Apollo 13 | Reviews of the Nerds

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, everybody. I’m Julien Jamar and this is another Reviews of the Nerds.

All right, kids, buckle up and you’re going to need a lot of buckles because we’re launching into space. We watched an oldie but a goodie, Apollo 13 is available on Amazon Prime and probably an old VHS tape you still haven’t purged out of your attic yet. It’s time friend, VCRs aren’t making the same comeback as vinyl.

Anyway, randomly, on the 53rd anniversary of the crew’s reentry, we chose Apollo 13 for movie night on Tuesday. Found out Jim Lovell is now 95 years old and his footprints can be found at the Uptown Theater in Marble Falls, Texas. He went there for the premiere. They are preserved in a block of concrete that used to be the sidewalk. Apparently, Marble Falls isn’t as good at building Walks of Fame as Hollywood. Weird. Anyway, Apollo 13 was an especially big hit with my boys. The girls all felt terribly sorry for the dude who had to stay behind because he might get the measles. Except for Madalyn, my seven year old, who deserted us immediately to watch her tablet. It’s fine. I wanted to watch Wreck-It Ralph also.

This movie won awards for lots of obvious reasons. The actors Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and a bunch of other actors we all recognize from all the other 90s movies but don’t remember their names, and that guy from CSI make up the epic cast.

The writing is magnificent. This was everyone in their absolute heyday. Ron Howard directed it. James Horner did the music. Just brilliance in every corner. The movie is a slow burn until it isn’t, and then it is again for a little while and then you can’t look away no matter how much you like Facebook. If you will remember the story from 1995 when it was released, Jim Lovell and two of his compadres launched into space and then predictively everything goes wrong. The epic line “Houston, we have a problem,” obviously, makes its debut in that show. And they find out that oxygen tanks have exploded or something. And there’s a bunch of technical jargon and things about amps that I didn’t quite understand. But the basic storyline is they get launched into space and they have to come home having never landed on the moon. And all three of the astronauts never get to land on the moon as far as I remember. So it’s kind of sad but really happy because they actually find a way to get them home via the guy who had to stay home because he might get the measles, but he did not actually get the measles.

So there is that. This movie fires on all cylinders, including those ones that burned out in the oxygen tanks. Sorry, that was low hanging fruit. I had to go for it. There is mildish language. That’s my only content warning. We had big fun with it. Except obviously, Madalyn, Wreck-It Ralph is on Disney Plus if you need backup options. Once again, I am Julien Jamar and this has been another Reviews of the Nerds. You can catch all of my movie reviews and sometimes a TV review or so on JulienJamar.com. And also all of my books are published there. Thank you. Have a good night.

Reviews of the Nerds are not traditional reviews, in that we don’t offer a rating, nor do we tend to review things we don’t like. Reviews of the Nerds is all about finding the right audience for what we are reviwiing.