"Houston, we have a problem".. those famous words now synonymous with this movie set the scene for this great DVD. It is the true story of the ill-fated 1970 voyage of Apollo 13 to the moon, the mishaps begin when the craft only two-thirds of the way to the moon suffers extensive damage as a result of an explosion in one of the onboard oxygen tanks. This forces the crew to abandon the mission and return to Earth. The crew consisting of Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks- Forrest Gump), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton - Titanic,Twister) and Jack Swaggart (Kevin Bacon - Tremors, The River Wild) must accomplish numerous extra-ordinary feats to solve one problem after another to ensure their safe return. They are assisted by the highly motivated and ever resourceful Mission Control led by Gene Kranz (Ed Harris - The Rock)

The film directed by Ron Howard (Happy Days) is one of the most true to life realistic films ever, Howard a stickler for detail and realism made the cast and crew fly 628 parabolic flights in NASA's KC-135 airplane to achieve real weightlessness. Each of the flights gave them 23 seconds only of zero gravity, making a total of 4 hours and 44 seconds.

The film based on the book by Jim Lovell 'The Lost Moon' who actually assisted Howard in re-telling the story exactly how it was. Lovell by the way also played a cameo role in the movie as the Captain of the rescue ship the 'USS Iwo Jima'. Marilyn Lovell incidentally also plays a cameo role as an extra in the crowd at the launch of Apollo 13. As stated by someone in the extra feature documentary "Lost Moon: The Triumph of Apollo 13" there is hardly any archival footage of what happened in existence and in 100 years people can watch the movie and see an almost true to life account of what actually happened.

The movie provided courtesy to you by Universal Pictures is presented in it's original theatrical letterboxed presentation only of (2.35:1). The transfer which is anamorphically enhanced for widescreen televisions is excellent and contains some amazing special effects, the launch scene in particular. The letterboxed image is consistently clear and sharp with excellent detail. Colors are solid and accurate without a trace of video noise and I did not see any digital artifacts. Brightness and contrast are again excellent with very good shadow detail. The scenes in space really do the DVD format justice, stars are by the million and come through very well, I can imagine just how good the Star Wars trilogy would look on DVD if this film is anything to go by.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is very effective. The thunder of the launch is spectacular and the digital soundtrack provides all the impact and subtlety of this first rate sound mix. Also the accompanying musical score by James Horner is superb and really adds to the atmosphere and feeling of this movie. This incidentally is included on the disc. You can access this feature when you enter the menu page. The soundtrack starts and you can skip from track to track using your remote as you would in the movie itself. However you can only forward through the tracks and not go in the reverse direction.

Apollo 13 runs 140 minutes and the disc contains 57 chapters. The disc is packed with supplements highlighted by the terrific documentary "Lost Moon: The Triumph of Apollo 13". The documentary runs 58 minutes and is also chapter encoded with 13 markers. A theatrical trailer, production notes, and cast and crew bios round out the onscreen supplements. Two additional audio tracks carry full length running commentaries by Ron Howard on one track and Jim and Marilyn Lovell on the other. The disc is also in the dual layer format. This is a superb collector's item and a must get , highly recommended.

Languages: English, Spanish, French. Subtitles: Spanish. Region Coding: 1. Dolby Digital 5.1. Ltbx: Optimized for 16x9.