The 1995 disaster flick “Outbreak” added viruses to the list of villainous forces of nature that would forever haunt the silver screen. Dustin Hoffman leads a ragtag group of scientists aiming to find a cure for the deadly (and fictional) Motaba virus before the U.S. government bombs a small town off the map to contain the infection. But the movie’s heroes, while not straying too outrageously far from actual scientific practices, make some dramatic leaps that wouldn’t be possible in the real world. Sufferers of a real-world Motaba outbreak would have been doomed by a ticking clock. In “Outbreak,” Hoffman and his crew manage to capture the monkey producing the crucial antibodies to a mutated form of Motaba and whip up a serum in a matter of days. But in the real world, scientists would probably need at least a few months or even years to pinpoint the right antibodies and produce a cure. The quarantined town of Cedar Creek would’ve been toast. Just how does the Motaba virus measure up to its real-world inspiration, the Ebola virus? Like Motaba, Ebola can jump from infected animals (including monkeys, but also via bats and some antelopes) to humans. Unlike Motaba, a mutation that …

If you weren’t around for the events of Apollo 13, you might have seen the film dramatization of it. But just how accurate was the Apollo 13 movie? We took a look at the evidence, and as it turns out, the movie scores pretty high on accuracy. But it is not completely without flaws. Director Ron Howard devoted a considerable amount of energy into recreating the setting as accurately as possible. Exact replicas of the Apollo 13 modules and control rooms were built, and Howard filmed zero-gravity scenes in 25-second bursts on the same KC-135 airplane NASA used to train astronauts. The plane (sometimes known informally as the “Vomit Comet”) flies in steep parabolas, creating a sensation of weightlessness at certain points in the flight path. Altogether, the cast and crew spent nearly four hours weightless. Science writer Jeff Kluger—who, along with Apollo 13 mission commander Jim Lovell, wrote the book the movie was based on—worked as a consultant on the film. The commitment shows, as the reaction from real astronauts to “Apollo 13” was near-universal approval. “It’s really amazing,” Lovell told the New York Times shortly after the movie’s premiere in 1995. “Everything. The instrument panels, the console switches. …