Apollo 13 (1995), for probably the 6th or 7th time.
Ron Howard's masterpiece, imho, but I wouldn't fight with supporters of some of his other movies. afaik, the story and the science are reasonably accurate, and like 2015's
The Martian, it makes the math nerds the heroes. Unlike that one, this is based on a true story. I don't think any of the historical footage was altered, but I guess I wouldn't know. The stones it takes to go to space is kind of stunning, when you stop to think about it, and doubly-so with 1960s technology. There's a scene where Jim Lovell/Tom Hanks is making calculations to burn some fuel or something, and they didn't even have pocket calculators, they just had six guys at Mission Control with pencils and slide-rules checking his math. For a movie that doesn't have a lot of action, it does have a tremendous amount of tension, which doesn't really dissipate very much with repeat viewings. I wasn't alive for the Apollo 1 disaster, but I do remember the Challenger. This [stuff] is no joke. I believe the movie's two most-famous lines are real. Gene Kranz's famous white vest is actually in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum today, which is sort of bizarre and cool at the same time.
Memorable lines:
- "Houston, we have a problem" is of course the movie's signature quote.
- "You, sir, are a steely-eyed missile-man" may be the 2nd-most famous line.
- "We now live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It wasn't a miracle. We just decided to do it."
- "We gotta make this fit in a slot made for this, using nothing but that." Okay, that line means nothing if you haven't seen the movie, but I love the whole 'McGuyver' thing of smart people trying to do something preposterous.
- "I don't care what anything was designed to do; I want to know what it can do." There, that line makes more sense out of context. Same thing, engineers trying to make a dumptruck fly, with duct tape and Saran Wrap.
- "Don't you worry, dear. If they could put wings on a washing machine, my Jimmy could land it." And with all the talk of the engineers and mathematicians, let's not forget about the pilots, who basically strapped themselves to a 10-story bullet and fired it into the sky. It sounds like something from an episode of Jackass, except 3 guys had already burned alive trying it.
- "Get ready for a little jolt, fellas." To put it mildly.
The film's rather glaring Achilles Heel is especially stark today, that it's very male and very white, but I don't know if that's not historically accurate. Maybe there really were no black people or women in Mission Control back then. 2016's
Hidden Figures might be a good companion piece, if you wanted to do a double-feature (I don't think any of my streaming services has that one, unfortunately).