Photo: Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

There’s a throwaway moment early in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 that I find irresistible, and which unlocks the picture in interesting ways. It happens right after the 1969 moon landing, as astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) and his wife, Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan), drunkenly look up at the night sky. “Christopher Columbus, Charles Lindbergh, and Neil Armstrong,” Lovell says, with a sigh. Then, he chuckles and repeats that final name as if he can’t believe it fits there: “Neil Armstrong!” he exclaims. Hanks plays it with just the right amount of bemusement. Neil Armstrong, to the Lovells, is just … well, he’s Neil Armstrong, another guy in the space program, a guy who they’ve hung out with and whose family they know. “I bet Jenny Armstrong doesn’t get a wink of sleep tonight,” says Marilyn.

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Apollo 13 is being rereleased in Imax today, and I’m sure it’ll look great in the format; I have fond memories of waiting in line for something like an hour outside the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., back in 1995 to see it in 70 mm. But for all its spectacle, what makes it really work is this casual, everyday feel that Howard establishes so well. It’s a movie about a bunch of people in a small and tightly knit community whose lives are shaken by catastrophe. Even as he works the suspense and the calamity of what happened on the Apollo 13 mission, Howard never loses this sense of the familiar.

This has always been one of the director’s underappreciated skills. Critics enamored with visionary artists like to think of Howard as a kind of anonymous, workmanlike filmmaker, but a distinctive sensibility does shine through in his movies. His ability to direct actors (having been one for many years) becomes an organizing principle in his pictures, which gives them a communitarian bent. Whether it’s a retirement community in Cocoon (1985) a car factory in Gung Ho (1986), a large and bustling family in Parenthood (1989), the firefighters of Backdraft (1991), or the journalists and editors of The Paper (1994), Howard understands the hubbub of small communities and subcultures, how they take on a life of their own, and he clearly enjoys the conflicts borne of such familiarity and proximity.

Coupled with his facility at establishing a sense of place — a result, I suspect, of the fact that so much of his early career as an actor was spent on TV-studio soundstages that he learned to appreciate location work — this often results in movies that immerse us not just in a character’s point of view but in a whole collective mind-set. (Even the films that focus on individuals have a bit of this: 2001’s A Beautiful Mind might be about the troubled life of mathematician John Nash, but it’s also very much about the insular world of Princeton.) Apollo 13 immortalized the line “Houston, we have a problem.” In a way, that embodies the movie’s appeal: Houston isn’t just a place but a whole way of being.

This kind of ground-level approach is probably the only way Apollo 13 could have worked as a movie, because it’s ultimately about failure — about a failure to land on the moon, a failure to even really get to the moon. Lowell and his crew wound up stranded in space three days into their mission after a short caused one of their oxygen tanks to explode. Without a conventional triumph to build up to, the film’s focus shifts to making sure these people get back safely. Making this compelling requires our getting to know them and those around them, because the achievement becomes cinematically meaningless otherwise; that small army of chain-smoking NASA engineers and technicians who rally together to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back to safety would seem like a bunch of anxious, anonymous employees doing busywork if we didn’t feel a connection to the men stuck up there in space. Casting Hanks, who at the time was coming off Oscar wins for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994) and hadn’t quite started his slow march toward “America’s Dad”–dom (one could in fact argue this film started the trend), was surely the right move; casting Ed Harris, Bill Paxton, and Gary Sinise alongside him were strokes of genius. Each of these men has a completely different energy and yet they all feel like people you could run into on the street.

So, while Apollo 13 certainly looks great, it’s effectively a film about details and small gestures, one whose suspenseful moments often involve Kevin Bacon flicking on a bunch of switches. The story beats are so delicate in this picture: There’s a whole extended sequence that basically involves Sinise’s Ken Mattingly, an astronaut who had to be replaced at the last second by Bacon’s Jack Swigert on the mission due to fears of a measles outbreak, sitting in a simulator for the Odyssey command module, figuring out the order of buttons he has to push in order to power the vehicle back up to maximum 20 amps. That doesn’t exactly sound like a setup for breathtaking cinema. And yet, here we are, 30 years later, watching this classic restored in Imax. Go see Apollo 13 on a big screen; for a brief moment, you might feel like you’re a part of something again.