Apollo 13: Survival

Directed by Peter Middleton, this Netflix documentary tells the Apollo 13 story with a choice unusual for the form: there is not a single talking head, and conventional interviews are dispensed with entirely. In their place are period archival audio, NASA footage, never before seen home movies, and newly shot reconstructions of the spacecraft interior. The home movies come from 8mm film shot by a Life magazine photographer embedded in the Lovells' living room. The team sifted more than seven thousand hours of raw material into the edit and restored audio that was, in its original state, too noisy to use. That material became accessible thanks to an archival project released on the mission's fiftieth anniversary, during which a researcher at the National Archives located four missing reels from the Mission Control audio collection, the ones containing the sound of the explosion itself, lost because they had been filed with the accident investigation materials. Those recordings became public for the first time since the 1970 inquiry. The film's emotional counterweight is Marilyn Lovell's perspective, fielding phone calls, listening to NASA comms on the squawk box at home, shielding her children. It holds a hundred percent on Rotten Tomatoes and earned four Emmy nominations. Jim Lovell died at ninety seven, roughly eleven months after it premiered. Who it's for: Anyone drawn to space history and to tension built purely from archival material. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting expert commentary and context, since the film lets the period speak entirely for itself.