The Synthesis: Apollo 13 (Episode 1)

Today we’ll be dicussing Apollo 13 in our first episode of The Synthesis. 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕪𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕚𝕤 is a live talk show that aims to find the relationship between science and fiction in pop culture. We’ll discuss a book, movie, or show each week that’s science-focused and talk about just how realistic it is, where reality is cooler than fiction, and exactly where certain liberties were taken.

In the inaugural episode of The Synthesis, TerraGenesis creators Alexander Winn and Lacey Hannan discuss the science behind the Apollo 13 movie, how close the Apollo 13 movie got to the real life mission, and how the entire ordeal shaped the future of space travel.

Transcript below if you’d prefer to read through this episode of The Synthesis.

[00:00:03]

Hey, folks, this is Alexander Winn. Hi, I’m Lacey Hannan, and we are the co-founders of Edgeworks Entertainment and the creators of the video game Terra Genesis. And we’re here with our new show called The Synthesis, where we investigate pop culture like movies and TV shows and video games and how they portray realistic science and realistic history.

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And books, he forgot books were going to do those, too, I like to read, so I can’t let you forget that we’re going to be talking about both the quality of the product, what did we like, what did we not like?

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And we’re also going to be talking about how did it portray events that really happened or realistic scientific principles and integrate them to the story being told.

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And now our credentials are mostly that, well, hey, we have a video game company, so we end it. We do science here.

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Lacey and I both came up in Hollywood, though. Yes, we both studied film and acting in different ways, and we both worked in Hollywood and we kind of fell sideways into video games. So this is sort of getting back to our roots.

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Yes. So I just recognize we will be talking about the acting, the writing, the lighting, that all of it, and the real science, the real history, all that they work together.

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Yeah. What’s anything else that we need to tell them about?

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It doesn’t know. We’re married.

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You need to know that I don’t know if that is a warning or if that is something that you are going to celebrate alongside us, but just recognize that that is the relationship here. So if it gets awkward or awesome, that why. That’s why.

[00:01:49]

So today we’re going to be talking about Apollo 13, which I had never seen before. I had never seen before. So with that in mind, would you like to give us a quick back of the box recap?

[00:02:02]

Well, I will start with this movie is not about the challenger.

The Synthesis

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It’s true, we’ve got we’ve got real facts here, so I get excited because there isn’t a teacher on board and it doesn’t explode.

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So it’s worth mentioning Lacey has a thing about disasters in space. Don’t like them, don’t like them. So she has always avoided Apollo 13. I so she didn’t really know much.

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I don’t really know my space or my NASA history, which I really should learn sometime.

START OF TRANSCRIPT

[00:02:38]

And I would have picked it up by osmosis at this point, you’d think.

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But like, I really came into this going man, it’s so early and Tom Hanks career for him to die like this is going to be weird to watch. Have we ever seen that? So anyway, that’s not what this movie is. This movie is what year?

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What year is it? Movie came out in nineteen ninety nine. What does Apollo 13 take off. I don’t know. OK, well then we’re, we’re doing great.

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So anyway, it’s a it’s based on a true story about Apollo 13. They were supposed to be the they were supposed to do the second third moon.

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Well OK. But as we know, only one part, one group did it. So, um. Anyway, they were supposed to do that, didn’t work out so well, everything went wrong, like everything, that’s the log line, everything went wrong.

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Apollo 13. Everything went wrong. But anyway, I don’t really think you have to know much more about it. I mean, you should probably watch it. It’s pretty good. I can actually tell you that it’s worth watching despite it being about a space disaster.

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Yes. All right. So some quick facts released in nineteen ninety five, directed by Ron Howard, written by Bill Broyles and Al Reiner Reiner, and based on a book written partially by Jim Lovell.

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So this was semiautobiographical, an incredible cast, incredible cast.

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We’ve got Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise and Kathleen Quinlan.

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And they’re all awesome. Uh, we it was nominated for a whole bunch of Academy Awards. I think it won two of them. It won best editing and best sound design. But there were some acting. It was it was up for best picture, lost out to Braveheart and yeah.

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Budget of fifty two million and made three hundred and fifty five million. So definitely they did all right. Yeah. Yeah.

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One interesting thing before we get into it that I read as I was doing some research is apparently it was written with Kevin Costner in mind for the Tom Hanks role, apparently because he is he physically resembles Jim Lovell so much. And do we know why that switch happened? I don’t know why he didn’t get it, but apparently the studio was more interested in somebody else.

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And there’s a quote that I found that I couldn’t find any more information on, but I was so intrigued, which is ultimately Hanks was cast instead in that role because of his knowledge of Apollo and space history. So he’s a nerd, too, so apparently, I mean, I knew he was a huge World War Two nerd, but apparently he might also be a space nerd and apparently it might have gotten him the role, which is just so charming.

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Well, he’s charming, so that makes sense.

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Yes. Also worth mentioning, Gary Sinise was invited by Ron Howard to read for any of the characters he wanted, and he picked the character of Madingley.

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So he did a. Awesome job, excellent job. All right, shall we start?

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So, yeah, so first off, what did you think overall before we start getting into the nitty gritty, like you, I had seen this movie several times and I knew what I was getting into.

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What what’s your I had a whole top sheet taking that a whole journey around this movie. So do you want do you want the final thought or like do you want the little the overall thought.

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The like what’s what’s the general. Thumbs up. Thumbs down.

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Uh, definite thumbs up. Yeah. I actually give it two thumbs up for the entirety of the movie and I give it a one thumbs sideways for the first 30 minutes.

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All right. Which I found real boring. Well then let’s talk about the first 30 minutes, OK? OK, so one of the first things you see is they go through what was Apollo, which one? Apollo one that had everybody burned alive, which is horrifying.

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Yeah, that’s actually the first note that I had, too, which was interesting that they’re starting with stuff goes wrong at NASA sometimes is literally the first beat of the film.

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And one of the first images you see is like this inverse Titanic shot where instead of like this beautiful, sexy and handprints on a condensed way. No, no. It is a an astronaut’s glove inside of the shuttle. And and there is fire behind them and they can’t get out.

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And it is horrifying. It’s like, what is this? What are we going to get do? So at that point, I knew I’d cry at some point.

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So for those of you who don’t know, interesting little history tidbit, Apollo one. The astronauts actually died in the in the training simulator. It wasn’t even in the thing they were they were simulating the flight and the console caught fire. And Apollo one was back in the day when NASA was experimenting with using pure oxygen environments. And because because the thought was humans can survive perfectly well. Earth’s air is twenty one percent oxygen and the rest is basically just filler. It’s nitrogen, which does nothing. And so the NASA was experimenting with the idea of instead of having full pressure with twenty one percent oxygen, you could have twenty one percent pressor, one hundred percent oxygen. And it’s just as good for the human body. But when that happened, when Apollo one happened, that fire spread so quickly in an all oxygen environment that they didn’t have time to react and all of the astronauts died. And that’s why NASA stopped doing all oxygen.

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So why did Apollo 13 lie to us or did the movie lie to us? Because I was under the impression that. The astronauts died right before liftoff. They were on the launch pad.

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It didn’t lie. It was just kind of ambiguous. They don’t. It’s the whole thing is under like music and voice over. And it just shows a bunch of astronauts in a capsule pressing buttons and then a fire. And so they don’t sort of comment one way or another whether it was an actual flight or a simulator flight. It was a.

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Well, I feel like they lied to me and I feel like like Tom Hanks lied to his son later in the movie.

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We will get it, because now I have feelings about it. OK, so, I mean, the.

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Two things that I got right off the bat, um, is that Tom Hanks is a terrible driver.

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He doesn’t multiple times. And for someone who’s supposed to be able to pilot really well, he rides like a jerk. Astronauts are kind of famous for, you know, but Tom Hanks does not play the arrogant astronaut in this movie whatsoever.

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But the US also Kevin Bacon has the least subtle like. Sexual innuendo joke I have ever heard, like it wasn’t it wasn’t even innuendo.

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No, it was just like it was just an illustration. It was like here’s a diagram of what I want to do later tonight.

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Oh, it was yeah. There was so much like male seeping off the screen.

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That being said, I do think that the very beginning, those first few scenes, they did a really good job of setting up the yearning of establishing just how much these guys want to go to space. And they really kind of established the the stakes of going to the moon. Guys, this isn’t some intellectual exercise or even a matter of patriotism. This is like their life’s dream and you’ve got that within a couple of minutes, which was awesome.

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It’s it is always awesome seeing people be passionate about something. Right. And like, even in that sexual reference, like or illustration, whatever you want to call it, like, he is obviously incredibly intelligent and incredibly passionate. And yes, he wants to have sex with this woman, but he’s using the space.

[00:10:56]

Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of telling that he’s not just giving her a pick up where he’s describing a docking procedure, why it’s so dorky.

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But like I mean, you guys in any like anything we want, this is going to be true for me. I love watching people be really passionate about things, even if it’s incredibly nerdy and dorky, which is a big reason. I think I got married.

[00:11:25]

Yeah. Love me, those nerds.

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Ok, I will say before we move on from this, because it happened in the same scene, I did not remember. There’s a there’s a certain line when when Lovell and his wife are sitting on in the backyard and looking up at the moon, there’s a line that he says, which just sort of captured my heart because I feel like it’s sort of the mission statement, not only of Apollo 13, but of the entire space race. And even Terra Genesis and even EDG Works is sort of our tagline. He’s talking about landing on the moon. He’s talking about Neil Armstrong. He’s up there right now. They’re looking up at the moon. And he says it’s not a miracle.

Apollo 13

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We just decided to go. Yeah. And that is such a perfect line for science, like it’s not some magical thing, we just decided to do it. I wrote it down to, um. So the full quote is, from now on, we live in a world where we’ve gone to the moon. It’s not a miracle. We just decided to go. Yeah. And I just. Oh, I loved it. It was it was really powerful to me because I feel like that is always how innovation works. Yes, innovation is rarely accidental. I mean, obviously, science can have big accidents, but some so much of what even takes it takes to get to those accidents are there’s so much purpose behind it. And so I thought it was really beautiful.

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I thought that was an incredible line. It’s also sort of a commentary on what you’re about to see in Apollo 13, because the whole point of this movie is solving problems.

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And at no point in this movie do they just kind of throw up their hands and say, we’ll see what happens. They are always coming back to this sort of focused, determined work. The problem, figure out how we’re going to do this, make your own luck. It’s really sort of the mantra of NASA throughout the entire film.

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One of the other things that I liked from the beginning of this was, OK, first of all, footage of us walking on the moon will never get old for me. It will always make me tear up like my I’m choking up right now. I, I will always love it. Yeah. Um, but the other thing that I really liked, uh, you know, we understand that the. Wives of these astronauts and the families go through so much like I mean, you think of it with military families, like all of the people who are at home are having, like, nervous breakdowns or they’re, you know, worried all the time or whatever. Stressful and how I love how they expressed hers. It wasn’t cliched at all. She says something along the lines of I just vacuumed over and over again. And I was like, it’s funny, but you can totally see it as like she needed to do something. Yeah. And I thought it was just a real clever way of showing her character not nominated for best supporting actress, by the way. Well, she did a great job. Those redheads, they’re great.

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She did a great job.

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And worth mentioning, she did a great job in a role that you sort of didn’t have to do a great job like that, that with a lesser actress, that could have just been hand-wringing for two hours. But she really had some great moments, even in scenes where she’s just sitting on the floor. She’s she’s conveying along. Yeah.

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So then we kind of move into this area where he’s giving a tour to politicians and whatever. And really the only thing that I have to. To say about the scene is those damn politicians, they’re such jerks like the like he said, he says something about, you know, Tom Hanks, his character level. Is that what his name is? Yeah. He is supposed to be on Apollo 14. He’s not even supposed to be on this mission. And this politician says if there is an Apollo 14 and I was like, dude, this is his dream.

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Keep your mouth shut. Why are you a jackass? I just sorry.

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I was I was so floored that anybody would be like, I’m going to try and wreck your dreams.

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Fun fact. By the way, that politician is played by horror director Roger Corman, who was something of a mentor to Ron Howard and

all throughout the film industry. And he sort of had kind of an Alfred Hitchcock thing where he would show up in cameos in various movies. Really? Yeah. So Roger Corman, have you ever seen a Roger Corman film?

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He’s that jerk politician from that 13. Fascinating and weird. Yeah, I don’t know. Half.

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So we do.

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I found myself absolutely marveling at the simulator that they use because it’s all analog. And obviously this is, you know, the early 70s. It’s not they would not have digital simulations or anything like that. But I just as somebody who has spent a lot of hours designing simulations of space, I was watching them like carefully moving joysticks. And then it cuts to this tiny little lipstick camera moving toward a wooden model. And it just blew my mind. You know, people talk all the time about the fact that we landed on the moon with, you know, computers that had less processing power than a graphing calculator. And it just kind of reminded me of that, that you’re sitting in this incredibly sophisticated system that’s got like wooden models.

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He says at one point during the tour, computers that fit in one room. And we both kind of giggled because, like, it’s just so far removed from our reality. Exactly. So, yeah.

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So I’ve got a question for you. And I would go to your launch. Would you come to my launch?

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I would go to your launch now, say it gets better because his wife does, in fact, go to the launch.

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But there’s a scene in there in their car where she talks about not wanting to go to launch. And it’s so heartbreaking because you see his face fall and it’s just, oh, now see, here’s the deal.

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I totally understand her. And, you know, apparently she is one of the few that goes to has gone to all of the launches. And I. I get it. It would be so there would be so much anxiety that I just I don’t know, I, I get it. But that’s the one where he was supposed to go to the moon. So I. You got to be there. Yeah, I would I would go.

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There is another in the world of sort of background research. Funny thing that I learned. There’s a particularly memorable scene where all the astronauts are standing on one side of a street and all of their families are standing on the other side of the street because they don’t want to get them sick. And apparently that is a NASA tradition, but it started after Apollo 13. So that’s a little bit of an anachronism. It started with the space shuttle era.

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So, yeah, it’s Roback, I. I do have to say, I was getting a little annoyed that they hit 13 over and over and over again. So everyone’s commenting on how it’s Apollo 13 and why they have to name it Apollo 13. And I think he even says because it comes after 12. Yeah. Which it was a funny line, but for whatever reason, it really felt like in a lot of ways they weren’t giving away the story except for in the writing, but not in the lighting of it, not in the sound design of it. Like not in the editing of it. There were lots of things that were going, OK, maybe this movie’s not going to just be terrifying in trouble.

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And so, yeah, I think they were definitely expecting that most people in the audience knew where this was going, at least a little.

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Listen, I don’t like disaster movies and I don’t like disaster in space movies.

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So next time I will look up, I will go to Wikipedia and find out what things are about. I’ve only done this once before and I actually vowed I would never do it again. I don’t know why I went into this blind because nobody would have expected me to be blind.

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I do have a little bit of good news for you, which is there’s a scene early in the film where there’s a nightmare where he gets sucked out into space. There’s his wife. Yeah. There’s also a scene where she loses her wedding ring in the shower. Good news. Both of those happened, but she got her ring back. She was able to fish the fish, the ring out of the drain just a little bit now.

[00:20:03]

Ok, it’s a bit of good news. I think that would have they should have added that. Yeah, because that would have actually set up what happens because when he says she almost loses him. Yeah, it does, because he says to her, you can’t live without me. And then she goes back to the hotel and loses her wedding ring. And I’m sitting here going, oh, no, he’s going to die, Tom. They’re going to kill off Tom Hanks. And then she’s not going to have, like, the wedding ring, the the symbol that most people want to have and keep forever if their spouse dies, like, oh, this is horrible. So her having gotten it back, would have maybe put me at ease just a little bit. But

then again, putting lives was not their goal. But they weren’t trying to terrify me like, say, gravity or some of the other movies like space disaster movies. So they could have. I think so, too.

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Danny, Ron Howard. So do you have anything else before the launch? Um, let’s see here.

[00:21:01]

Oh. Yes, I do, I do. Oh, I thought Henkes made some really great points about switching out the crew. Um, I, I decided in watching all of this that I really want more team movies. I, I loved this not because there was one genius and they were the he was the only person who could pull it off. No, no, no. I love that everybody in the room knows what they’re doing and it’s redundant and like there’s competence porn in teams.

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Yes. It’s that same West Wing, that same West Wing kind of thing, like really everything Aaron Sorkin writes. But yeah.

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Yes. And so, like for me, when he was here, when he said, you know, we know each other’s voices. We know we know like every little detail and body language. Yeah. And I’m sitting here going, he’s right.

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And then they do a really good job of setting it up. As soon as Kevin Bacon’s in the chair, it feels awkward. Yeah. Like it does not feel like they’re in sync.

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Mm hmm. Um, so there was that part. And then the other thing was when they when they have like the stressful moments, their calm voices that everyone does, which they use proficiently throughout this movie, the calm voices are both terrifying. And incredible like I there’s the amount of training you would have to have to be able to manage your stress so well, to be able to keep your voice at that level at all times. And like, no matter what’s happening, I don’t know. I was. I was just I was blown away and it kind of freaked me out. Yeah. So that’s what I have to say. Before the before that.

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Before the launch. Before the launch. Yeah. All right. So half an hour into the movie, The Rocket takes off and we are officially starting the story of Apollo 13, as Lacey and I were watching it. The Apple TV freezes at that point and has to buffer. And Lacy, who thought that this was a movie about the Challenger disaster, looks at the timeline and goes, wait, how are we only this far into the moon?

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I also didn’t understand how everyone could think this movie was incredible at this point because it was so slow. Yeah. And so I was I was having issues and I had maybe a little bit of an outburst. I’m sorry that you won’t be seeing today.

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Too bad. So they get into space.

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And one of the things that I remember the best about this entire film is the zero G sequences. This is by far the best zero G stuff from any movie ever. And it’s because they did it for real. Apparently, Ron Howard was really worried about having his guys on wires because it always just looks awkward. And it like if you if you watch the movie, you can tell they’re moving sort of from their center of mass because that’s where the harness is connecting. They don’t sort of tumble and do all the things that you do. And apparently his friend Steven Spielberg suggested that he get the KC 135, which is a jet plane, which goes it basically does like a roller coaster. You get in this jet plane and it’s got a huge fuselage that’s just empty. And they take the plane up and up and up and up and up like a roller coaster.

[00:24:27]

And then they just nose dive toward the ground and you’re inside this plane. And from an external reference, the plane is flying straight toward the ground. But from inside, compared to the walls, it’s zero g and you can just float around and bounce off the walls. And Lacey’s having a panic attack. Oh, my God. And so that’s how they were able to simulate zero G. But here’s the funny thing, and I can distract you by tapping into your actress for a moment. It only works for 23 seconds at a time. So all of those sequences, because otherwise you hit the ground.

Apollo 13

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Yes, because Earth comes up fast. Exactly.

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Ok, so every scene throughout the film that you see of those three guys in the capsule where they’re floating around and stuff is drifting around, that’s not computer generated. That is actually like when they’re drinking juice, the juice is actually flying up and getting on Kevin Bacon space, but they’re doing it 23 seconds at a time.

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There were no long takes, everything had to be choppy, which is why they probably did it as the broadcast stuff, because then they don’t have to have it be one like attempt to make it look like one tape.

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True. But I mean, through the film, like to the very end, everything they do in the capsule, they have those kind of things.

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So they filmed it all. Twenty three seconds at a time.

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I’m sure there were some scenes where nobody was floating and so they were able to film it on the ground. But any time you see anybody floating around or zero G.

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So my thought was. As soon as as soon as liftoff happened. If anything goes wrong, I’m blaming Kevin Bacon, and I was she said it out loud. Yeah, yeah, I it wasn’t his fault.

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It seemed like it was his fault. But in the final analysis, in the in the thing that they did, they they ultimately revealed that it was he was the rookie. Yeah.

[00:27:48]

So I’m blaming her for in the name of hazing. We’re going to blame Kevin Bacon because, you know, he’s just connected to too many people. That’s that’s really the problem with with Kevin Bacon. He’s connected to too many.

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I will say that one of my other thoughts when as soon as we saw Ed Harris was, man, this dude always gives me the creeps and there’s no way around it. And you want to know what? By the end of this movie, he stopped giving me the creeps.

[00:28:18]

Hey, I know you’re not afraid of it, Harris, anymore. It’s amazing, right?

[00:28:23]

So that was hey, if nothing else, Apollo 13 will help you get over your Ed Harris phobias.

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Phobias. Yeah. Oh.

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The other thing is this movie is just here to reinforce superstitions. What do you mean? The 13 oh, yes, they hit it, they hit it so hard, and so I just had I just had to get that in there.

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I will say this. So we so we go up into space and we’re floating around and they do this great scene where they’re making a broadcast.

[00:29:00]

And I have to say they do a really good job of making you sort of righteously indignant that the news broadcasts aren’t even covering it anymore. At one point, they say going to the moon is as exciting as going to Pittsburgh. And I was like, I’m sitting here, you know, 50 years later and I’m still disagree with that shit with old.

[00:29:19]

And you skipped a thing for me. OK, so before they even get to the broadcast part, there’s a moment where there’s an alarm that’s going off. And it was just driving me bonkers. And Hanks says we’ve had our glitch for the mission. And this dude like chuckles to himself, like under his breath, it was very ominous.

[00:29:43]

And I was like, yeah, like, see, who doesn’t know what’s coming is like, wait, did they just did they not just have their glitch for the mission was like I mean, I recognized drama has to happen.

[00:29:52]

That is storytelling. Duh. But like the. He just had to scare me, it just didn’t even mean to, but but, yes, I’m good at that. The Cancela, like all of the stations canceling their broadcasts. Yeah. It was just like humiliating. Yeah. And depressing.

[00:30:13]

Sort of set them up as underdogs, which like, how do you make a NASA astronaut going on his way to land on the moon, an underdog, but somehow they did. And then all of a sudden these guys are, you know, the the ones to root for. I will say as soon as the chaos breaks out. That movie did a surprisingly good job of balancing chaos without disorientation like they were.

[00:30:39]

They were doing fast cuts and swiping across panels and lights were turning on and we were cutting down to mission control and they were all freaking out. But I never felt like what is happening, right? Like I never got lost. I was following, oh, this guy is over here doing this. This guy’s checking a clipboard. They’re all reporting things. I was I was tracking everything. And it sort of it leaned into that competence porn like you were talking about the sense that everybody in the room is really good at what they do. And so this is urgent, but it’s not uncontrolled. It’s just working the problem really fast.

[00:31:17]

One of the other things that I noticed with this movie is I never felt like the science was lost. And I think it’s because they often cut to people who are explaining it really well. So it’s I don’t feel like we’re going to have a lot to. I’m not going to have a lot to say about the real science of this, because they do such a good job of explaining it as they’re going. That I was I was really impressed.

[00:31:41]

And that’s actually the next note I have on my list is it’s amazing how they made watching gages and doing math riveting, like even more than The Martian, which I usually hold up as sort of the gold standard of how to make science cool. This movie, you know, with The Martian, he’s usually describing something he has just done. He’s he’s just explaining it to you. But this movie, you’re just sitting there watching a dial.

[00:32:07]

Yes, slowly drop and then it stops dropping and you’re like or and then it keeps dropping and you’re like, oh, and it’s so exciting.

[00:32:15]

Or you’re watching Tom Hanks freeze to death and he’s doing math and he’s erasing it.

[00:32:21]

And you’re like, no, Donna, you’ve got to figure it out. And like, I got to go faster. Exactly. Like you’re literally just watching a guy do his homework and it’s so exciting.

[00:32:30]

And then he he asks for everybody else on. Yeah. You know, math leads team to double check his work.

[00:32:38]

And I would like to go and I was like, great panning shot of the camera going down a counter as like six guys are all jotting down what he’s saying and doing the math to double and triple or quadruple and quintuple check his work. Yeah, yeah.

[00:32:51]

I, I had like I kind of said this earlier, but I have to say it again. Watching the redundancy that happened there was phenomenal when they were like, you know, normally it takes three hours to do to put up the LEM. Yeah. Yeah. And you have fifteen minutes to do it. There was something incredibly sexy about the idea that they were going to actually manage to do it, because usually it takes three hours because there’s so much redundancy, there’s so much double checking, there’s so much of all of that. But these are professionals who are going to actually move out of their comfort zone and manage to do it at the top of their game. Right. Just I was just like, awesome. It floored me to watch. But it’s on both sides of it’s the guys up in space and it’s actually it’s also the guys in control and mission control. And I was just like, dang, just watching all of them be there working as a team again. Like, I just want more team films because it’s so cool to watch.

[00:33:55]

People work together and figure things out and not agree on things, the yelling that they did at each other, oh my God, and I was solving problems like there’s so much, you know, so many movies, even movies that are ostensibly science movies are actually about interpersonal conflict. Like if you were to really boil this story down, this is a story about two guys who hate each other. It’s a story about a love triangle. It’s, you know, whatever. And there’s you know, when you live in Hollywood, like we do when you work in Hollywood, you go to these writing classes and they talk about how everything is about human relationships. You have to base everything in human relationships. And that’s one of those things that’s mostly true. But I desperately want more movies like Apollo 13, like The Martian, like like, you know, there are a few stories out there that are about solving the problem. Yeah. And about these people coming together and working the problem. And obviously, in individual scenes, there are moments where two characters are butting heads. But the central through line of the story is here’s a series of crises, fix them.

Apollo 13

[00:34:58]

I will say with The Martian that they actually do it a little bit differently, because in The Martian, everybody is like there’s one genius they can fix. Yeah, like the Martian is a story of specialists. Yeah. And I don’t love that story as much in comparison to the story of a team who the only way that they got through this is there are so many people that know all of the same information, but they’re also tired. So it’s all about like who remembers what at any given moment?

[00:35:29]

And they do a great job of interweaving little personal details. You know, like everybody is a professional. Everybody’s here. They’re kind of all clones in the sense that they’re all wearing the short sleeve button up shirt with the black tie. But this guy over here won’t shut up about sort of covering his ass to make sure everybody knows that the engines weren’t designed for this because he’s clearly

a little bit of a coward when it comes to his career. And then over here is the doctor who is just a little bit off, I guess, and doesn’t get the fact that this is a crisis and they can’t work exactly to the manual. And all the different characters had their own little twist and they were professionals.

[00:36:09]

Yes. And one of the I think one of the awesome things that whenever we’ve gotten to have a larger team of like multiple devs is the only way to have something work super smoothly is when you have more than one idea as the input. You’ve got multiple heads working on the same problem. And that’s what we got to see in this. And I love that.

[00:36:30]

You know, that’s an interesting thing. I think I never thought about this before, but I think you’re right. I think I probably enjoyed Apollo 13 differently before you and I started Imageworks, because before we started EDG Works, this was a story about astronauts and, you know, all that kind of stuff. But since then, I have a feeling that I am subconsciously connecting with Ed Harris a little bit more because we have a team and we have had, you know, bugs that we have to immediately jump on and fix.

[00:36:59]

And obviously, it’s nothing on the scale of Apollo.

[00:37:01]

The stakes are a little bit lower. Yeah, but the I would agree with you, right, again, if you’re watching.

[00:37:07]

But it’s one of those things that, like you said, the the sort of the camaraderie of problem solving is something that has I mean, when you start a company and you’ve got employees, that is your life. And that’s a big part of the story.

[00:37:20]

So, yeah, one of my favorite moments was when the when they were all in the little room arguing down at Mission Control and. One of the guys says we have to have this under, you know, we have to have everything running on 12, we’ve got 12 volts or 12 amps. Well, that’s right. Yeah, that’s what it is. And. And everyone is like, what? No, no, no. And he goes, No, I’ve been looking at this for an hour. And again, it comes back to you have all these incredibly intelligent human beings, but it’s there’s so much happening. You have to have so many eyes on the problem. And he has his eye on this problem.

[00:38:03]

And and as soon as he says, I’ve been working on this for an hour, everybody kind of shuts up. Yeah. Like there’s not it’s it’s similar to something that I say about Star Trek a lot, which is especially Star Trek, The Next Generation, which is sort of my home base. There are so many opportunities where another show would have had characters kind of backbiting or like going behind each other’s backs or talking to the captain, being like, do you think he’s really up for this? Or, you know, anything like that? But in Star Trek, everybody kind of respects everybody else’s professionalism. And even if this episode is about somebody screwing up, it’s not held against them forever. Yeah, and the same way in this in this movie, like, there is one moment where the astronauts kind of start to doubt that maybe mission control might not have their back. But for the most part, when the expert says, I’ve done the math, Ed Harris nods and goes, OK, what do we do next? And there’s no back biting or or any of that kind of stuff.

[00:39:03]

Yeah, I it was it was super awesome. And going back to the the flight surgeon, I just have to I just have to call this out real quick. You guys, we love Christian Clemson. He is the one who plays Dr. Chuck, but he was also on Boston Legal and he he is incredible actor. This guy is phenomenal. And I could I could watch him all day, but his voice, I could pick it out, like as soon as I heard the voice, I knew it was him. And I could listen to that voice all day, every day, you know, got a beautiful voice.

[00:39:37]

People use the phrase or use the term underrated a lot. And, you know, people say things like, oh, Star Wars is so underrated, you know, no, it’s not like Star Wars is popular and it deserves to be popular. Everybody knows how popular it is. He is one actor who I genuinely think is underrated. That guy is not doing as much as he deserves to be doing.

[00:39:55]

We have a pense fly. We do. Give us a second. All right. All right.

[00:40:02]

Yes, that guy is awesome. And yeah.

[00:40:06]

Yeah, he’s so again, his name is Christian Clemson. Go look him up on IMDB and then watch everything he’s ever done and then tell me that you agree with me, because if you don’t agree with me, we’re going to fight and I’m going to win. You’re wrong. Yeah.

[00:40:20]

Ok, just so we’ve made that very clear.

[00:40:23]

Speaking of characters that are awesome and hilarious and kind of steal the spotlight for a minute, let’s talk about the grandma who grandma that that actress has played the grandma and basically everything you’ve ever seen.

[00:40:39]

And she’s so good at being kind of dotty and kind of, you know, just out of touch, little old lady. And then one moment in this movie, she has this moment of clarity that is so badass. And I just love that this little old lady who is so typecast gets to have her one kind of hero moment.

[00:41:01]

I wrote, OK, so the quote is, if they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it. And I just really feel like everybody needs a mom or dad to be that supportive just to believe in you, do you know how far we would probably be in this world if everybody says society like that lady?

Tom Hanks

[00:41:25]

Oh, my God. So, yeah, that was I loved that.

[00:41:30]

And on a similar note, we have a moment that is an absolute knife to the heart, which is early in the film. Tom Hanks is talking to his little boy who is nervous about the flight and specifically nervous about Apollo one, the astronauts who burned to death. And Tom Hanks walks him through. You know, a whole bunch of stuff had to go wrong. And, you know, we fixed that stuff. And the example that he uses is the door or the hatch that they couldn’t get open and so they couldn’t get out. And then when things start going wrong, the mom comes in and she very specifically says a bunch of things went wrong with your daddy’s spaceship. And this little boy just looks at her and says, was at the door and oh, my God, it was just so good.

[00:42:18]

I immediately started crying. Yeah.

[00:42:20]

And I’m that there are a lot of kids that age who could not have delivered that line that well, like, there’s a lot of there are a lot of bad child actors out there and that kid is not one of them.

[00:42:34]

Yeah, it was it was excellent. Yeah. Um, there was. Another moment where it’s. Paxton’s family, I don’t remember their names, but, you know, his wife is pregnant and they’re sitting with their family and it’s before they know, like how this all ends. And the little one of the boys who plays her, one of her kids, he, as the little actor, obviously forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be doing because they’re all gathered around the TV listening to you just like this awful news. And he turns and looks at the woman playing the mom and smiles this big, bright smile. And the way she reacts to him was just like heartbreaking because she still stays in it and she gives him a reassuring smile. But you can see in her eyes that’s not at all how she feels. And I was just like, I don’t I don’t know. It just kind of took my breath away because that wasn’t the scene or that wasn’t the big an organic moment. Yeah. They would not have, like, meant for that take to happen. And it totally just did and it worked. And I love it so good. Oh, going back to that voice, that calm voice that they use. Hanks does such a good job of masking in this movie, and that’s like a that’s a term that gets thrown around by actors all the time, which is like when you’ve got this big feeling over here and you’re and you’re pretending you don’t you’ve got this mask on. It’s the it’s the part that’s about to boil over and you’re trying to keep it under wraps. And his ability to go from totally panicked to his calm voice. He just turned on a dime. And I was like, oh, my God.

[00:44:25]

Yeah. There’s one scene where they’re they’re all yelling at each other. And there’s this term, are we on Vox? Which means just sort of an open mic. Can can mission control here. Everything we’re saying, they’re all yelling at each other and all of a sudden they get a broadcast from mission control. And he says, are we on Vox? And it turns out they’re not. And he reaches down, presses a button and goes, yeah, mission control. We’re reading it. And it’s just this absolute pivot on a dime from high energy, stressed out, yelling at each other to super professional lockdown. Mm hmm.

[00:44:55]

So it was I loved it. I loved it. The I have to say that when they finally get a hold of cities. Mm hmm. Uh. And get them out of bed and bring him to mission control is like one of my favorite things.

[00:45:12]

I was like, he’s going to save the day.

[00:45:16]

And I loved watching him save the day. If they don’t sleep, I don’t sleep like the whole lot. I don’t know. It was just so in it. And I love that towards the end, you see the thing.

[00:45:31]

So you see.

[00:45:33]

Tom Hanks as character, there’s an old interview of when has he felt fear and he was lost over the sea near Japan and everything was going wrong and his lights went out in his cockpit and. Because of that, he was able to see the bioluminescence in the water, which allowed him to land on the ship, the aircraft carrier, and he said it’s you never know what it’s going to be that gets you home. And it’s the measles.

[00:46:13]

It’s purely the measles because like, God bless Kevin Bacon, but he wasn’t going to be the guy who would have gotten them all figured that out. Yes, he would. And Denise wouldn’t have been able to do that up in space. Right. He would have been able to do that work. A good point. I thought about that. Measles saves the day. Yeah, exactly. So it’s essentially measles. Are the lights going out and sneeze becomes the bioluminescence. And I was just like, oh, that was powerful. And I don’t need that in my life. I did. I did.

[00:46:44]

But like, it kills me for Cleveland. Yeah. You don’t like strong emotions.

[00:46:49]

I do. I like strong emotions. Just not when I don’t want them.

[00:46:54]

Like everybody, I will say we would be remiss if we went through this entire episode without talking about the greatest homage to Apollo 13 that has ever been done, which is an episode of community called Basic Rocket Science.

[00:47:08]

And in that episode, Abed plays the Gary Sinise role and does it absolutely perfectly. And apparently there are a ton of shots in that episode that mirror shots from the movie. They go deep, dive into recreating Apollo 13 specific mannerisms and things I love.

[00:47:28]

Yeah, that was such a great character. My goodness. Yes, indeed. And we’re kind of jumping all over the place. And I think that’s a lot my fault.

[00:47:37]

I’m I don’t actually have anything, any notes until the ending and then a few sort of after things. Well, take us through the second act.

[00:47:46]

Well, I don’t really I’m going to continue being all over the place because I don’t know where we are in the story.

[00:47:51]

But I’m just going to point out a couple of things that I loved. First of all, I love the little medical muny.

[00:47:59]

Yes. And like, I guess really mutiny is against the captain and the captain is Tom Hanks. And he starts that. So I don’t know that you’d actually call it mutiny, but whatever it is, I loved it. It made me really happy. And that Cawdor scene where they’re having to figure out how to get into position to enter the atmosphere. So they are there to shallow and they need to manually put themselves in a place where they can come in a little bit at a sharper angle, but not too sharp. And the newscasters use the if if Earth is the basketball and the moon is the softball and the area the corridor that they have thinner than a piece of paper. Yeah, I was just like, again, it comes back to the real science they did, while to me I would have loved to have seen more of it. Um, what we did see was so well done. Yeah. That I, I was still happy with it.

[00:49:03]

And you know, one of the things that’s nice about using real science is that oftentimes using something real prevents you from going too far in either direction. Because I feel like if this was a fictional movie that somebody was writing, they would have been really tempted to either make the necessary thing that they had to do.

[00:49:22]

So ludicrously impossible that there’s like a point zero zero one percent chance that they could pull this off and then they do or they would have hedge their bets and they would have been like, I mean, you know, here here’s a baseball. Here’s a softball. In the area that they have to get into is like this big, you know, and it’s not something that seems totally impossible because we needed to be believable. But the fact that this is real means that you don’t have to convince people it’s believable. It actually happened. Yeah. And you can just lean into that. And it sort of veers you away from some of the more cartoony options that a writer could have taken.

[00:49:59]

And one of the other real science things is they go to the weight. They finally figure out why all of their their calculations are off. And it’s because they expected to have a couple hundred pounds of moon rocks.

[00:50:15]

Yeah, there’s this sort of running thread throughout the second half of the movie that they keep veering a little bit off course and they can’t tell why do they keep coming in shallow? And oh, it’s because we were supposed to have all these moon rocks and so they end up having to get ballast for the last. Yeah. So they pull apart is that they pull a bunch of stuff off of the LEM. Yeah. Right into, just into the into the command module to just help weigh it down a little more.

[00:50:36]

And I love that they gave it, they gave that to us, they didn’t go into as much detail and you know, they didn’t spell it out too much. But we got a little taste of that, which I thought was that was really nice because I had forgotten that they were having Calkin. Problems are so much going wrong because you know what, they have a quadruple failure, which is. Yeah, well, I mean, that’s what they say at the top of the at the top is that there’s a quadruple failure. But one of the other things, two of the other things that I just have to say is

Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks just holds our hearts in his hand. He, like, just mush them all together and he holds them and he plays with our heartstrings. And I, for one, never gave him permission to do that. But he does it all the time without reservation. And I would like to admonish him in person while I hug him and cry. I love him. And I don’t know.

[00:51:44]

Is that clear enough? I love him, OK? In a very angry way.

[00:51:48]

Very angry way. Yes. OK, last thing before I will let you speak to no. Go for that little moment where they are gathering to watch the reentry. Hmm. And his wife is taking to to the audience. We have no idea who these two men are, but she’s telling them you need to distract his mom while they’re talking about the likelihood of of the crew living. And it turns out to be Armstrong and Aldrin.

[00:52:24]

And and the lady says, who are you boys in the space program to?

[00:52:30]

Oh, my God. And they both kind of they have this, like, little hesitation as they kind of look at each other like, is she for real? She is for real.

[00:52:40]

Yes. Which I just like I don’t know if that happened in real life, but I really hope it did. Oh, God, that’s amazing. Yeah.

[00:52:52]

Which brings us to heading in for the final landing. Couldn’t let it be too easy because they’ve gotten off so easy this whole time. You’re heading into a typhoon because it’s breaking eye of the storm.

[00:53:05]

Yeah, incredible shot as this ship flies toward the earth and there’s this swirling vortex like right below them and lightning flashes.

[00:53:13]

Incredible. If one thing can go wrong, apparently everything can go wrong so that we’re going to be talking about gravity next week.

[00:53:20]

And gravity, I think, is one of these movies that can be retile. I forgot we were watching the movie and I was like, excuse me, what?

[00:53:27]

Or just I read Straight Gravity and Gravity, I’ve always joked should be retitled The Story of a woman who just can’t catch a break. And that is very much in the spirit of Apollo 13.

[00:53:40]

I guys who could not catch a break, I don’t remember much about it except for the oh, you’re going to have a grand old. I’m not. You’re not. And even a little I mostly remember her in the fetal position in front of that weird light. And I was just like.

Apollo 13

[00:53:55]

All right, yeah. Oh, no, you’re you’re you’re going to be so mad by the end of this month. I know. I remember feeling that way before.

[00:54:02]

So and in that same spirit as they’re coming down, it starts kind of raining in their faces.

[00:54:07]

There’s a shot of the dew that has been gathering on the console before we get there, right before we get there, can I say I was so glad when there was finally a body heat hug?

[00:54:18]

Yes, I was I had been waiting for that because these men are freezing and they’re not touching each other. And like, I know they’ve got a lot to do.

[00:54:27]

Yeah, but one of them is very sick. Yes. So I was I was pleasantly surprised when I happened because I was desperate for it to happen. But I had kind of gotten to a point of they said this is like a man’s man sort of world and they’re not going to touch.

[00:54:43]

And I was just like, but Tom Hanks doesn’t live in that world very well.

[00:54:47]

So I was just, oh, it was a relief. I needed I needed to put that out there. Yes, indeed.

[00:54:55]

So they re-enter.

[00:54:57]

And as with any ship entering the atmosphere, there’s always a period of communications blackout where the radio signals can’t get through the ionization happening around the ship. And they they say it’s going to be between three and four minutes. It’s generally three. And the countdown starts happening and they get to three minutes and there’s nothing and it just keeps going. They end up hitting three and a half. They end up hitting four. And it’s just like this slow twisting of tension, as you think. Maybe they actually didn’t make it. And then they finally do, and it’s such a relief and everybody’s cheering, and I just need to read you this quote from Jim Lovell talking about that moment and why they because that’s not Hollywood that actually happened. There was this really long period where they didn’t respond and they could not. And everybody thought they were dead. This is a quote from Jim Lovell. He says, We are working and work and watching the controls during that time because we came in shallow, it took us longer to come through the atmosphere where we had ionisation. And the thing was, we were just slow in responding.

[00:56:08]

The entire world was waiting with bated breath to see if these guys were alive and apparently they just didn’t pick up the phone for a while.

[00:56:15]

Oh, my God, if I was his wife, I would have lost my mind when he got home. When I heard that quote, I would have been like, you’re a dead man. You are a dead man. But, yeah, the moment that there is that reentry and it’s literally raining on them. Yes.

[00:56:31]

That is just just adding insult to injury. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s raining on them. But outside of the capsule, it’s like three to 4000 degrees I think is what they call it.

[00:56:44]

Yeah, something like that. Yeah. It’s a number of thousands of degrees in there and it’s getting ready. They’re getting ready Don. And I was just like, oh my God, because I mean we’ve been warned about it.

[00:56:52]

So I love that they kept that detail. It was I liked that.

[00:56:58]

Another little cameo right here at the end, the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, which is the ship that picks them up. The captain is played by Jim Lovell.

[00:57:08]

Oh, really? Huh. I like that. Nice. I it was it was funny, I, I was not expecting a shot of someone in all of their scuba gear, like peering in the window. It was I don’t know, there was something about it that it was just really funny. I feel like in the course of, you know, there just there are window images now and they had and so I have the Titanic and I have an astronaut burning and now I have a goofy scuba guy being like, are you guys OK?

[00:57:40]

You just got in from space. I’m here to help you. Welcome back.

[00:57:45]

Yeah, there’s you know, it’s funny these days, you know, we we’re saturated with these images of Space X with these rockets that come down in, like, land so gently on their floating platforms. And even before that, we have the space shuttle, which comes down like an airplane and lands very majestically on a runway. And you sort of forget that in the early days of space travel, it was a little bit goofy getting back to Earth like you were in a little pod that just kind of falls into the ocean and then they have to go find you like wherever you landed in the ocean. And you just sit in your pod until some scuba guy comes up and like, knocks on the door and helps you out.

[00:58:18]

There was a part of me that was like I kind of. So we scuba dive. Yes. And I’ve always been a little not a lot, but a little interested in doing rescue diving. And there’s a part of me that’s like, I want to be that person. Then we go back to this era and I can just be the scuba diver. That’s like, hey, I’m going to help you get home. Yeah, I don’t know why, but that sounds awesome.

[00:58:40]

I actually did. There’s a moment where the helicopters hovering hovering overhead and a couple of scuba guys step out and when you go scuba diving, whatever you first get into the water, they always tell you to sort of step onto the side of the of the boat and you either fall backwards into the water or they tell you to take this really big step to just sort of stride out and then let yourself fall into the water. And they were doing that. They were stepping out, but from a helicopter. And so they fall like, you know, 20, 25 feet and then go into the water. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of like fun.

[00:59:10]

Can I do that? Except go scuba diving leaving because Catalina Island went from a helicopter when we were in New Zealand.

[00:59:18]

Is that where we were? I think it was when we were in New Zealand and we were canyoning, I was the one who was like, oh my God, I want to jump off that thing. Can we jump off that thing? And they’re like, yeah, go jump off that thing. And you were like, I, I don’t want to do that.

[00:59:29]

It helps when it’s the ocean. There’s no there’s no functional bottom to that when you’re jumping over really high, which, by the way, was about twice as tall as the helicopter that guy stepped out of. And then it’s like a little, you know, pond of water was about three inches. And just want to put it out there then.

[00:59:49]

This family, I am not the chicken.

[00:59:53]

Can confirm I wasn’t expecting that. I mean, it’s true, but I was expecting you to say that, OK.

[01:00:03]

Oh, I loved all of the reaction shots when everybody learns that, hey, they made it. And I have to tell you, I was really surprised by a couple of that. Ed Harris. I love how he said it and everybody else did. Everybody rises and he drops. Yeah.

[01:00:23]

And I and I was like, oh, that’s like that makes total sense. And they came back to him later and he was tearing up and I was like, man, Ed Harris, like, I love you.

[01:00:34]

I’ll give you a hug, which is not where I started at the top of this movie. It was a whole journey. You went on with the virus.

[01:00:40]

And I was really concerned about the the oldest level boy, the oldest son, because he’s whose only introduced at the eleventh hour. Do we see him in the first act?

[01:00:54]

I mean, I think we see him when the moon landing happens, but I don’t remember because it’s not that age. Right. It’s only like a year later, like, he wouldn’t have been a little kid at that time. It’s only a year or two then maybe we didn’t. But he’s at, what, a military academy or something? He’s at a military academy. And there was a part of me that’s like they’re all watching this.

[01:01:16]

And this is the 60s, maybe the 70s. And yeah.

[01:01:22]

So this is 1969, April 11th, 1970. So it’s so a few months like less than a year after. OK, so.

[01:01:32]

They’re watching this, he’s surrounded by his male peers, is he going to be allowed to be relieved? Is he going to be allowed to cry? Because, like, I really felt like I was going to have to say something about masculinity of that time. That might still be a thing today, but I didn’t have to because Ed Harris cried. Yeah. And so there was this thing where, like, all of the boys got really excited for him and we didn’t see him cry, but he was mostly just stunned. He was just like in shock, which I still totally acceptable. You don’t have to cry.

[01:02:11]

But there was a part of me that was like, man, if none of these men cry, I’m going to have to call toxic masculinity because, yeah, you got to show your emotions. And this is just some family tears.

[01:02:23]

Well, yeah, because, I mean, that amount of stress, you’re going to have a bodily reaction and you just kind of have to. So I was I was glad to see it somewhere. I was really concerned that we weren’t going to see the oldest son’s reaction because they don’t show it for the longest time. Yeah. And I was I was mostly interested in his as a teenager at a military school, but I will.

[01:02:48]

So I’ve got a few other notes, just sort of in terms of general scientific stuff, unless you want to say anything else about the landing. No, no, no. So I did some research on scientific accuracy in Apollo 13, because that’s our thing here on the synthesis and learn some interesting stuff. So apparently they got NASA was very helpful during all this and they offered the use of many of their facilities. They offered Ron Howard to to let Ron Howard film in the actual mission control. And he turned them down. They recreated mission control in a set so that they could perfectly control everything. But apparently they did such a good job that their consultants kept getting lost because the room was perfect. But obviously outside the room it was a studio. And so there was a one particular way to leave, but it was the other way from where you leave actual mission control. The elevator was over here and the exit from the set was over here and the consultants were so they bought into this thing so much that they kept getting lost because they kept heading for the elevator for mission control. That’s neat. And then they also the headsets that all the extras use in mission control, all of their consoles were actually networked so that as all of those actors, the supporting characters and the extras were sort of shouting over each other trying to solve problems, they were actually talking to each other.

[01:04:09]

They could carry on conversations, sending information back and forth. They weren’t all just kind of saying things to themselves accurately, just which was another interesting choice. The space suits that they wore were apparently perfect. They were space

suits. They were in every single regard. There were no compromises made to the point where they were even airtight. And when the astronauts have their helmets on in this movie, they also have air hoses connecting them because otherwise they would suffocate like these. These are actual spacesuits and they had to have their air pumped in. Oh, yeah. Walter Cronkite, very famous news personality from that era, does a number of broadcasts, some of those were archival footage from the time of Apollo 13. But apparently Walter Cronkite actually rerecorded some news broadcasts for this film because they needed him to say something sort of concisely for the film, because in the actual broadcast, he sort of spread it out over several minutes and he got the script and then rewrote it in his own voice so that it would sound like a real Walter Cronkite broadcast. I love that. Very interesting. And then the last little bit of filmmaking that I have is one of the most famous lines from Apollo 13.

[01:05:32]

You’ll see it on every time somebody references this, they’ll show this a little bit of B roll. It’s in every trailer. Everything is Ed Harris walking with purpose through a room full of professionals. And he says failure is not an option. And it’s become this line that is very heavily associated with the Apollo 13 crisis. Apparently, he never actually said that the character that’s not a thing that was said during during Apollo 13 there the crisis. But the writers were talking to several of their consultants who had been there, including a person named Jerry Bostik, who they asked him, did you guys ever just like panic? Did you just freeze with how much stress there was? And his response was no. When bad things happened, we just calmly laid out the options and failure was not one of them. We never panicked and we never gave up on finding a solution. And apparently the writers left that meeting, got in the car, and one of them, as soon as the doors closed, he just started screaming. Failure is not an option. That’s the line. That’s going to be the line that people remember from this movie. We just need to figure out who says it. And they ended up giving it to Ed Harris. And he was exactly right.

[01:06:46]

I can’t believe that you haven’t brought up the square peg in a round hole.

[01:06:50]

That is one of my very favorite. Before we get to that, I’ve got one other line, which is Houston. We have a problem which has gone down alongside Luke. I am your father. And and play it again, Sam, as incredibly iconic lines from Hollywood, which never happened. All three of those lines, it’s almost right in actual history. They said, Houston, we’ve had a problem and then they go on to describe it. But Houston, we have a problem is so they just changed a little bit. Yeah, it’s close. That being said, Lacey does bring up a good point, which is probably my favorite moment from this movie, which is getting a square peg into a round hole. The team is presented. The team at Mission Control is presented with a problem because CO2 is building up in the LEM and the air filters for the LEM are not designed to support this many people, but the air filters from the command module don’t fit their two different shapes. And so they dump out a bunch of stuff on the table and they say this is everything they’ve got up there. We need to figure out how to use this stuff to get this filter into a hole that fits this. And it’s a very famous moment. And I just love it because it’s so sort of ground level. Like they’re literally playing with blocks. They’re just doing sort of kindergarten level stuff. But lives depend on it.

[01:08:16]

Yeah. And I love it. I love that scene. And I I’m definitely one of those people who would have liked to have seen it play out a little bit more and not not like the whole thing. I don’t I didn’t need to be for it to be like 30 minutes or anything like that. But he dumps out the stuff that they have available to them. And then he’s like, all right, we have to do this. And then everyone just grabs for it.

[01:08:36]

And I’m like, wait, wait, wait. Who’s project managing this? No, no, don’t get organized exactly. Like if you just start grabbing things, who’s going to know what you have?

[01:08:45]

Yeah. And I wanted I wanted to see it play out like I wanted to see.

[01:08:49]

Yeah. That is one scene that I wish had been done more.

[01:08:52]

Yeah. Because it’s, it’s cool to see genius’s attack a problem that you can watch because we, most of us aren’t going to follow a math problem. But this is something that’s so physical that we could have seen how their minds work. And I, and I get that it’s you know, it’s it’s not a problem that you got to keep the story moving. Yeah. Yeah. And I and I hear that, but I would have liked it.

[01:09:18]

It is also, you know, as we’ve talked about, The Martian is we’re big fans and you can clearly see the influence of Apollo 13 on the concept of the Martian. There’s a there’s a clear lineage there.

[01:09:32]

And I was reading reviews recently and somebody described The Martian as being the perfect movie for people who wish that Earth air filter scene from Apollo 13 had been the whole film, which I feel like the reviewer meant it as kind of a dig at nerds.

Space Movie

[01:09:49]

But I read it and I was like, yeah, that yes, that’s me. I’m one of those people I want to see scientists, MCGYVER things exactly what could be cooler than McGyver and real. Yeah.

[01:10:02]

Yeah. So I think overall. Yeah. Are you done.

[01:10:06]

Well I’ve got one little sort of addendum, a little epilogue on the story of Apollo 13, which is sort of a good news, bad news situation. So after Apollo 13 was so scary, the Apollo program kind of got wrapped up. And that is one of the reasons we never went to Mars is Apollo 13 is after the Apollo 13 crisis. President Nixon and then those who followed decided that space travel was really scary and they didn’t want a disaster hanging around their necks. And so they decided instead of continuing to push the front. We’re continuing to try dangerous new things and go out into the unknown, what they would do is perfect this and they came up with the space shuttle and that’s why the space shuttle program happened, was it was their attempt to get near Earth travel perfected. And so we’re going to make basically like a space plane that we can reuse over and over. And it’ll it’ll be able to land on its own and it’ll have all these things. And so NASA put all of its effort into the space shuttle and near Earth orbit operations like satellites and the International Space Station. And we we retreated from the frontier.

[01:11:23]

So that is sort of the I don’t like that humans are not good at retreat. And, you know, I don’t like that our leaders are cowards and cowards.

[01:11:32]

So it’s good that we are now living in an age when, you know, things like Space X and even NASA are starting to pick up the baton again and start moving forward.

[01:11:41]

Yes, well, I just want it to be NASA. So, yes, that would be nice. That’s a whole other topic. So we don’t need to end on that note. Let’s let’s also a final thought. Final thought. I think it is devastating that Gary Sinise, his character, I didn’t get his dream, but I think it is even. More devastating, heartbreaking to be that close, you can see it, yes, you can, it’s right there.

[01:12:10]

But it must have been just a knife in the gut for those three guys flying past the moon and just not, I don’t know, like that.

[01:12:17]

I just kind of keep coming back to that. Thought of dreams should not.

[01:12:22]

You shouldn’t have to see them without touching them.

[01:12:26]

It’s just it’s too much for my actor heart because being an actor has far, far too much has to do with hope then and luck than anything else. So, yeah, my my actor heart didn’t handle that very well in incredible movie.

[01:12:42]

Yeah, right. Fantastic movie. Apollo 13. I mean, obviously hailed as one of the great space movies of all time. Just an absolute masterpiece. And yeah, I think just a plus on the scientific accuracy score. This is sort of the the thing to beat.

[01:13:00]

This is the standard by which those good judged, I will say accuracy. Yes. A minus for how much science is in it. Fair enough. I would have liked to have seen it ratchet it up a notch. Yeah. So fair enough. Yeah. All right. Well then I think that’s episode one of the Synthesis. Oh yeah. Look at us. That was fun.

[01:13:22]

Thank you to everybody who’s been watching and who will be watching in the future. This was this has been a fun little experiment. And unless we were completely in the dark, I don’t think anything went terribly wrong.

[01:13:34]

Who knows? Maybe we’ll we’ll end this thing and then realize that we’ve been broadcasting calabaza. This all done.

[01:13:40]

Our our producer will let us know. Yeah. Um, so the next episode we will have watched Gravity. So if you want to kind of follow along, follow along. I would suggest watching it.

[01:13:51]

Yep. Same that time. Same bat channel which is five thirty Pacific Time on Thursday. I’m going to be watching Gravity and talking about that and you’ll get to see Lacy have a slow panic attack which is going to be fun.

[01:14:03]

So much fun. I am so excited to show that side of myself to you. That’s awesome. All right. Well, thanks for watching. Have a good one.