One of the interesting things about the movie was how well they conveyed the mood and atmosphere on subs.

I don't know exactly how to describe it, but the sub force just has a different temperament than the surface fleet.

Of course, all of that went out the window when people in the movie started yelling at each other. From that point on it's a fictional scenario contrived to create a dramatic story.

Same with Apollo 13. Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances... but that wouldn't make for a good movie.

I should probably note that this is coming from the perspective of someone who grew up with a father who was an career enlisted man (CPO/EM-N) stationed mostly on boomers.

Right. The thing that bugs me about Apollo 13 is that they played up the drama unnecessarily, because the ground crew was so large, well-trained, and in sync. Like the scene where they dump a box of stuff and say "You have to make this go into here using just this?"- the actual story is that one of the engineers on the ground realized basically as soon as he heard about the accident (and the LM lifeboat) that they would need to use the CM scrubbers, and within five minutes of talking to another engineer they had figured it out in principle. The delay was that they wanted to walk through all the steps to make sure their documentation was correct, and the only CM scrubber available was at Kennedy, so they had to wait while it was put on a plane and flown to Houston to mate with the rest of the practice equipment.

Similarly, the "oh we forgot the moon rocks!" bit was actually the engineers realizing it ahead of time and changing the prep checklist to account for it, rather than a last second dash. This was only because there were so many engineers, and they had made themselves so immersed in the task, and they had such good lines of communication that someone identified the problem and was able to escalate the fix to the correct levels at the appropriate time. This didn't happen by accident, but was the result of years of working together, both training and the experience of actual flights that made these teams so good.

Separately, there were a few things the movie got wrong just as one-off moments. At launch the arms retracted simultaneously, rather than sequentially as shown in the movie (not quite as cool looking) and if you listen to the bit where Lovell says "Houston, check my math here" he is doing addition, which can't be done on a slide rule.

> Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances

On the whole, they were consummate professionals. And then there is the Apollo 10 turd incident.