Having built one of the most complicated camera rigs in cinema history for Children Of Men, Alfonso Cuaron took it one further with last year's Gravity, which had its production delayed for years because the director was waiting for technology to get to the point that he could create even more complicated rigs in order to simulate Sarah Bullock's very bad day spent in the zero gravity environment of space. He needn't have bothered. Because years before his things-go-wrong-in-space blockbuster Ron Howard has produced the definitive film in that admittedly niche sub-genre. The Award-winning Apollo 13 reconstructed the actual events of the 1970 moon flight which very nearly went totally pair shaped for its crew. Who just so happened to look a bit like Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton and Gary Sinise. Howard wasn't quite as big a stickler for realism as Cuaron in some ways (case in point: Bacon's Command Module Pilot Swigert actually said "Houston, we've had a problem here, rather than the better-known present tense Houston, we have a problem), but in other ways he had the Spanish director totally beat. So if it took until 2013 for Gravity to have the right technology to accurately simulate zero gravity environments, how did they do the same with Apollo 13 in 1998? Simple. They actually filmed in zero gravity. Hanks, Bacon, Paxton, Sinise and the crew took rides in NASA's very own vomit comets, those planes which fly really high and then plummet to create the effects of zero g. So every scene with zero gravity in Apollo 13 was filmed in thirty-second bursts, presumably with breaks for everyone to throw up. It's not just a name, you know.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
