What Lovell does in that moment is “report” the problem. To report something is to tell an official person that it has happened. You report a fault, an accident, a delay. It is the neutral, serious verb.

And what he reports is a “fault”: something broken inside a machine or a system. A fault in the heating, a fault on the line.

When a fault stops equipment working properly, we say it has “malfunctioned”.

When it stops completely, that is a “failure”: a power failure, an engine failure. Aboard Apollo 13, the fuel cells die one by one.

In Houston, flight director Gene Kranz commands a roomful of engineers with no ship to examine. All they have are “symptoms”: signs that reveal a problem without identifying it.

So Kranz repeats one question: “What’s your status?” Your “status” is the present condition of something: a patient’s status, a project’s status.

When nobody has the answer ready, the reply is two words: “stand by”. It means wait, stay there, be ready, and I will come back to you.

This is no longer merely a problem. It is an “emergency”: a sudden, dangerous situation demanding immediate action. The lunar landing is abandoned.

The crew retreat into the cramped lunar module and use it as a lifeboat, while the engineers “troubleshoot”. To troubleshoot is to work through a problem in deliberate steps until you find the cause and mend it.

Kranz supplies the rule the whole film runs on: “Let’s work the problem, people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing.” To “work the problem” is to deal with what is in front of you, instead of speculating about catastrophe.

Then the crew begin to “run out of” things, which means to have none remaining. They run out of power, they run out of water, and worst of all, they run out of breathable air, as carbon dioxide accumulates. On the ground, engineers improvise a filter from cardboard, a sock and duct tape.

The words reviewers reach for are the five bonus words above. Frame Rated described the kind of film that keeps you perched on the front of your chair, and a great many reviewers said it held their attention from start to finish. Emanuel Levy warned audiences that they would share the fear of the three astronauts, and plenty of people left the cinema feeling nervous and jumpy. Reviewers singled out the tight, efficient way Howard directs, with no wasted scenes, as the reason the tension never drops. Variety observed that, because the story moves in a straight line, the film proceeds carefully, one stage after another, and the notes published by Yale call it a gripping, spellbinding account of real events, so tense that you may find yourself chewing your fingernails.