Movie critic John Powers reviews Apollo 13 in the Washington Post, July 9, 1995, and in so doing manages to come completely unglued:

[T]his particular true story seems tailor-made for today's conservative mood—its Angry White Men and its nostalgia for a homogeneous America that never was. Ours may be the first country ever to pine for its lost glory while still being the most powerful nation on Earth, and in its rose-colored images of bygone days, Apollo 13 makes such nostalgia seem like a rational political position.

In fact, its story line could be a Republican parable about 1995 America: A marvelous vessel loses its power and speeds towards extinction, until it's saved by a team of heroic white men. I can imagine the political commercials in which Hanks morphs into Phil Gramm.

Although the movie's publicity trumpets its historical accuracy, the movie itself celebrates the paradisiacal America invoked by Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan—an America where men were men, women were subservient, and people of color kept out of the damned way. And what of satanic '60s counterculture? In one of the most telling subplots, Apollo 13 vanquishes the Jefferson Airplane. Astronaut Jim Lovell's daughter goes from being a rebellious teen with "White Rabbit" on her stereo to a docile young woman restored to the bosom of her family by her father's ordeal. Whatever the dormouse said, she's forgotten it.

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