TO: ALL HANDS
FROM: S. Travis Brown
CEO, Auteurs sans Honte ni Fierté, Intl.
Hollywood, CA 90067
STATUS: URGENT!
RE: Apollo 13: The Remake
Okay folks, I just watched a movie called Apollo 13: Survival, on Netflix. This 2024 documentary about the 1970 Apollo XIII disaster, which was pieced together from archive footage and rarely seen interviews with the participants, is pretty darn tense and captivating, right up to the final frames. What an epic story of survival! What a property it would make! And it’s all public domain, too! No agents to deal with or rights to buy!
But the more I think about it, the more I realize it has some pretty serious problems we’ll need to address before we can move forward. Good core concept, yes, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. And before anyone whines, “But that’s not historically accurate!” I have just one word for you: Hamilton.
Now, here’s my thinking.
First off, the Apollo 13 crew is not balanced. It needs to consist of a handsome young Black male hotshot Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) who’s been unfairly passed-over for promotion, a beautiful slender blonde lesbian Command Module Pilot (CMP) who tries to warn everyone about the impending disaster but is ignored because she’s a woman, and an older white guy who’s the Mission Commander (MC) because he’s old and white, but who is also the guy responsible for stupidly throwing the switch that causes the explosion that cripples the ship.
Secondly, Chief Flight Director (CFD) Gene Kranz is just all wrong, in every possible way, from the top of his brush-cut hair to the soles of his wingtip shoes. The CFD needs to be a body-positive middle-aged Black woman—I’m thinking Viola Davis, am I right?—who stomps into scenes, shouts a lot, pounds her fist on desks and tables, and motivates her team by screaming threats at them and saying things like, “Come on, people, work this problem! Give me a solution!” She’s got to treat her staff in Mission Control like they’re a bunch of minimum-wage Subway employees who would be just sitting around playing games on their computers if she wasn’t there to motivate them by shouting at them.
Third, speaking of the Mission Control staff: all those people in all those scenes were way too male and way too white. We need more women in those scenes; more Blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and Asians; at least one Russian—no wait, not Russian, better make him Ukrainian—and at least one transgender BIPOC person with a prominent speaking part who comes up with a brilliant idea at a crucial moment. Along with that, as long as we’re doing all the cutaways to the other people on the ground, what’s with this obsessive focus on Marilyn Lovell and the Lovell kids? We need a lot more cutaways to the CMP’s beautiful wife and their angelic child, anxiously waiting for word of the fate of the mission.
Hey, here’s a sidebar thought. Can we maybe get those three Black women from Hidden Figures—or they’re getting kind of old now, maybe we can get three lookalikes? Just for a cameo: say, at a crucial moment the Mission Control computer breaks down, and these three Black women step out of the shadows with legal pads in their hands and pencils tucked behind their ears, and they do the re-entry calculations in their heads. I think that’d be a real wow stand-up-and-cheer scene, don’t you?
Okay, where was I? Fourth, or is this fifth? Anyway, Nixon. You’ve got Richard Nixon in this story, and he’s completely wasted. You need at least one scene in which he’s smiling and sympathetic on TV, but then cut to him huddled in a back room with the rest of his Reichstag staff, scheming and discussing whether it will be more helpful for him in the next election if the Apollo 13 crew is killed or saved, and if killed, can they make it look like an accident?
Next, there’s no getting around this, the special effects in Apollo 13: Survival are just terrible. The movie misses so many opportunities to up the dramatic ante. When the oxygen tank in the Service Module explodes, the explosion should be louder, larger, longer, and much more colorful, with flaming crap flying everywhere, and maybe it should make the ship start tumbling, too. Then, when they slingshot around the Moon, they’re too high up: they should be skimming in so close to the surface they only make it by the skin of their teeth, and an antenna gets snapped off on a lunar peak that they just barely miss thanks to the CMP’s brilliant piloting. Finally, when they need to restart the LM engine for the Earth injection burn, it just starts, with no drama. It should fail to ignite the first couple of times, and not start until the CMP sobs, pounds her fist on the console in frustration, and gives it one more try.
Speaking of the Earth injection burn: the Apollo 13 crew members were all wearing Omega Speedmaster chronograph wristwatches. They had to time the engine burn manually and precisely, by closely watching their wristwatches. PRODUCT PLACEMENT, PEOPLE! PRODUCT PLACEMENT! Jesus, do I have to think of everything myself?
Finally, once they’ve made their last mid-course correction burn, that’s it. After that, they’re just waiting to find out if they survive. Tense, yes, but no drama. I’m thinking when they hit the atmosphere this is the perfect place for something to go horribly wrong, for the MC to freeze up, forcing the CMP to take over, and for the hotshot Black LMP to seize the controls and fly the ship in manually, wrestling with the controls and just dripping with sweat and machismo and showing off what a great big pair of mighty balls he has!
Then: happy ending. They splash down safely, the helicopters show up, we cut to them on the carrier’s deck, emerging from the capsule—only we don’t just have a bunch of Navy people standing around them, we have everybody. Think of the last scene of Independence Day. The CMP’s wife and child are there. The LMP’s husband is there. (Never reveal that your hero is gay until after his hero cred is solidly established.) The MC’s wife is there—better yet, she’s back at home, watching all this on TV with a drink in her hand and disgusted look on her face—no, wait, I’ve got it! She’s in a motel room in bed with her lover, watching all this on TV with a drink in her hand and a disgusted look on her face, saying, “Damn. I was really looking forward to being his widow.”
To sum it up: Apollo 13: Survival is a good movie. Great concept. Good story. It’s a solid “nice try.” But I think we can make the story better, and seriously, we must make it a lot better if we’re going to get Disney to green light and bankroll the remake.
Now get cracking, people! I want to see first draft script treatments on my desk by EOB Friday!
No pressure,
STB
Once upon a time, under another name, S. Travis Brown had a successful career as an SF/F writer, until the winds of taste changed direction and the kinds of fiction he liked to write became too hard to sell. When his own agent advised him, just before dropping him, to adopt yet another new pseudonym, preferably female this time, and to start his career over again as a writer of paranormal romance novels, he said, “[intercourse] this, I am not Doctor Who,” and went off to do other things that paid better.
Now comfortably retired, we don’t hear from him often, but when we do, we’re mostly happy to publish what he sends us. Mostly.
When asked to supply an author’s photo, he instead sent us this picture, with the explanation, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” We considered asking him to explain his relationship to this dog, but decided it was better not to ask.
Brown has no social media presence that we know of, and says he prefers it that way.
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