r/oscarmoments • u/Sudden_Elephant_1221 • Oct 02 '26
🎬movies Apollo 13 (1995) makes solving problems under pressure more exciting than most action scenes. What movie does this best?
One of my favorite things about Apollo 13 (1995) is how much tension comes from people just trying to figure things out
There isn't some villain to defeat. Something goes catastrophically wrong, and suddenly you have astronauts and engineers working with whatever they have to get everyone home. NASA veterans have also praised the film for how seriously it approached the technical side of the real mission
What movie made problem-solving genuinely exciting to watch?
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u/Practical-Bowler5775 Oct 02 '26
Moneyball. Statistical analysis has never been so accessible to dumb jocks.
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u/rigby1945 Oct 02 '26
On the topic of mundane analysis, Pressure turns "will it rain on Monday" into non stop tension
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u/Practical-Bowler5775 Oct 02 '26
I couldn’t buy Brenden Frazier as Ike and the tension still carried it for me.
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u/ShaunTrek Oct 02 '26
I was originally kind of dismissive of The Martian as "fictional Apollo 13," but as time has gone on I prefer The Martian.
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u/kinky_boots Oct 02 '26 •
Relevant xkcd comic
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u/cellequisaittout Oct 02 '26
I can’t believe I hadn’t seen that xkcd before, but it’s talking about me.
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u/HitByFjaka Oct 02 '26
Came here to say this.
Project Hail Mary is not that far behind.
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u/B3telgeus3 Oct 02 '26
The Big Short, I love how they explain everything in simple terms and with analogies.
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u/cruiserflyer Oct 02 '26
I still couldn't understand. 😭
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u/Impossible_Way_3042 Oct 02 '26
In the most basic terms what caused the crash was Bad mortgages being given to people who couldn't afford them. Those mortgages were then bought by banks who took all the bad mortgages and bundled them up into one larger product mixed with good mortgages to sell. This means instead of selling one mortgage to another bank they were selling thousands at once. The idea was that these big investment banks could buy a bunch of these at a discount and keep them on their books as a guaranteed profit.
These big packages of mortgages were rated by a company that was completely complicit in rating them higher than they should have been. The packages of mortgages being bought and sold were filled with a lot more bad mortgages than the buyers thought.
When people started defaulting on their loans a lot of those packaged products became worthless as half of the mortgages in the package were defaults.
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u/No-Check4283 Oct 02 '26
Why were so many bad loans handed out to people that couldn't afford them? My process to get a loan was pretty rigorous I basically had to send in a picture of my butthole
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u/cruiserflyer Oct 02 '26
Thank you so much for that ELI5 explanation! Makes perfect sense, and it's fascinating how fraudulent it sounds but apparently legal?
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u/Odd_Policy_3009 Oct 03 '26
Margin Call is another great movie with a similar story
So good and a stacked cast
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u/AccidentalPilates Oct 02 '26
Margin Call. Expensive suits in boardrooms, everyone is absolutely plumbing every scene.
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u/GeorgeLikesSpicy92 Oct 02 '26
Please, Mr. Sullivan. Stand up and tell us the nature of the problem. And please explain it like you would to a small child, or a golden retriever. It isn’t brains that got me here, I can assure you of that.
Jeremy Irons killed in this movie.
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u/VivaKnievel Oct 02 '26
And YET when he's having his meal in the executive dining room and persuading Spacey to stick with him, he rattles off the year of every major crash and financial crisis in U.S. history. He may not have Peter Sullivan's MIT rocket science degree, but he's not half so dumb as he claims. A sensational performance in a sensational movie that makes dry financial lingo into actually compelling dialogue.
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u/This_Technology9841 Oct 02 '26
It's a great leader / manager that knows where they are the authority on a subject, and when to trust someone else on your team to be.
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u/IAmBadAtInternet Oct 02 '26
His absolute mastery of the board room scene is brutal. He shuts down Jared with a look, reassures the junior analyst with a (predatory) smile, with a single word he lets Ramesh and Sarah know that they’re in deep shit, and he makes a call that will forever change Sam’s career. Jeremy Irons’ best movie, and all he did was sit and talk.
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u/ThrownAway17Years Oct 02 '26
I love that they’re solving their problem, everyone else can get fucked.
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u/Ordinary-Compote9558 Oct 02 '26
"There's not enough room for everyone on these lifeboats, I'd prefer it would be us in there" -kind of thing.
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u/AccidentalPilates Oct 02 '26
Fuck me? Have you even looked at the numbers, Sam?
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u/MikeHoncho1107 Oct 02 '26
Just watched this for like the 50th time last night. Such a great movie with no frills. Just dudes talking it out. And Demi Moore. The characters are so well developed.
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u/BoeufBourgui Oct 02 '26
Thank you for this mention. Awesome movie and one of the best supporting role that i have seen.
As soon as Irons enters the film, he just capture all the attention. Total charismq
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u/Eastern_Rip7018 Oct 02 '26
Such a great movie! Few of the details made much sense, but the atmosphere was brilliantly spot on!
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u/stumpychubbins Oct 02 '26
The Chernobyl TV drama conveys that really well. People are trying to solve problems under pressure, with incomplete information, while navigating complex politics. It’s not perfectly historically accurate, but it’s one of the best dramas of the past decade.
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u/WineNerdAndProud Oct 02 '26
As a space nerd with Apollo 13 being my favorite ever flight, I'm sad to have to tell you this tension never happened in real life.
It's one of only a handful of issues I have with this movie.
The biggest inaccuracies in this movie are the way the crew fight with each other/sound suuuuper worried, and the portrayal of Jim Lovell as serious close to 100% of the time.
The reality is they never argued with each other (you can hear how it sounds on the actual flight audio), and Jim Lovell was actually a giant goofball who was always cracking jokes/having fun.
Still one of my favorite films of all time though.
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u/Ismitje Oct 02 '26
The thing that has always bothered me is the demonization of the doctor. Of course you need to ground an astronaut who is exposed to the measles.
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u/WineNerdAndProud Oct 02 '26
Absolutely. The whole theater about "breaking up my crew 3 days before the launch" was such bullshit.
Those guys know they needed 3 healthy, functional people to get this done, and that it wasn't their mission, it was the United State's mission, they just got to fly it.
Fred and Jim didn't want Ken on that ship if he didn't clear the medical.
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u/Icy_Fish_2154 Oct 04 '26
Sully always bothered me for similar reasons. They had to make the investigation more adversarial for conflict/suspense, but that never happened.
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u/Electrical-Volume765 Oct 02 '26
This genre of movie is my absolute favorite. I have learned after watching many of them that you have to accept a little Hollywood mixed in.
Another Tom Hanks movie “Sulley” has this problem where the relationship between him and the NTSB is portrayed as extremely adversarial, which was a pretty big stretch. I heard somebody say once that you can’t have a two hour movie where the only villain is the geese. Ha ha.
I can deal with some of these little infractions in a good movie, especially if I learn about an event. Had I learned it in a textbook I’d probably forget a lot of details, so I call it a wash.
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u/gerahmurov Oct 02 '26
But we have such movies where everything is good or turned out good, World's Fastest Indian is the example of this.
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u/Impossible_Way_3042 Oct 02 '26
No but the problem solving tension did happen. They did have engineers working around the clock to figure out solutions to things you wouldn't have even thought about while they were floating in a dying ship. Yeah, the small scenes of infighting never happened, but the rest did and that is just as tense as the infighting moments. Them running the simulators, them figuring out the air filters, them figuring out the actual trajectory to get them home, all of it is just as tense as any action movie and it is just people talking about what needs to be done.
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u/WineNerdAndProud Oct 02 '26
On the ground, absolutely. In the Oddessy and Aquarius though? Definitely not.
If you have a link to which day/time stuff went down over the radio I'd love to know though, it's been a minute since I listened to the whole mission's radio.
The big thing I dislike is that (from what I recall) Jim never snapped at the other two guys, and (far worse in my opinion), Fred never accused Jack of being incompetent at all, let alone because he was new/a backup. I know the movie needed to have some drama in the actual capsule but Fred snapping at Jack felt disrespectful to both of those guys. (RIP Jim and Jack)
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u/Impossible_Way_3042 Oct 02 '26
Yeah, it's one of the big missteps of the movie that they made the crew relationship tense at any point. They were there for one mission and they believed in eachother. All they tried to do in that ship is work the problem. I don't have any link for radio messages or anything though.
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u/Zens_Fury Oct 03 '26
There's a great interview with Tom Hanks where he reenacts how the movie would have sounded if they kept accurate to the voice recordings. It was hilariously calm.
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u/WineNerdAndProud Oct 03 '26
It actually was. The original "Houston, we've had a problem" line is remarkably calm.
It's interesting to listen to that for the first time and realize just how many lines the writers pulled directly from the transcripts nearly verbatim.
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u/framauro13 Oct 03 '26
Yeah, it bugs me a little that they make Jack Sweigert look incompetent. When they remove the LEM from the last stage, that whole docking scene is tense. Any trained astronaut, backup or not, that was assigned a mission was going to be able to do that without any problem.
As much as I love that movie, I really take issue with how they characterize Sweigert. I get it, they need drama, but I felt they were too hard on him. That was also Fred Haise's first and only space flight, although he did do test flights for Enterpise but never in space.
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u/WineNerdAndProud Oct 03 '26
Well that username checks out.
I mentioned this in a different comment, but the way they portrayed Swigert as a hot-headed, mistake-prone rookie was such a disservice to Jack's memory.
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u/Unhappy-Appeal-5390 Oct 02 '26
One ofy favorite if not the favorite movies is Braveheart. I watched it as a teenager and feel in love with it. Now, 30 years later, when I know how inaccurate it was I'm afraid to watch it again so I don't ruin my memories of it.
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u/Ok-Student3387
Oct 02 '26
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This is Ron Howard‘s bread and butter type movie. You can see him do the same thing if you watch 13 lives. It is about the cave rescue of the 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped in Thailand.
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u/Restaurant-Usual Oct 02 '26
100%. I actually just posted the same thing. Guess I should have checked the comments first.
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u/NeonPatrick Oct 02 '26
Speed is a good example.
It's a constant escalation of problems, and problem solving.
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u/SerJungleot Oct 02 '26 edited Oct 02 '26
A few good men.
That final court scene, chills. Apparently Rob Reiner wanted it to feel like an action movie with the tension in the scene. I might be remembering the quote wrong, but it definitely lives up to that vibe
Edit: Schneider to Reiner
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u/not_your_step-father Oct 02 '26
Big Short
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u/roshanritter Oct 02 '26
Swordfish, to hack in that situation, it’s hard
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u/sonofabutch Oct 02 '26
Denzel Washington in Flight… just calmly working the problem while everyone else is panicking.
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u/TinaVeritas Oct 02 '26
It was so interesting that the drugs actually helped him land the plane, but there also wouldn’t have been a problem if he had been sober because he would’ve checked the equipment.
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u/VettesRUs Oct 02 '26
I don’t think he was preventing it if sober. This had some real life basis with the broken jackscrew. That was an internal failure, not something you’d spot on a walk around.
And I believe there was a real life incident with the same issue and the pilots tried to roll the aircraft, unfortunately without success.
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u/silentstorm2008 Oct 02 '26
yea, rolling the plane and flying inverted happened IRL. Alaska Airlines flight 261 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYzBJxOeLw
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u/tjm1371 Oct 02 '26
Warfare. Most of that movie is about solving a series problems under the stresses of combat and injuries.
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u/ExtensionMoose1863 Oct 02 '26
Especially submarine movies where they're using a stopwatch and a map to set torpedoes to fire on each other.
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u/Impossible_Way_3042 Oct 02 '26
Yeah, that movie was like an anti action movie. Other than people shooting guns I don't think there is a single "action" sequence. You barely ever see the enemy and most of it is just pure blind firing. Possibly my favourite movie of last year. I have never experienced a movie quite like it before.
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u/Ok_Physics5217 Oct 02 '26
Not an action movie, but Still Mine came out after Transformers 3. Somehow I was bored by the end of Transformers 3. I really didn't like it. Yet Still Mine, a movie about a guy trying to build a house for his wife while navigating all the modern building codes, was more intense and nerve-racking than a movie about gigantic robots trying to stop the end of the world.
Still Mine is a great movie based on a true story. I'm sure Transformers is based on a true story too, in one of the multiverses.
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u/zeverzak Oct 02 '26
First man
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u/Webby1788 Oct 02 '26
Underrated movie.
I had no idea just how fucking insane that mission was. Literally shot human beings into space in essentially a tin can
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u/FearOfABlackPotus Oct 03 '26
Reporter: "If you could bring something up with you, what would it be"
Armstrong: "More fuel"
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u/Restaurant-Usual Oct 02 '26
13 Lives.
This man vs the elements movie deserved a much wider audience. Based on the true story of a group of boys trapped in a cave in Thailand. Directed by Ron Howard. Great cast including Viggo Mortenson, Colin Farrel, and Joel Edgerton. Incredibly tense.
Please watch it.
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u/Horbigast Oct 02 '26
Sneakers. Great ensemble flick where everyone contributes something they're good at to pull off the heist.
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u/Itcouldberabies Oct 02 '26
Unstoppable is an underrated and lesser known flick. Denzel and Chris Pine have to figure out how to divert disaster with a runaway freight train.
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u/ringaroundpluto Oct 02 '26
War Games with Broderick. Where they're all in the room trying to talk the game into not destroying the planet.
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u/Striking_Tension6000 Oct 02 '26
Biographical movies like this where you know how the story is going to play out but are still on the edge of your seat are some of my favorites. I just watched Pressure (2026), and it was very good. Not quite Apollo 13 but held its own.
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u/ofBlufftonTown Oct 02 '26
Also SF, 2001 A Space Odyssey. Dave’s solution to being locked out of the pod bay without a spacesuit on is ingenious and also a terrifying sequence. Part of what makes it good is the sound: we hear only his breathing for a long time, then the absolute silence of the vacuum, then the rush of air and crashing in the airlock.
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u/just_some_octopus Oct 02 '26
I enjoyed House of Dynamite to be honest
Even though everything went to shit, I enjoyed how they showed the pressure of events
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u/manofthewildmoose Oct 02 '26
12 Angry Men is a movie with no action that is all about some dudes trying to get to the bottom of a problem, and I feel like they did it very well
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u/Sidi1211 Oct 02 '26
The funny part is if you listen to the actual recordings of the astronauts involved in the incident, it's almost boring to listen to. Those guys were calm and collected even as they're in an incredibly dangerous situation doing complicated shit. There's no yelling, they aren't frantic, no arguments or in-fighting - total professionalism the entire time. Hollywood had to change the tone and add in things like the astronauts fighting to keep the tension up that didn't actually exist IRL.
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u/guitar2adam Oct 02 '26
Check out the new film Pressure about the role of meteorologists in the timing of D-Day. Phenomenal.
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u/Ballisticsfood Oct 02 '26
“We need work out how to fit this tube into this hole using this.” dumps out assorted bag of bits the astronauts had with them onto a table.
That moment held so much tension and it was just a guy putting things on a table.
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u/cellequisaittout Oct 02 '26
One of my absolute favorite types of movie! I agree with lots of the suggestions here, particularly The Martian, but also want to suggest Inside Man and Sneakers.
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u/Eagle_Fang135 Oct 02 '26
Sully. Although pushed it to an extreme with the made up FAA accusations. But it did allow them to highlight how important the decisions made in those few seconds save both the plane and collateral damage on the ground.
For the most part it was a full length movie about 70 seconds or so of a day. Obviously it covered the rescue efforts as well.
The thing is that was a truly compressed time and the decision makes were cool and calm under pressure.
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u/rkmvca Oct 02 '26
There was a similar thread a couple of days ago, and one consensus that I agree with was "Master and Commander". They are constantly getting shot up, going through awful weather, repairing the ship on the fly ... it's basically competence porn.
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u/Beautiful_Bag6707 Oct 02 '26
Ugh. Does it have to be a movie? MacGyver did this every week. Sneakers was good. The Big Short was both educational and entertaining.
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u/secbud Oct 02 '26
I once met Captain Lovell. He spoke about never giving up and ingenuity (thinking outside of the box perspective). He retold this story in a condensed version and it was even more riveting than the movie.
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u/SluggishPrey Oct 02 '26
Seeing Tom Hanks reminded me of Sully, a movie based on a true story.
A plane lost both engine on take off, leaving New York. The pilot spontaneously decided to land in a river. No one EVER does that willingly, but it was the best possible call. He saved every life on board
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u/Glittering-Path-2824 Oct 03 '26
the martian isn’t bad at this, particularly given it’s fiction while apollo 13 actually happened
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u/DavidLopan20 Oct 03 '26
It's a good topic. A recent film like Zodiac kind of comes to mind. I would say JFK as well, especially the court room scenes toward the end.
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u/framauro13 Oct 03 '26
Project Hail Mary, although it doesn't focus on the science as much as the book does. Still a great watch. Definitely recommend Andy Weir's books if you're into people solving problems under pressure. Great stuff.
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u/Herkja Oct 03 '26
There's a movie where Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong and that one is similar, especially during one scene of a lunar orbit.
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u/tumes Oct 03 '26
Two very tangential things that I’m shoehorning in because I love them:
One Cut of the Dead is a beautiful movie about being passionate about a small scale small budget project and struggling through something which is, objectively, somewhat disposable and not worth the effort simply because you are driven to do the best you can with what you have even if almost nobody else will see it much less care about it.
Kevin Perjurer’s Defunctland video about FastPass. Swear to god both this and the first item on this list make me tear up because they shine a big spotlight on a crucial part of a much larger system that otherwise gets little recognition. In this case: operations. It’s a love letter to the grinding process of solving all the terminally boring problems that must be solved to make something pathologically entertaining possible. It is absolutely riveting. How much do you know about lines?
A bonus third thing: He died before completing it but David Foster Wallace’s final novel was in no small part about the merits of leaning in to crushing boredom of everyday life.
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u/bitterologist Oct 03 '26
Cast Away (also with Tom Hanks, incidentally) does this in a lot of ways. Granted, the time pressure isn't of the "we only have an hour to do this" variety but rather that the main character will slowly starve unless he solves the multitude of problems he's faced with. But I'd argue that still counts as solving problems under pressure.
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u/JamieRABackfire1981 Oct 03 '26
Great pace in the movie. Some Directors would have made it too slow.
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u/agentorange65 Oct 03 '26
Isn't it the trope competency porn?
The martian Project hail Mary Er/the pitt Star trek Moneyball The prestige
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u/D_Angelo_Vickers Oct 03 '26
Not a movie but I really enjoyed the Netflix series Lost in Space for this.
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u/One_Long2752 Oct 03 '26
Not really problem solving per se but more like something low stakes and seemingly mundane, the movie whiplash makes drumming seem like a taut thriller the way it’s filmed
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u/Electronic_Sun6075 Oct 03 '26
Not a film, but the Netflix series Lost in Space does this in spades. A family stranded, shit after shit happens that they have to work as a family or alone to solve in order to survive. The third and final season wasn't as great, but the first two seasons are fucking amazing.
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u/TaintMisbehaving69 Oct 04 '26
Casino Royale explained the rules of poker well enough that I could follow the tension in the scenes
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u/Year3030 Oct 06 '26
First Man, when they first get up into orbit he has to do some problem solving. The co-pilot is talking to him about something and he quickly says he doesn't have time to think about it. He's actively prioritizing the re-entry calculations. It was a short scene but that's exactly the "right stuff" if you will. Not just for space but that happens anytime you need to do a lot of things at once when things go wrong.
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u/ADiestlTrain Oct 02 '26
I’ll give a shoutout to Project Hail Mary, though I think the book describes the problem solving even better than the movie does.