A Life in Film is a project where I’m writing about a movie from every year I’ve been alive.

1995: No flair to get in the way

APOLLO 13 (dir. Ron Howard)

I don’t like Ron Howard much as a director.* His movies are usually competently made, but turgid and devoid of flair. He feels like—arguably he is, given his biography—a throwback to a much earlier era of Hollywood,  a competent, workmanlike director who would function just fine as a midsized cog in a gigantic studio machine. Barton Fink finally wrote that Wally Beery wrestling script, let’s get that over to Ron Howard, he’ll get it shot on time and under budget without any fuss.

*As a person, I’m not sure; he seems to have a sense of humor about himself, at least sometimes, and I don’t know offhand of any “Ron Howard is a monster” stories. But he did exercise the massively poor judgment to make a bad adaptation of the bad source material of Hillbilly Elegy. I guess if nothing else, given how much child actors go through, “prolific and competent director who lacks any personal flair” is a pretty good outcome, so good for him. On the other hand, his longtime associate Brian Grazer seems like a dumb piece of shit, so, uh, questions remain.

Anyway, Apollo 13 is by far Ron Howard’s best movie. It’s the rare case where all of the elements play to his strengths: a true story that’s so compelling on its own that it’s an ideal situation for a director with a lot of competence but zero panache. There’s no directorial personality to get in the way of the story.

And let’s be clear: it really is a motherfucker of a story. Astronauts on their way to the moon, rocket blows up, they’re saved by the power of teamwork and engineering? It’s jaw-dropping that it happened, and Howard’s movie really does do a great job of laying it out for you. I don’t know if it’s reasonable to claim that Apollo 13 initiated the genre of competence porn (it almost certainly didn’t), but it sure acts as a landmark in the field (and I believe it’s a direct production  ancestor of HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, which is also quite good).

Also noteworthy: Apollo 13 just visually looks great in a way that I don’t know a contemporary run at this would. I don’t pretend to know much about the effects work in this movie, but I know that every seen feels real, something that I don’t think would be a given now (barring superhuman efforts like Cuaron’s Gravity, which I wouldn’t bet against getting covered in this column eventually).

The other noteworthy thing to me about Apollo 13 is that it marks one of the hinge points (along with his 90s rom coms) in Tom Hanks’ career pivot from “affable doofus who does bizarre comedy remakes of old cop shows with Dan Aykroyd” to his long, maybe-still-extant run as the modern Jimmy Stewart. And to be super clear: Hanks is really good in this, doing his peak Hanks thing of radiating competence (there’s that word again! I guess that’s just the theme of this movie) and both reliability and relatability. I’d never thought of this before, but maybe this movie marks Hanks’ flip from America’s doofy uncle to America’s dad.

So, yeah. Not a major movie, but I guess its twin positions as Howard’s peak (and it’s worth remembering that for a long time, Ron Howard was an irritatingly ubiquitous force, reliably throwing down some middlebrow Oscar bait every year to massive promotional pushes) and Hanks’ hinge point make it worth talking about (anyway, ’95 was a lean year, it was this or Crimson Tide). This’ll be a short, lesser entry as I gather steam for ’96, which should be a big one.

But I’ll leave you with this: for whatever reasons of brain wiring, I don’t cry easily. I’ve had some pretty large tragedies hit me in my life, and in each case I wound up just sitting on the couch staring at the wall. But one of the few things that consistently—and I do not understand this at all—makes me tear up is video of success in space. So if you’re some kind of sicko who wants to see me get misty-eyed, all you need to do is watch Apollo 13 with me.