I watched the DVD, too. I don't rent anything else. I just have not seen one for sale, yet. It's a definite "must add" to my movie collection.

It's quite likely that they embellished the story for the sake of the movie. After all, they did state up front that it was "based on a true story" as opposed to being true. Still, if there was a flaw in the movie anywhere, I didn't see it. That's extremely rare.

We could fault "Apollo 13" for little things like hearing the thruster firings in a vacuum, etc. I'm willing to give them the benefit of some slack on that one. I respect the efforts Ron Howard and the cast went through to make a good movie, especially the hundreds of parabolic flights in the "Vomit Comet" to shoot actual weightlessness. This had never been done before in a major movie. It's easy to see why. Imagine the difficulty - each weightless section of the parabola only lasts about 45 seconds. The set was built inside the plane. For each shot, the director, camera operators, and crew had to get everything set and then only have 45 seconds at a time to hit their mark, do the acting, get their lines right, and be ready for the sudden onset of gravity again. They then had to edit all those short segments together to make the scenes seamless.

I think I read somewhere that Ron Howard logged over 300 weightless parabolas, far more than most astronauts. You have to respect that kind of dedication for getting things right, and in exchange, I'm willing to cut him a little slack in other areas that really aren't that important.