Apollo 13: Survival review: Exploring a mission to the moon gone astray 

Netflix's Apollo 13: Survival landed on Netflix today to recount the tale of NASA's most dangerous mission. The documentary explores how, in April 1970, NASA faced the greatest crisis during its mission to put a human being on the moon for the third time. The mission went astray when the spacecraft that had three astronauts aboard suffered a catastrophic explosion.

As the crew of the Boeing Starliner awaits their fate, Netflix has brought back the cautionary tale of space missions with Apollo 13: Survival. It is a time capsule of rare audio and visuals from the shuttle, NASA's control center, and the astronauts' families. It is produced by Insight Film, with producers Clive Patterson and Hugh Davies on board. Peter Middleton directs the documentary, which is now streaming on Netflix.

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Exploring the story of how the third mission to the moon went astray

Apollo 13: Survival is not just a documentary. It is a collage of archive footage with artful reenactments that tell one harrowing tale of an event where life and death hung in the balance. When Apollo 13 took off in the 1970s, the lives of three astronauts were imperiled by a near-fatal explosion that happened over two days and 210,000 miles into the mission. This nearly drained the three-part spacecraft of oxygen and electrical power.

The three astronauts on board, Fred Haise, Jack Swigert, and mission commander Jim Lovell, were forced to spend four traumatic and suffocating days in a lunar module meant for just two people and 45 hours.

The Netflix documentary explores NASA's unparalleled efforts to get them home, starting with hand-transferring flight data to the “lifeboat” module, catapulting off the moon’s orbit, and manually aiming an unpredictable rocket blast at the Earth. All of these required precision to avoid any death lest the efforts become misplaced. Moreover, the chances of survival were slim.

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Apollo 13: Survival is a one-of-a-kind documentary bringing us previously unexplored footage

Apollo 13: Survival presents facts from the whole event, gathered and arranged meticulously from restored archival material. Director Peter Middleton re-creates a play-by-play of the six-day mission aboard Apollo 13, primarily through archival recordings and old interviews with the crew.

The movie presents never-before-seen footage of the spacecraft, ground control, and the astronauts’ families. We see crew recordings during two crucial engine bursts, a video of mission control putting together a haphazard CO2 filter from cardboard and a sock, and home videos of the Lovell family.

Lovell’s wife Marilyn and the couple’s four children provide an emotional counterpoint to the dry, factually oriented documentary style. The result is a faithful, honest, and sometimes even clinical depiction of the ill-fated chapter of the US space program that we can enjoy from our homes.

It is hard to imagine a better approach to telling the story than the one Middleton adopted. It reminds us of Todd Douglas Miller’s 2019 Apollo 11 documentary, which followed a similar format, resurrecting and restoring the story from archival footage of the first moon landing. Middleton does an excellent job of making us remember the Apollo 13 mission not just as an extraordinary event but also in all its mundaneness.

The Apollo 13 mission has been previously explored cinematically, notably in Rod Howard’s Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks as Commander James Lovell. Still, the Netflix documentary ranks over it owing to the benefits of access to a wealth of previously unexplored materials.

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Don't miss the Netflix documentary Apollo 13: Survival today.