Apollo 13 (1995)
- Ron Howard originally wanted a completely different ending for the film, but test audiences preferred the one we see today.
- The original script for Apollo 13 was written over a decade before production finally began in 1995.
- Many of the practical effects used in the climax were achieved without any CGI.
Apollo 13 is a 1995 American space docudrama directed by Ron Howard, depicting the harrowing true story of the aborted 1970 lunar mission. Tom Hanks stars as Commander Jim Lovell, Kevin Bacon as pilot Jack Swigert, and Bill Paxton as lunar module pilot Fred Haise, whose routine moon-landing mission becomes a desperate struggle for survival when an oxygen tank explodes 200,000 miles from Earth, crippling the spacecraft and leaving the three astronauts in a freezing, carbon-dioxide-filling command module with dwindling power and a rapidly closing window to return home alive. Ed Harris plays Gene Kranz, the flight director at Mission Control in Houston who declares "failure is not an option" and leads his team through an impossible engineering challenge to bring the crew home.
Ron Howard's direction recreated the experience of spaceflight with meticulous detail โ the actors trained in NASA's "Vomit Comet" aircraft to film genuine weightlessness sequences, and the mission control set was an exact replica of the 1970 facility. Apollo 13 earned $355 million worldwide and received nine Academy Award nominations, winning two for Best Film Editing and Best Sound.
