Survival Instinct

I think in a few blog posts over the years, I've mentioned my interest in crewed space flight. I know I've mentioned that Apollo 13 is one of my very favorite movies. So you probably won't be at all surprised about a recent documentary that found its way into my queue.

Apollo 13: Survival is a recent documentary on Netflix that tells the story of that fateful mission to the moon -- how an explosion on the journey crippled the spacecraft, and only through heroic efforts were the three astronauts returned safely to Earth. I've seen Ron Howard's film Apollo 13 many times, and I've even read astronaut Jim Lovell's book on the flight (originally called Lost Moon; republished as Apollo 13, in connection with the movie). Still, Apollo 13: Survival had the potential to tell a story I already knew well in a new light.

Where Lovell's account makes you play events in your mind's eye (as any book does), and Ron Howard's movie dramatizes events (with some slight alterations from strict truth), Apollo 13: Survival aims to split the difference. By using actual footage -- from the spacecraft itself, the ground crew in mission control, and representative film from other sources -- this documentary aims to tell the story completely as it happened, in as visual and visceral a way as possible.

As you might expect, there are pros and cons to this approach. This documentary did not have the budget for any restorative technology (like Peter Jackson used on Get Back, for example). Thus, most of the footage is as low-quality as you might expect -- poorly preserved, or limited by technology at the time it was originally captured. Sometimes, the documentary has to resort to "home movies" with poorly synced audio, and photos with sound recordings playing underneath.

That's where footage actually exists. As you would expect, three astronauts in a fight for their lives weren't taking time to capture their ordeal on film. So some of the sequences in this documentary are "reenactments," close-up shots of replica spacecraft instrument panels, underscoring the technical jargon being used in the recordings we hear.

Yet in the moments that can and do use real-life film, this history really does come alive and seem more "real." (And a handful of the sources are more clear than you'd ever imagine 50+ year old film could be.) These are the real people, captured as they reacted in real time to these events. We get to be the proverbial "fly on the wall," as some of the best documentaries ever have positioned the audience.

I imagine that the average viewer wouldn't care to experience this story twice. And if you're going to only watch it once, I think I'd still recommend the "slightly fictionalized" version that is Ron Howard's Apollo 13. But I'd say the essential humanity of the people involved comes through more in this documentary -- the astronauts, their families back on Earth, the engineers working at NASA to solve one problem after another. I give Apollo 13: Survival a B+.