There’s a reason spacecrafts are often the setting of horror stories: they are the ultimate locked room. No matter what threatens you inside, there is literal and instant death waiting on the outside. But this threat isn’t just present in the world of fiction — as of this writing, there are two astronauts trapped on a ship docked at the International Space Station. On August 31, they reported “a strange noise” coming from the ship’s speakers, which NASA has written off… but how do they truly know? Those two astronauts, who were supposed to make a quick trip to space and back, are now stuck there until February. While there have been major disasters during trips to space (Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 1, to name a few), only three Russian cosmonauts have ever died in actual space, defined as 62 miles above mean sea level. However, in 1970, three NASA astronauts came remarkably close.
During the Apollo 13 mission, intended to be the third crewed lunar landing, an unexpected crisis occurred. Two days after launch, an oxygen tank in the service module exploded, crippling the spacecraft and causing a loss of electrical power, light, and water. The explosion forced the crew, comprised of Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise, to abort their moon landing plans and focus on returning safely to Earth. The astronauts, with the help of NASA’s ground control, had to overcome numerous technical challenges, including power conservation, manually aligning the spacecraft, and figuring out a way to scrub carbon dioxide from the air. Thanks to improvised solutions, the crew managed to make a safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on April 17.
Of course, most people are already at least peripherally aware of this story thanks to Ron Howard’s 1995 Apollo 13, but nearly 30 years later, newly released footage and audio from the mission has come forward to form the backbone of Apollo 13: Survival, courtesy of director Peter Middleton. In making the documentary, Middleton faced a difficult battle — how could he showcase the true story of these men and those around them without it just feeling like a less dramatic version of the Tom Hanks-starring Oscar winner and cultural touchstone? Thankfully, he manages both to keep Survival from feeling like mere cinematic retread and to avoid the common historical documentary pitfall of presenting what amounts a visual reading of a Wikipedia article.
Middleton accomplishes this largely by forgoing the route of traditional talking head interviews. Instead, Survival places audio of the key players atop archival footage of the event, an aesthetic gambit that results in a distinctly immersive film, one which places viewers directly in the cramped, failing spacecraft and makes it easier to slide directly into the astronauts’ fear and determination. We also learn more about the ordeal from the perspective of those on the ground, including Jim Lovell’s wife, Marilyn, and daughter, Barbara, whose voiceovers add emotional depth and personal stakes to the narrative, highlighting a gentler human element of space exploration’s most dangerous moments than the high drama of the 1995 film allowed for. Indeed, in scrubbing away the Hollywood sheen from our knowledge of the almost-disaster, Middleton is able to fix more focus on the psychological strain that all involved in the experience endured, balancing that emotional weight with the matter-of-factness of the newly-released footage and audio. But the real question with documentaries of this ilk — both the kind that tackle known narratives (the Apollo 13 crisis) and those that trade in popular nonfiction film material (space) — is whether anything fresh can be found in the familiar. With regard to Apollo 13: Survival, the answer is yes, with Middleton crafting a visceral experience that effectively reminds us just how terrifying space travel can be — and still is.
DIRECTOR: Peter Middleton; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: September 5; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
