Editor Reviews:

Description:
Nominated for nine Academy Awards , including Best Picture, Apollo 13 is now available in an incredible 2 -Disc Anniversary Edition with never-before-seen bonus materials. Produced by Academy Award winner Brian Grazer and directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard, Apollo 13 stars Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris in the inspiring and riveting story of the real-life space flight that gripped a nation and changed the world.

Amazon.com essential video:
NASA's worst nightmare turned into one of the space agency's most heroic moments in 1970, when the Apollo 13 crew was forced to hobble home in a disabled capsule after an explosion seriously damaged the moon-bound spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton play (respectively) astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise in director Ron Howard's intense, painstakingly authentic docudrama. The Apollo 13 crew and Houston-based mission controllers race against time and heavy odds to return the damaged spacecraft safely to Earth from a distance of 205,500 miles. Using state-of-the-art special effects and ingenious filmmaking techniques, Howard and his stellar cast and crew build nail-biting tension while maintaining close fidelity to the facts. The result is a fitting tribute to the Apollo 13 mission and one of the biggest box-office hits of 1995. --Jeff Shannon

Amazon.com:
Relying primarily on actual footage shot by NASA and by news organizations, this video documents the drama of the aborted Apollo 13 mission, in which three astronauts came close to losing their lives in space. The actual recording of commander Jim Lovell telling Houston about the "problem" made famous in the Hollywood version of Apollo 13 is presented, and the scenes showing distressed engineers in the actual control room in Houston are in some ways much more dramatic than anything seen on the big screen. This is, after all, reality, with real people scrambling under intense pressure to save real lives. Besides the footage inside mission control, the video also showcases invaluable flight footage shot by the astronauts aboard the crippled spaceship. This video takes an essentially chronological approach, but the technique of using the crew's postflight news conference to serve as narration, while it is at first confusing, serves a useful purpose. This is a no-frills production, but the excitement as NASA engineers mobilize and the whole world watches the news about the stricken spaceship is so gripping that any flourishes would only seem to get in the way. --Robert J. McNamara

Rating : - Great movie, great DVD, great price - how can you go wrong?
It seems impossible to think that an Oscar-nominated film (in several major categories) could be considered "under-rated." But this is certainly the case with Apollo 13. Perhaps Ron Howard's best film, it is an exciting, harrowing, and ultimately rewarding film-watching experience that doesn't let you down on repeated viewings. Howard brings out the most in his cast - the casual viewer will be surprised at the depth and nuance the performances of Gary Sinese and Bill Paxton. This is also Kevin Bacon's breakout role (with Mystic River). I would even go so far as to say this might be Tom Hanks greatest performance - yes, even better than "Philadelphia", "Forrest Gump", or "Saving Private Ryan" (it is most similar to the last, perhaps unsurprisingly as his Apollo 13 character is an Air Force officer). But the performances are only part of the puzzle. The filming - much of it in sets built for microgravity filming in a NASA training plane - is a remarkable feat of cinematic sleight of hand, and I am still shocked and dismayed that Howard did not win the "best director" Oscar. There has never been a movie that uses special effects so effectively as this one.

The story is likely well-known to most: the 3rd American mission to the moon suffers a catestrophic failure when a fuel cell blows up, leaving the three astronauts aboard with little power and no hope of rescue. Howard dishes out the drama in stages, as first the oxygen tanks leak out, to the temperature dropping, to erratic course corrections, to gradual poisoning of the atmosphere on the ship by respired carbon dioxide. He does not neglect the peripheral members of the NASA team, and pays special attention to Lovell's wife and family. The IMAX version, some 15 minutes shorter, is also included on this Anniversary Edition. It's instructive to note that the longer version is a more effective film, since he spends more time developing the relationships that allow us to care for the characters.

For those that have seen the movie many times, I would direct them to the making-of features as a reason to buy this bargain-priced DVD. Of most interest to me was the audio commentary by Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell. He is candid about where the film fails to accurately portray either the science or the details of the actual mission, while Ron Howard's commentary explains why these changes were made cinematically (as an example - the film shows Mattingly in the simulator exclusively, while in reality there were three simulators and teams of astronauts working in them all simultaneously). Lovell's wife Marilyn (portrayed by Kathleen Quinlin in the film) is also part of the commentary, and her input is equally valuable. One amusing part is the discussion of miniskirts:

Jim: "Hey, they dressed Kathleen in miniskirts through this whole movie. Did you really wear them that much?"
Marilyn: "Well, it was the style at the time..."

To sum up, this is a 5-star movie on a 5-star DVD.