"Gentlemen, it's been a privilege flying with you."

I was thinking about Apollo 13 today - one of my favorite movies, not least because most of it really happened (with allowances for the screen) and it still manages to make a foregone conclusion tense and exciting, plus I'm a huge fan of the space program and have been since I was very young. One sequence I particularly like, and wanted to comment on, is the re-entry. Not so much the long, tense radio blackout, but the shots just before that.

Most atmospheric (re)entries I've seen in fiction are relatively gentle, even serene: the ship is suspended in the foreground while a bow-shock forms around its nose and/or belly and the heat shielding acquires a cherry-red glow. Maybe there's a little buffeting in the interior shots, like turbulence on an airplane. Apollo 13 was the first thing I saw that conveyed the reality of a capsule slamming into a wall of air at supersonic speeds and punching a flaming hole through it.