Ivan Radford | On 15, Sep 2024

Director: Pete Middleton
Certificate: PG

Apollo 13. The name recalls not only the perilous Nasa voyage of 1970 but the Ron Howard film from 1995. That movie retold the events of the failed lunar landing with the comforting familiarity of a Hollywood prestige drama. Now, a new documentary takes a fresh look at the events of the mission – and the addition of the word “survival” into the title gives you a clue about what to expect. Not the end result of the miraculous effort to bring the crew (Fred Haise, Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert) back safely, but the tension every step along the way.

Director Pete Middleton (Notes on Blindness) and editor Otto Burnham (Formula 1: Drive to Survive) are no strangers to creatively crafting immersive stories from a range of materials, and they do an excellent job here of stitching together archives with reconstructions and representative footage from other missions. Whether it’s family photographs and home videos or close-ups of buttons being pressed, it’s a comprehensive and gripping drip-feed of the crisis as it unfolds.

There’s a clinical precision to the film’s assembly that matches the technical feat of Nasa’s out-of-the-box problem-solving, right down to the lack of talking heads to avoid puncturing the suspense. The effect elegantly emphasises the impossibility of reversing the critical oxygen and electrical levels, as the astronaut trio have to spend several days staying alive in a lunar landing module.

The result is a nerve-racking counterpart to the similarly awe-inspiring Apollo 11, and a grounded cousin to the drama of fiction gems The Martian and For All Mankind. If its Hollywood sibling from the 1990s has more emotional intensity, this is a riveting ride that functions as both scientific celebration and survival thriller.

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