The movie, from a cinema standpoint, is excellent. It shows the shots of the soldiers leaving home, the shots from the spacecraft, and the effect of the crash on the astronaut’s families. The shots from space are wonderful and seem as though they have the effects that modern technology has now. It is really pretty astonishing looking at some of the shots of the movie and how closely related they seem to be to what a viewer would think it would be like to be there.
The thing that is so intriguing about the movie is that it is a docudrama. With that, I mean to say that it is so close to the facts that it is mostly a documentary. Obviously, it is not the exact same but is closely related to what it would have been like to actually be there, in the moment of the crash and with the families—and most importantly the moment when the astronauts got to return home. And, as far as the drama of the movie goes, it is nothing of what a person might think a documentary might be like. With that, I mean that it still conveys the excitement that a movie should have to be done well and it definitely has that.
Overall, the movie is excellent, and it was not surprising when it was nominated for nine Oscars in 1995. For the movie being over ten years old, what is surprising is how ingenious some of the shots from the movie are. The movie makes it seem as though the viewer is there with the astronauts and gives credibility to the actual history of the movie.