DIRECTORS
Mike Gabriel
Eric Goldberg

SCREENWRITERS
Carl Binder
Andrew Chapman
Susannah Grant
Philip LaZebnik

PRODUCER
James Pentecost

MUSIC
Alan Menken
Stephen Schwartz

EDITOR
H. Lee Peterson

CAST

Irene Bedard (Pocahontas)
Judy Kuhn (Pocahontas [singing])
Mel Gibson (John Smith)
Linda Hunt (Grandmother Willow)
John Kassir (Meeko)
Frank Welker (Flit)
David Ogden Stiers (Governor Ratcliffe)
Christian Bale (Thomas)
Billy Connolly (Ben)
Gordon Tootoosis (Kekata)
Russell Means (Powhatan)

MPAA rating: G
Running time: 81m
U.S. release: June 23, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD

Other Disney films
reviewed on this site:

- A Bug's Life
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

DIRECTOR
Ron Howard

SCREENWRITERS
William Broyles Jr.
Al Reinert
based on the book Lost Moon by
Jim Lovell
Jeffrey Kluger

PRODUCER
Brian Grazer

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Dean Cundey

MUSIC
James Horner

EDITOR
Dan Hanley
Mike Hill

CAST

Tom Hanks (Jim Lovell)
Bill Paxton (Fred Haise)
Kevin Bacon (Jack Swigert)
Gary Sinise (Ken Mattingly)
Ed Harris (Gene Kranz)
Kathleen Quinlan (Marilyn Lovell)

MPAA rating: PG
Running time: 140m
U.S. release: June 30, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD

Other movies by Ron Howard
reviewed on this site:

- A Beautiful Mind
- Ed TV
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas
- Ransom

As Disney never tires of pointing out, Pocahontas is the studio's first historically-based animated feature. What they don't point out, understandably, is that -- with the exception of two or three characters -- this is essentially a live-action movie that a lot of people spent four years drawing. Has there ever been a cartoon less animated in spirit than Pocahontas? Disney's well-meaning solemnity seeps over the characters like spilled ink. There's a built-in problem with animated films featuring mostly people: Unable to project our emotions onto the otherness of cartoon animals, we observe the imitation humans, scrutinizing their every movement for accuracy. You look at someone turning his head and notice how his nose seems to shrink or expand from frame to frame. Even when a human gesture rings true, you can't help considering how much work went into animating that gesture.

Pocahontas goes by fast, and some of it is reasonably entertaining. By now, Disney has this stuff down cold: the pastoral images segueing into show tunes ("Colors of the Wind" will likely continue Disney's monopoly of the Best Original Song Oscar); the largely opaque heroes/heroines; the buffoonish villains who exist to be deflated; the earnest preaching, which here shifts from the usual "Be yourself" to "Accept others who are different." And Disney has always excelled at low-comedy supporting players; there are really only two here -- Meeko the raccoon and Flit the hummingbird -- but the movie would feel completely stiff without them. (They don't talk, which is an almost radical step for Disney.)

Despite Disney's pride in delivering a history lesson, the advance word has advised us to approach Pocahontas not as armchair historians but as people who want to be entertained. (Okay, here we are, now entertain us.) In other words, Disney is saying: Get off our backs, we're doing a good deed here. And I guess in some respects they are. Pocahontas is a decent film for girls, who generally don't find many role models at the movies, and it's a long-overdue big fantasy for Native American children. Yet Disney's fiddling with history has produced a bloodless romance. Pocahontas, a proud young woman who resists marrying her boring intended, meets John Smith, a blandly cute Disney hunk who lands on this strange new territory along with a crew of English settlers searching for gold. Pocahontas and John fall in love because ... because there would be no movie if they didn't. Neither one is a person; they're both too busy representing something or other. Call me a grinch, but I'm not particularly moved by two abstract concepts falling in love.

Disney already handled the "We're all the same underneath" theme in Beauty and the Beast, where it resonated more deeply. Belle, a studious girl, learned to love the Beast even though he looked like an upright ox and sounded like Robby Benson talking through a shoe. Pocahontas takes a much more PC approach, never more explicitly than in the number "Savages," in which the Native Americans and English settlers prepare for battle and denounce their foes as savages ("They're barely even human"). But is it so unreasonable for the Native Americans to characterize the settlers that way? The romance between Pocahontas and John Smith is meant to be a bridge between cultures, a salve on ancient wounds, but we know that English culture won out and the wounds were mainly Native American. That Disney has received support from Native American groups is irrelevant -- how can the studio whitewash this story as a Romeo and Juliet conflict? (Actually, it's closer to West Side Story, but never mind.) And the movie's pleas for tolerance are hypocritical in light of the effete villains, who even have a spoiled, plump dog named Percy. With its decadent plummy-accented queers pitted against virile heteros (Mel Gibson provides the speaking voice of John Smith), the movie is flat-out homophobic, a kiddie-musical version of Rob Roy.

Despite that, Pocahontas is a guilty-white-liberal movie. It sees Native Americans through Caucasian lenses: See, underneath that scary warpaint and red skin they're really just like us. And if they were unlike whites in every possible way, would that justify wiping them almost completely off the face of their own earth? After a while, the movie turns schizo: No, they're like us except that they respect nature and they don't believe in guns. (Which made them easy targets until they were forced to start believing in guns.) What lesson will Native American children draw from Pocahontas? "Love thy white neighbor even though he took your country away"? How warmly would the black community receive a cartoon in which a slave woman and a plantation owner fell in love? Would they, too, suck up to Disney for finally putting their people on the screen?

On almost every level, Pocahontas is a mistake, though I did enjoy the clowning of Meeko and Flit. They're basically leftovers from The Lion King, and I'm aware that Disney threw them in so as to have characters they could convert into stuffed toys, but they give the film what life it has. The anti-gun message is a nice touch, I suppose -- two Native Americans are fatally shot, and cannons tear trees apart -- but no English settlers get hit by arrows, which makes the Native Americans look fairly ineffectual. And then there's Pocahontas herself. Lacking a mother (just like every other Disney heroine), she instead has a grandmother-tree, whom she asks for advice about her destiny. But does her destiny have to include romance? Especially with a white guy? (As Pinocchio demonstrated, Disney can actually make a superb fantasy without a whiff of hearts and flowers.) Checking out the hunky John Smith, the grandmother-tree gives the couple her seal of approval. She must not have noticed what his fellow soldiers were doing to her fellow trees.

Most of us don't go to the movies wanting the projected equivalent of an encyclopedia. Historical accuracy is the least of Pocahontas' problems; if we're told a solid, absorbing story -- if we're caught up in the characters, real or invented or whatever -- not much else matters. At the other extreme, Ron Howard's Apollo 13 promises to be a riveting history lesson. The facts of the aborted Apollo 13 mission in April, 1970, seem like God-given movie material. Three astronauts -- family men Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), plus cocky bachelor Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), a last-minute replacement for the original third crew member -- go up in space with visions of Neil Armstrong dancing in their heads. Early in this second moon shot -- on April 13, in fact -- an explosion disables their capsule. It's uncertain whether they'll have enough oxygen, water, and energy to make it back to Earth alive. The men have to improvise solutions as problems arise, while NASA engineers on the ground do what they can, which at first isn't much.

Apollo 13 has a satisfying grand sweep. Ron Howard sets up the trappings of the NASA techno-brotherhood, and he knows how to whip up massive, stomach-freezing effects, as he showed in Backdraft, with its flames roaring out at us like the wrath of a dragon. He knows how to put us inside a pressure cooker. And since movies, unfolding in a horizontal, rectangular world, are an inherently claustrophobic medium, I expected Apollo 13 to paralyze the audience with nauseated horror at being locked in this capsule -- floating in an infinite inky void yet enclosed in a tight metal tube. But none of this really comes through. Partly it's because these men aren't very nervous about being shot up there to begin with, so that undermines our nervousness. It's all old news to them. They're stoic, they deal well with stress; like Tom Wolfe's knights of the right stuff, they have an unspoken pact not to express fear or doubt. And so you feel the force of the movie slowly leaking out.

The story, adapted by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert from last year's book Lost Moon by Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, abounds in real-life ironies. After 1969's famous giant leap for mankind, America is rather blasé about a return trip -- until things start going wrong, at which point the media camps out en masse on Lovell's front lawn. (As Lovell's wife Marilyn, Kathleen Quinlan spends the movie sitting in the house, staring at the TV, and fretting.) Howard picks up on an intriguing unsung-hero aspect of the story: Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise), the experienced pilot Jack Swigert replaced -- he would have gone up if not for a suspected case of measles -- stays on the ground and goes through one flight simulation after another, looking for a way to bring the capsule home on minimal energy. Mattingly's story would make a good movie in itself; he gets all the stress of the mission and none of the actual elation of being near the moon. He's the original virtual-reality hero.

Howard couldn't have cast three more likable actors as the imperilled spacemen. What's amazing is how little of their personalities comes across. Even Kevin Bacon, a suave Casanova whose idea of a come-on is a smirking demonstration of a lunar module sliding into dock, is too close to Dennis Quaid's hell-raiser in The Right Stuff (and none of these boys is a hell-raiser). Physically, the performances look strenuous. The sequences in the capsule were filmed in real zero gravity, aboard the Vomit Comet used in astronaut training, and sometimes the actors look a little green around the gills. But the stars, and Tom Hanks in particular, are running on autopilot. Like the men they're playing, they seem to have convinced themselves that the only thing that matters is the problem at hand; once the pressure's on, there's no room for such frivolity as inventive acting. (I kept expecting Bill Paxton to flip out as he did in Aliens -- "Game over, man!" -- but no such luck.) Hanks has an effective way of speaking in a dead, neutral tone when Lovell is frightened, but it seems like an actor's choice. Hanks is trying to be true to the real-life, brave Lovell. The actors are smothered by history and good intentions.

Apollo 13 is so much more self-possessed, so much clearer in a basic narrative sense, than almost every other blockbuster this summer that I didn't trust my initial, complacent enthusiasm for it. Of course it looks great next to Batman Forever or Johnny Mnemonic -- what movie wouldn't? There was one moment during Apollo 13 when I felt an Olympian surge of adrenaline: the countdown to the launch. Everyone in the audience stopped breathing. (The launch itself doesn't live up to it. And I must point out the sonic inaccuracy, perpetuated by Star Wars and countless other space operas, of the exterior shots of Apollo 13 in orbit: We shouldn't be hearing exhaust or explosions in the airless vacuum of space -- we shouldn't be hearing anything. A surprising lapse in a movie otherwise slavishly devoted to The Facts.) I also liked the DIY solution devised by Mission Control for the carbon-dioxide problem. The movie is terrific on nuts-and-bolts stuff -- the disposal of waste, the instruction manuals magnetized to the capsule walls. But nuts and bolts aren't the same as drama. I hate to say it, but in format Apollo 13 is Speed in space, and without Speed's kinetic audacity.

A director like James Cameron, whose nerve-destroying The Abyss made me vow never to go more than five feet underwater, would have made us sick with stress up there in that capsule. He would have risked melodrama, and probably would have toppled right into it with a mighty crash, but at least he would have gambled. Apollo 13 actually would have been perfect for Cameron's temperament and talents. Ron Howard has talent but no identifiable temperament, and he isn't a gambler. Taking his camera into zero gravity, he makes us feel the strange giddiness of weightlessness. Howard is the ideal man for a space movie -- he's a weightless director. Apollo 13 has its gripping bring-the-boys-back-home narrative drive going for it, and Howard's monklike attention to detail sometimes pays off. It's a solid and honorable piece of work, but to think it was a great movie you'd probably have to have a thing for control panels.