APOLLO 13

This is the good stuff: a true American story, told with real craft, about ordinary men doing extraordinary work under impossible pressure. The film is well-paced and exciting, and its portrait of teamwork, courage, and determination overcoming the worst of situations will land with almost anyone who watches it. That's a four-star achievement, and it earns it.

The catch is smaller than the achievement, but real. The dialogue carries a real quantity of obscenities and profanities, there's some sexual innuendo between a married couple, and a shower scene (no nudity). More than any single line, though, is what's missing: a story built entirely around human ingenuity, with no turn toward prayer or God, even in a life-or-death crisis in space.

For older children through adults, this is an easy recommend. For families who want their moral triumphs to point somewhere beyond human grit alone, know that going in.

Jim Lovell watches Neil Armstrong take his "one giant step" from a party at his own house, content to wait for his turn on Apollo 14 — until a crewmate's illness bumps him up the ladder early. Days before launch, he loses his top pilot to measles and gains a last-minute replacement, joined by a third crewman for the ride. The takeoff goes off without a hitch. Then, deep in space, halfway between the earth and the moon, something goes catastrophically wrong.

Four stars means this is Movieguide's top mark, and here the reasoning is straightforward: the film is well-paced and exciting from the ground up, and its central themes — teamwork, courage, determination in the face of near-certain disaster — come through with real force.

What's clear even from a thin craft description is that this is a film built to move an audience, and it does. The praise is unqualified on the entertainment side — the only asterisk the source attaches is to content, not craft.

This is a humanist film, and it knows it. The source is blunt about it: strip away the crude language and you'd have a movie "every moral American would love" — except for one more thing it names directly, a "noticeable lack of prayer." Men facing near-certain death in space solve their crisis through ingenuity, teamwork, and sheer nerve, with no turn toward God even as a footnote.

That's not nothing to praise. Courage, determination, and sacrificial teamwork are real virtues, and Scripture honors them too. But a story about men saved from death in the deep who never once look up is a story that's told half the truth. The Bible has its own account of a sea rescue that ends not in applause for the crew's cleverness but in prayer and thanksgiving to the God who calmed the waters (Jonah 1–2; Psalm 107:23–30). "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God" (Psalm 20:7). Apollo 13 gives you the chariots. It leaves out who else might be worth trusting.

Apollo 13 is exactly what it sets out to be: a well-made, exciting, deeply American story of courage under pressure, four stars' worth of good filmmaking. It also asks families to sit with some real crudeness and a story that never once looks past human skill toward God. Our answer: worth the trip — older children and up.