Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com essential video:
NASA's worst nightmare turned into one of the space agency's most heroic moments in 1970, when the Apollo 13 crew was forced to hobble home in a disabled capsule after an explosion seriously damaged the moon-bound spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton play (respectively) astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise in director Ron Howard's intense, painstakingly authentic docudrama. The Apollo 13 crew and Houston-based mission controllers race against time and heavy odds to return the damaged spacecraft safely to Earth from a distance of 205,500 miles. Using state-of-the-art special effects and ingenious filmmaking techniques, Howard and his stellar cast and crew build nail-biting tension while maintaining close fidelity to the facts. The result is a fitting tribute to the Apollo 13 mission and one of the biggest box-office hits of 1995. --Jeff Shannon

Amazon.com:
Relying primarily on actual footage shot by NASA and by news organizations, this video documents the drama of the aborted Apollo 13 mission, in which three astronauts came close to losing their lives in space. The actual recording of commander Jim Lovell telling Houston about the "problem" made famous in the Hollywood version of Apollo 13 is presented, and the scenes showing distressed engineers in the actual control room in Houston are in some ways much more dramatic than anything seen on the big screen. This is, after all, reality, with real people scrambling under intense pressure to save real lives. Besides the footage inside mission control, the video also showcases invaluable flight footage shot by the astronauts aboard the crippled spaceship. This video takes an essentially chronological approach, but the technique of using the crew's postflight news conference to serve as narration, while it is at first confusing, serves a useful purpose. This is a no-frills production, but the excitement as NASA engineers mobilize and the whole world watches the news about the stricken spaceship is so gripping that any flourishes would only seem to get in the way. --Robert J. McNamara

Rating : - WHY THE MISSING SCENES???
Being a big follower of the space program since the mid-1960s, I was really excited when Apollo 13 was released..first on VHS, then to DVD. But on both the DVD-released versions, why are there scenes missing? One that I noticed right away is when Barbara Lovell(the Lovell's eldest daughter) doesn't want to go to Mission Control to watch the TV broadcast from space. Presumably because she is upset over the Beatle's breakup. Then much of the TV broadcast itself from the VHS version is missing. There were more missing, as well. It was a little disconcerting..especially with the "anniversary" edition. But the essence of the story..the triumph of the human spirit in the face of extraordinary odds...still remains true.