My only real complaint about Apollo 13 is that they made such a botch-up of the timing of the Saturn V's ignition and liftoff. I was surprised and wondered how they managed to do that.
It's even more surprising now that I've checked the list of
Technical Consultants for
Apollo 13 (shown at 2:09:34):
Jim Lovell, Jeffrey Kluger, Dave Scott, Jerry Bostick, Gerald Griffin and Max L Ary. Perhaps they were over-confident and simply omitted to show their consultants the computer-generated footage of the liftoff - Ron Howard said it impressed Buzz Aldrin who obviously only saw it in the finished movie. Lovell, Scott and Griffin alone would have surely told them they had to redo the countdown timing so that ignition occurred at 8.9 seconds and liftoff at zero, the same as it did in real life.
Possibly a sad cause of them not being corrected was that the excellent TV docu-drama
From the Earth to the Moon (1998), with Tom Hanks narrating, also had the same timing botch-up. Hanks was a great Apollo fan in his younger years, but must have not known about that.
I've known about it for at least 30 years and probably more. And perhaps with so few Apollo old-timers being around now, botch-ups like that will keep on occurring in the future, because many historians don't go right back to the earliest possible time to do their research and instead summarise and repeat the errors of their predecessors. Plus, of course, the finer details of space travel are extremely complex.
Speaking of botch-ups, I made one in post No. 1 where I should have written "struggles
to get out". Oldfartitis (76) frequently causes those sort of things these days, to my annoyance.
