Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.As the crew of the Boeing Starliner now wait to return to Earth months after their troubled spacecraft, an older cautionary tale descends with Apollo 13: Survival. The glitch-ridden 1970 attempt to put men on the Moon for the third time would later get the Hollywood treatment: a Ron Howard blockbuster with Tom Hanks as steadfast commander Jim Lovell. The new film is a different beast. Not just a documentary, it is a juddering collage of archive footage, some never seen before, subtly laced with artful reconstructions. Life and death hang in the balance amid vintage buzz and crackle.Director Peter Middleton previously made the documentaries Notes on Blindness and The Real Charlie Chaplin, bracingly inventive takes on their subjects. Here, finding new angles feels harder. But the swirl of archive soon proves heady, transporting us back to a 1970 where, only a year after Neil Armstrong’s small step, the public has already grown just a touch blasé about the space age. And Middleton has a hawk’s eye for tell-tale visuals that TV news editors of the time would have simply cut: the sheer leviathan weirdness of the Cape Kennedy launch pad; the fading smile of commander’s wife Marilyn Lovell at a Nasa press conference.Now that expression looks like an omen. Once an explosion dooms the crew to a desperate race back to Earth, a stark contrast soon develops. On the ground, we have the frantic, fearful energy of Mission Control. Some 240,000 miles above, the scene is eerie stillness. The film does a lot with the dark joke of the ghost ship’s control panel: control here is as limited as the oxygen, and all power is devoted to the last available engine. The crew find mordant silver linings. The temperature plunging, Lovell realises they no longer need a fridge for the hot dogs.If Middleton’s work here is more conventional than his previous films, it also smartly draws out the central, timeless ambivalence of the story. Even as we continue to yearn for what a voice back in 1970 calls the “other Eden” of unknown planets, for now, only one place in the cosmos offers anything like a home.★★★☆☆On Netflix from September 5
