Celluloid Heroes

And you, sir, are a steely-eyed missile man.

Don’t come into Apollo 13 expecting a deep, acutely insightful portrait of the inner lives of astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon are playing themselves to a large degree and this is probably a good thing for a big budget summer movie like this one. Real astronauts are invariably cool, hard-to-ruffle, by-the-book kinds of people. Sometimes it seems you could set their pants on fire and it would barely raise their pulse. This makes for successful space missions but not for a particularly exciting movie.

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Listen, nothing’s going to happen. This is just the opening credits.

This follow-up to 1979’s The Muppet Movie is a little heavier on the plot and a little lighter on the celebrity cameos but otherwise quite similar in tone. More important, it’s just as funny in the same lightly sophisticated but still kid friendly way.

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