My Basic Ramblings: After watching this movie, I read Roger Ebert's review, and it brought up a very good point: the computers we have in our homes, the ones on which we browse the Web and figure our finances and play our games (Carmageddon, anyone?), are faster and more powerful than the computers used in the Apollo missions. (Send men to the Moon with the easy-to-use Microsoft MoonLaunch 2.3.5! Comes free with every Windows 98! Just try to delete it off your hard drive!)
Anyway, one of Chris's mother's cats is named Apollo, and he's huge. Upwards of 25 pounds. I like to call him "a bowling ball filled with cat-flavored goo", simply because I like the phrase "cat-flavored".
When is Tom Hanks going to play the villian? He always plays these noble, pure in heart and spirit characters. Maybe he and Dennis Hopper can co-star in a movie and break their respective stereotypical characters. Or Gary Oldman, or, as of recent, Christopher Walken. Tom Hanks could make a bitchin' Bond villian. ("You are like a box of chocolates, Mr. Bond. Leave it in the sun too long and it melts," Hanks sneers as James Bond is tied up under a giant magnifying glass.)
Bill Paxton is in this movie, and any time he had a line, I always imagined him saying, "Nyah, nyah, I'm going to be in Titanic, the biggest movie ever, and you're not, nyah nyah, screw you, Tom Hanks, with your two Oscars, and screw you, Kevin Bacon, with your little movie star game. I'M KING OF THE WORLD! WAHOOOOOOO! Gimme some more of that PCP-spiked chowder!"
Gary Sinise is in this movie, too. I like him. He's cool. He's up there on the List O'Crushes. Ed O'Neil is in the movie too (not Sam O'Neill, he was in Merlin and The Lost World and Event Horizon and is rather handsome too, though I tend to get him confused with Robert Urich) - he was John Glenn in The Right Stuff. Jim Meskimer is in it as well. (He was a somewhat regular on Whose Line is it Anyway? - does a very good impression of Sting.) I'm not sure, but I think Dean Cain, the TV Superman guy, is in it as well.
My favorite part of this movie is when the engineers have to make the carbon dioxide filter adapter out of stuff the astronauts have on the ship. It's great! These are the kind of guys you want to have around. Something in your house breaks, they can fix it with duct tape and a sock. (Duct tape - is there anything it can't do?) Maybe they can build me a tape deck out of duct tape and a sock.
I read the "Goofs" section at the Internet Movie Database for this movie, and discovered that, like James Cameron, Ron Howard took a few liberties with the history of the event (for example: Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise's character) was at Mission Control during the entire mission, not at home moping around with his phone off the hook. Also, when Apollo 8 landed on the moon, there was no party at the Lovall household - Jim was at Mission Control.) Some would say, "See, nyah! Great movies bend history all the time, leave Titanic alone, you fucking Nazi jerkoff!" I point out that Ron Howard did not need to put a pair of star-crossed lovers in the capsule with Lovall and crew to show the drama of the situation. (Though wouldn't Kate Winslet've looked heavenly, running through the capsule, all weightless and stuff? She could have said "I'm flying!" and been telling the truth. She could have jumped out of the capsule at the very last minute and stayed with Leo, saying "You burn up when we go through re-entry, I burn up when we go through re-entry." Then she could have swiped the last spacesuit and survived, while Leo burned up in a glorious Technicolor burst of flame.)
Little Trivia Bitlet: The captain of the Iwo Jima, (the ship that collects the astronauts) is portrayed by the real Jim Lovell.