It requires patience to settle into the narrative, but once the action moves into space, it becomes a remarkably engaging story about three astronauts who are left adrift after an oxygen tank explodes. Ron Howard delivers a notably tense and confined experience as Lovell (Tom Hanks), Haise (Bill Paxton), and Swigert (Kevin Bacon) collaborate with their ground control team—including Mattingly (Gary Sinese) and Kranz (…

The April 1970 Apollo 13 mission to the moon was cut short when an explosion created problems inside the spacecraft. The three astronauts and those at Mission Control then had to concentrate on simply staying alive and returning home, if that proved possible. Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” (1995) offers a dependable depiction of what actually happened, and it's clear that it shaped "The Martian," which came out twenty y…