Apollo 13 (1995)

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Kathleen Quinlan

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. In fact, taking the movie in at 11 on VHS* feels like the first—or at least one of the first—movies meant for grown ups that really captured my imagination. It sent me into one of several periods over the last thirty years where I became obsessed with the space program, or at least that era before NASA decided to putter around in low Earth orbit for all eternity**.

Did I Like It: I’m smack dab in one of those periods where the Apollo program absolutely fascinates me. It’s entirely the fault of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, which has rapidly become one of my favorite television series ever. By its very nature, the show guarantees that we’re never going to know what’s going to happen at any given moment.

Even if I hadn’t already seen the movie several times over the years, I’d know exactly what happens by the end.

And yet, it is still thrilling. That may be partly because the story—without any Hollywood embellishments (of which there were few, judging by the Jim and Marilyn Lovell commentary track on the DVD—is just that thrilling. Everything that could have gone wrong on humanities third attempt to land on the moon did go wrong, and yet astronauts Lovell (Hanks), Haise (Paxton), and Swigert (Bacon) still return home at the end.

Also, and I really didn’t think this was going to be the case nearly thirty years after the film, but the special effects still work. The launch sequence is still insanely thrilling, and there isn’t even any inherent tension at that point in the film. The journey for the free-return trajectory to the moon depicts a lot of subtle details of the flight (chiefly debris from the explosion following the spacecraft through most of its arduous journey) that I honestly hadn’t noticed on previous viewings. Lora indicated one shot didn’t hold up as much as the others, where Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) watches the launch. She was right, but it didn’t even occur to me until after we were done watching that the film might have any technical flaws at all.

*How did we ever live like such animals? It boggles the mind.

**I know we’re trying to get back into the actual exploration of space beyond our planet, but as I type this Artemis I failed it’s second launch attempt in half as many weeks, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Twister (1996)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cary Elwes

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. When your family gets HBO for the first time in late 1996, you almost had to watch it. It was the law. I’m sort of sad that I didn’t catch it in the theater, as my memory includes a screening of the film at the Admiral Twin Drive in here in town had to be cut short due to—you guessed it—marital discord between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

That’s what the movie is about, right?

Did I Like It: This has got to be one of the flimsiest, silliest blockbuster films to exist, and somehow, almost kind of work at the same time. The marriage subplot is so thin that both viewers and the movie itself decide to pretty much forget about it before the third act.

The movie makes a mad scramble for an antagonist. One would think the tornadoes would be enough bad guy for a movie… about tornadoes. There’s even a moment, right at the film’s climax where I think we are supposed to believe the probes contained within Dorothy actually killed the final tornado? Was this the same tornado that killed Jo’s (Hunt) father? But it isn’t enough, there has to be a cadre of black hats, or rather SUVs. 

One might point to the special effects as worth a view, but I think the one-two punch of seeing it on television, combined with the fact that it has been 25 years since the film was released, even those moments have grown tame.

What more is there? There aren’t that many movies that take place in the place I came from, to say nothing of action movies. There’s also a certain dopey charm in the storm chasers. Sure, if you forced me to come up with the names other than Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, and that one guy who I’m fairly sure disappears before Paxton’s fiancée excuses herself from the proceedings. They’re a fun bunch and I have a vague recollection of there being development of a sequel in the years since. What would that have even looked like? Maybe they go after hurricanes? Or snow flurries. Yep. I can see the poster now. Twister 2: Snow Flurries. Released in 1999. Bill Paxton returns; Helen Hunt couldn’t be bothered. In that universe, the Twister saga displaces The Fast and The Furious. 

One shudders. I just won’t growl. That should be left to the tornadoes.

True Lies (1994)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Eliza Dushku

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: It is a shame that James Cameron so rarely makes films now. Indeed, his only feature directorial effort in nearly twenty-five years* is Avatar (2009), and the only films he has on his schedule are sequels to that film. Had he kept his output at the pace it was in the 1990s, we’d have 5-10 new films from him to enjoy. 

And we might be less inclined to dwell on the ones that don’t work as well as the others. I remember enjoying this film a great deal in years past, but something about it doesn’t ring as sharply now.

The action is good, which isn’t surprising, as anything less from the team of Schwarzenegger and Cameron would have been a colossal blunder. Even then, it does feel like it is not all that surprising. The set pieces you see here would be stuff that had become old hat in the James Bond franchise by that time.

Maybe part of the problem is that Schwarzenegger isn’t quite the right casting for a suave mega-spy. He’s a better actor—or at least movie star—than most people give him credit for, and his roles after leaving the governor’s mansion have been by and large pretty good, but he is a howitzer, not a device for finesse.

I think the real problem, though is that the film is at its heart a romantic comedy, and Cameron excels at action and spectacle, and not so much the smaller human stories. He doesn’t fail at it, necessarily. He brought plenty of romance to Titanic (1997), obviously, but a light comedy may not be in his blood.

*His version of Spider-Man (2002) would have really been something, though. DiCaprio as the Wall-Crawler? Schwarzenegger as Doc Ock (had they ever gotten around to it)? But in that scenario, we all would have idly wondered what Sam Raimi’s version of the films would have been like.

Titanic (1997)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane

Have I Seen It Before?: I’m relatively sure I came to the film late. In December 1997, the stink of the massive delays with the movie led me—my analysis of the movie business as a thirteen-year-old were not to be dismissed—to insist that Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) would win the box office that particular opening weekend. I may still owe a school chum a couple of Star Wars CCG cards as recompense for my folly.

I did eventually see the film during its unparalleled run at the box office over the next few months. Everyone did. Girls wanted to see the movie. Now, of course, I ended up seeing the movie by myself, but one did want to be conversant in the vernacular of the age.

Not that I was talking with too terribly many girls either.

Ahem.

Did I like it?: There’s an interesting trend with the writer James Cameron. His tastes are pretty basic*. The Terminator (1984) is essentially just a slasher movie. Aliens (1986) is a war movie. True Lies (1994) is a Bond movie merges with what is essentially a family sitcom. Avatar (2009) is a pulp sci-fi novel. Even Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) is essentially Shane (1953) with robots. So, too, is this film a very basic romance story. In the hands of any other filmmaker, Cameron’s scripts could be a real drag.

Cameron the filmmaker is at or near the top of his field. I hesitate to think of a filmmaker who has been able to more successfully buck the studio system in favor of his gigantic budgets. Even Orson Welles was only able to pull of the trick once. Cameron does it time and time again. Even when he had to work with a shoestring, he knew better than most how to make each shot work in symbiosis with one another. His words may be pedestrian, but the way he speaks the language of cinema are second to none. The cast is fine, although I don’t think I’d be alone in thinking that DiCaprio’s best work still lay ahead of him, after he was sufficiently freed from the burden of being a teen heartthrob. Package that all together with one of James Horner’s finest scores, and you might not even notice that the film runs over three hours, entering that hallowed ground of movies that had to be split up into two VHS tapes (and even had to run on two discs in the here and now).

But let’s get serious. If Jack (DiCaprio) and Rose (Winslet) hadn’t been making out so close to the crow’s nest, then none of us would be still talking about the damned boat, I’d imagine.

*I know. Who am I to judge?