
Apollo 13: Survival arrives on Netflix 5th September.
