Almost 30 years after its release, Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 remains the gold standard for real-life Space Race films. It’s easy to see why: the story of Jim Lovell and his crew’s battle to save their severely damaged spacecraft halfway to the Moon, and the tireless efforts of engineers in Houston to bring them home, needs little embellishment to be compelling, and the excellent production values, direction, and acting from the likes of Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, and Ed Harris make it a breathtaking watch.
In fact, Apollo 13’s stranglehold over the genre is so complete that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the Space Age has produced many other stories that are just as worthy of a big screen outing. Here’s 10 of the best.
10. Challenger
This made-for-TV 1990 drama about the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle during the ill-fated STS 51-L mission in 1986 won a Primetime Emmy, though leaden pacing, rampant sentimentalism, and an exceptionally saccharine treatment prevents it from realizing its potential. Indiana Jones alumna Karen Allen does everything asked of her in the lead role as Christa McAuliffe, the educator who in real life became the public face of NASA’s Teacher In Space Project. The movie’s tone is one of innocent, enthusiastic delight at the promise of flight, and Allen does an excellent job of conveying this during McAuliffe’s astronaut training, with able support from The Rocky Horror Picture Show star Barry Bostwick as shuttle commander Dick Scobee. The film shies away from showing the aftermath of Challenger’s brief final flight, but the scenes in which shuttle engineers expressing doubts about launching in sub-zero temperatures are overruled by NASA bigwigs eager to stick to schedule are just as dismaying.
9. Apollo 11
Seeking to cash in on the success of Apollo 13 the previous year, this 1996 TV film stars veteran character actors Jeffrey Nordling as Neil Armstrong and Xander Berkeley as Buzz Aldrin, the first humans to set foot on the Moon back in 1969. Both give good performances, and if it at times struggles to scale the same dramatic heights as its more well-known predecessor, it’s because of the limitations of the budget – much use is made of real-life stock footage in lieu of bespoke special effects – and the subject matter. After all, during the first attempt to land humans on the Moon in 1969, more or less everything went right, and as a result, it leans rather heavily into the brief computer glitch that disrupted the landing sequence, and also on the astronauts’ relationships with their wives. Max Headroom actor Matt Frewer provides solid support as the no-nonsense Mission Control supremo Gene Kranz.
8. Space Dogs
Before space agencies risked human lives on spaceflight missions, a variety of dogs, monkeys, rats, and other animals were strapped into capsules and lofted into space to see how they coped. And though the reality for these creatures was probably far less pleasant, this 2010 Russian animated film makes Pixar-esque heroes out of Belka and Strelka, two dogs that were sent into space on a Russian rocket in 1960 and brought back to Earth alive. Surrounded by a less than historically accurate rabble of sausage dogs, bulldogs, and assorted strays, the canine stars do their best to overcome adversity in the search for new horizons. It’s harmless if formulaic fare, and did poorly at the box office on its release in the United States.
7. Mission Mangal
Until fairly recently, few outside India were aware that the world’s second most populous country has its own space program, having launched satellites into Earth orbit using their own rockets since 1980. In 2013, Indian space agency ISRO hatched an audacious plan to go interplanetary, readying the Mangalyaan space probe to go to Mars. Hindered by a less than shoestring budget, no experience in deep space missions, and an underpowered rocket, commentators across the globe scoffed – but the agency pulled it off, scoring a stunning prestige victory for India and earning the country a place at the top table of spacefaring nations. This 2019 Hindu-language melodrama takes a few liberties with the details, but is a tight, compelling feel-good watch nonetheless, with Indian film industry A-listers Akshay Kumar and Vidya Balan giving good value as the scientists demoted to work on the seemingly doomed mission as punishment for previous failure, who then succeed against all the odds.
6. First Man
The first human to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong was a quietly spoken, private individual even before he became a household name, and Damien Chazelle’s 2018 biopic shows why. Chazelle tapped his leading man for 2016’s La La Land, Ryan Gosling, to play Armstrong, and he’s eminently believable as the highly competent civilian test pilot. Scenes depicting him bailing out of a crashing plane and bringing his wayward Gemini 8 spacecraft under control after a jammed control thruster sends it into a dizzying spin are gritty and realistic. It’s not in reference to these events, nor to Armstrong’s Moonwalk, however, but to his family life that First Man really tugs at the heartstrings. Having married in the 1950s, Armstrong and his wife Janet (sensitively played here by Claire Foy) had to bear the agony of losing their young daughter to illness in the early 1960s. Armstrong also mourned two fellow astronauts in a fatal plane crash in 1966 and a further three in the Apollo 1 fire of 1967, underscoring the riskiness of human spaceflight at the dawn of the Space Age.
5. The Right Stuff
This multiple Academy Award-winning drama bombed at the box office on premiere in 1983 for reasons that are not easy to discern. Though an overly earnest approach to the subject matter does not serve it well, in terms of cinematography, plot, and direction, The Right Stuff still stands as the definitive depiction of the beginnings of the American crewed space program, showing the development of the Mercury program and the sudden rise to household name status of the “Mercury Seven” astronauts with panache, all the while evoking the promise and enthusiasm for the future of Kennedy’s America. Moreover, the cast is brimming with talent, including Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid, Alien star Veronica Cartwright, and breakout appearances for Ed Harris as John Glenn, and Scott Glenn as Alan Shepherd – Harris’ first billings as leading man shortly followed, while Glenn would go on to enjoy big screen success at the turn of the 1990s with The Silence of the Lambs and The Hunt for Red October.
4. Gagarin: First in Space
This 2013 film was criticized for its Russian government backing and whitewashed version of history, but in its depiction of the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, the film tells a good yarn. But it’s not just about the army man’s pioneering 1961 flight – Gagarin: First in Space works as a sort of Soviet version of The Right Stuff, examining the goings-on in the first batch of cosmonauts, an ultra-competitive bunch that included Alexei Leonov, the first human in history to perform a spacewalk. Some of the special effects are a little shonky, but the period details, not least the excellent costume design, elevate the production.
3. The Dish
This delightful 2000 Australian comedy drama takes place far from the launch pads of Florida or the computer banks of Houston’s Mission Control, but is no less entertaining for it. The Parkes radio telescope was a crucial link in the global network of dishes that sent and received signals to and from the Apollo Moon missions, and the Australian facility was all-important in transmitting the live TV footage of Neil Armstrong and Buz Aldrin’s Moonwalk to a global audience in the hundreds of millions during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Jurassic Park star Sam Neill stars as Cliff Buxton, the telescope’s director, laser-focused on ensuring the telescope plays its part in Apollo 11’s success. All manner of snags follow, including failing equipment and a race against time to realign the dish with the spacecraft. Viewers could be forgiven for thinking it stretches credulity to wring tension out of the operation of a radio dish, but the film’s climax manages it with the help of a gale and a taxing ethical dilemma, and a subplot involving a will-they-won’t-they romance is both witty and touching.
2. The Challenger Disaster
The second film covering the 1986 loss of the Challenger space shuttle is a sober look at the lengthy investigation that followed the accident. Starring Academy Award winner William Hurt as Richard Feynman, and Pirates of the Caribbean star Kevin McNally as rocket scientist Lawrence Mulloy, it cleaves closely to real-life events, and powerfully eviscerates the normalization of deviancy that led NASA to launch the shuttle in unsafe conditions. Hurt is on top form as Feynman, and the BBC production benefits from tight, clinical directing by James Hawes.
1. Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures received three Academy Award nominations, and proved a commercial and critical success on its release in 2016. Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monáe, and Octavia Spencer play Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan, three African-American mathematicians – “human computers” – who were employed at NASA in the 1960s to help calculate the exceptionally difficult equations required to ensure the agency’s crewed spacecraft are propelled into the correct orbits. In so doing the trio encounter systemic racism and sexism, railed against by a sympathetic and upstanding manager (Kevin Costner). In the process, they win over doubters, including an Army man with eyes for Johnson who is nonetheless skeptical of women’s abilities to do the immensely complicated work involved, played excellently by Mahershala Ali.
