MIT Lecture Series Committee

Rated PG
140 minutes

view trailer

format: 35mm

Apollo 13 (1995)

Apollo 13 will be preceded by a talk by MIT Professor and former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman. This FREE event is part of the Giant Leaps: The 40th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing series, and is sponsored by the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

"Houston, we have a problem." Those words were immortalized during the tense days of the Apollo 13 lunar mission crisis, and the suspense, fear, and excitement of those days are captured in Ron Howard's epic recreation of the 1970 crisis. Command-module pilot Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise)'s exposure to the measles gives backup Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) a spot on the mission; mission commander Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) leads him and lunar module pilot Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) on what is slated as NASA's third lunar landing mission. All goes smoothly until the craft is halfway through its mission, when an exploding oxygen tank threatens the crew's oxygen and power supplies. As the courageous astronauts face the dilemma of either suffocating or freezing to death, Mattingly and Mission Control leader Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) struggle to find a way to bring the crew back home, all the while knowing that the spacemen face possible death once the battered ship reenters the Earth's atmosphere. Even though the outcome, in which all three astronauts miraculously survived, is historical fact, the film derives suspense from the situation itself and from the actions of the heroic astronauts and the men on the ground. Howard's taut direction, a solid ensemble of players, and eye-opening special effects all add to the overall impact of the film, which has been hailed as one of Hollywood's best historical dramas. [www.allmovie.com]

Apollo 13 remains Howard's masterpiece... It is, quite simply, one of the finest movies ever produced.
      -- David Cornelius, DVDtalk.com. Read this review.

Jeffrey Hoffman is co-director of the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Selected by NASA in January 1978, he became an astronaut in August 1979. Dr. Hoffman left the astronaut program in July 1997 to become NASA's European Representative in Paris, where he served until August 2001.