The movie beautifully captures the crescendo of desperate problems that starts when an oxygen tank explodes, turning the mission into a race for survival in a deteriorating spacecraft hurtling amid cosmic forces. The screenplay by William Broyles Jr. and A1 Reinerr (with an uncredited polish by John Sayles), the direction by Ron Howard, the performances of a superb east, the technical magic (especially the reality of the weightless sequences) all work together with gripping effect. The movie takes just one major liberty with the facts, inventing a tense confrontation among astronauts Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), who had been a late replacement for Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise).
This unneeded Hollywood touch doesn’t spoil the integrity of an exciting and moving film. It’s also sad, an elegy for a union of vision and can-do that seems almost prehistoric. Hanks establishes an American model of brains, dreams and decency. And Ed Harris turns flight director Gene Kranz, controlling and mediating a flood of ideas and solutions, into a figure that goes beyond mission control. He’s a prototype–for an ideal president to handle the spaceship of state.
