Apollo 13

Tom Hanks goes to space with his friends but, oh no! The flange compucticator falls off the bib-bab and they get stuck up there. Lots of men with incredibly tidy haircuts try to figure out how to get them back and Tom Hanks is extremely sensible at his friends. Weirdly suspenseful bit at the end as you wait to find out what happened at the culmination of one of the most famous things in recent history.

Trivia

The Tom Hanks role of Jim Lovell was originally written for Are You Being Served legend Mollie Sugden, but she turned it down as she didn’t believe in space

Gary Sinise recorded a version of Adam Ant’s Apollo 9 to help promote the film

In preparation for the film, the actors didn’t go to the Moon.

A sequel, Apollo 14, would have seen the crew return to space and destroy the moon in revenge for events of the first film. It remains unmade.

Bloopers

The scene in which NASA engineers frantically google solutions to the problem could never have happened because Google wouldn’t be invented until 1998, three years after the film was made!