Apollo 13: Survival sounds like an Asylum knockoff of Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 from 1995. And compared to that movie, it might as well be. If you’ve seen that far superior ’95 film, there’s very little reason to bother with this underwhelming Netflix documentary.

The film recounts the story of 1970’s Apollo 13 flight. Something went wrong on the flight to the moon and the astronauts have to jury-rig various components to make it back alive.

The doc gives us voice over interviews from the astronauts, their family, and the ground crew so that’s nice. Plus we get archival footage showing us how much better looking Hollywood actors are to the actual rocket jockeys and the steely eyed missile men on the ground. Only flight director Gene Kranz comes off looking similar enough to Ed Harris (and maybe the guy Clint Howard played in the film).

The unfortunate truth is that if you’ve seen Apollo 13, there’s almost no reason to watch this doc. It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know… I wound up playing mental connect the dots and admiring how much detail the old film got right. But if you haven’t seen Apollo 13… well… just go watch Apollo 13.

This film does give us more information about the crew and their family (well, at least Jim Lovell’s family). His wife and daughter are interviewed so that’s nice. The text at the end gives us a nugget about Lovell’s life after the flight but doesn’t bother with the two other jokers. Screw them, they weren’t played by Tom Hanks in the movie, I guess?

I was very bored by this doc’s attempt to dramatize documentary footage. I want to give it a better score since it’s good history told poorly… and it’s not exactly its fault Apollo 13 did it better. Maybe it’ll be exciting to folk who don’t know the story. But it bored me to death.

Score: 66