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One of NASA's finest hours & a great film For the over 40 year old viewer, "Apollo 13" recaptures the feeling of America at that time when we were still the "can do" people. As with "The Right Stuff," when there were test pilots who didn't worry about safety too much but just flew by the seat of their pants, you have astronauts here literally using duct tape and other household items to salvage their crippled space capsule and try to get home. I think there is a certain irony that 35 years later after two years grounded we still can't get the space shuttle back up and running and now the Chinese, Europeans, Russians, and average millionaire American seems more capable of getting people or equipment up into space than NASA. We can't even save the Hubble. I think if this Apollo mission took place today, those crew members would be doomed. Which makes this film all the more appealing. The entire cast is excellent. The music score beautifully compliments the action. Although beyond the launch there isn't a great deal of physical action, this film is as suspenseful and dramatic as any Alfred Hitchcock film, gripping, and also inspirational as routine household items (including, quite literally, that duct tape) do get used to cobble together a way to salvage the crippled ship, conserve the remaining oxygen, and power supply (which was barely enough to run a modern day kitchen appliance), and figure a way to get them into the proper orbit to get back into Earth's atmosphere without either being incinerated or bouncing off it and out on a one way trajectory into infinity. The effects, particularly the launch, are impressive and realistic and give the feeling they're using real film footage, ie. they don't look like effects. You also feel like you're there. Everything looks very realistic. It seems to me that the film unfairly got a bad rap at the time it was originally released merely because Ron Howard made it. Even if you are not a big space buff, which I'm not although I did like "The Right Stuff" very much, "Apollo 13" is quite entertaining and exciting once it quite literally gets off the ground. It is a little bit of a slow start as characters get introduced and the mission takes shape, but from the moment one of the crew gets bumped from the flight because his medical reveals he has the measles, you begin to get a sense of foreboding of things to come and wonder how this change in crew will affect the mission. It proves to be quite significant. Despite all the drama, there is some witty dialogue from time to time to relieve some of the tension. But above all, the movie shows a positive "can do" quality and optimistic attitude often missing in today's America and NASA despite all our present-day superior technology. There is such irony that in those incredibly dangerous early days of the space program, there was no launched mission, i.e. they got off the launch pad, in which the astronauts didn't get back even when they were flying as far as the moon in itty bitty space capsules. Today manned missions don't go beyond the space station and Earth's orbit -- the latter the type of stuff being doing back in the 1960s. Viewed from this perspective, "Apollo 13" the film and the mission are that much more powerful and emotional to watch and I couldn't help but feel a little bit of nostalgia for those earlier days in the American space program.