Slingshot | Reelviews Movie Reviews (original) (raw)
Slingshot (Hungary/Indonesia/USA, 2024)
August 31, 2024
Slingshot is about the first manned trip to Titan but, somewhere along the way, the primary narrative is hijacked by a series of too-long flashbacks and a questionable decision to insert a late-in-the-proceedings twist. A problem with this movie, as is too-often the case with productions set within the confines of a space craft/capsule, is that the filmmakers don’t trust the inherent dangers and claustrophobia of the situation to be sufficiently suspenseful.
I am admittedly a sucker for this kind of film because I’m endlessly fascinated by the difficulties that human beings will face as they expand their footprint beyond the confines of this planet. As a result, I tend to be kinder to the likes of Life and I.S.S. than some critics and gobble up Apple TV+ series like For All Mankind and Constellation. I found Slingshot to be more frustrating than bad because it doesn’t have faith in the “first people to Titan” storyline and opts to become a psychological thriller about one man’s escalating psychosis within the confines of a small spaceship. Attempts to build tension are frequently interrupted by all the flashbacks. The approach might have worked if the portals into the past had been less boring, better acted, and shorter in duration.
John (Casey Affleck) is one member of a three-person crew selected for this pioneering mission: a two-year journey out to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, using a slingshot maneuver around Jupiter to generate enough speed to get all the way there. John is joined by Nash (Tomer Capone) and the captain, Franks (Laurence Fishburne). In order to conserve fuel, the crew must spend a majority of their space time in hibernation, sleeping for three-month periods with brief breaks of wakefulness to perform routine maintenance tasks and ensure that everything is going as planned. There’s a downside to all this sleep, however: the possibility that the hibernation drugs can cause mental impairment (not unlike what happened to Michael Biehn’s character in The Abyss). Almost from the beginning, it’s evident that John is not functioning at peak capacity. He is becoming forgetful and he begins to experience hallucinations of his estranged girlfriend, Zoe (Emily Beecham), on board. As the ship approaches the critical moment of the slingshot, Nash begins to fear that the craft will not hold up to the stresses inherent in the maneuver.
The idea behind spending so much time mucking around in John’s backstory is to flesh out his character and explore his romantic relationship with Zoe. Unfortunately, the screenplay (co-credited to R. Scott Adams and Nathan C. Parker) never views these two as real people. Everything about them is artificial, from their dialogue to their sex to their confessions about their feelings. There chemistry between actors Casey Affleck and Emily Beecham is of the most perfunctory sort, barely igniting a feeble ember. Speaking of Affleck, although he’s fine on board the spaceship as a man gradually losing his grip on sanity, the low-energy actor is wooden in the Earth-based scenes. If there can be said to be an acting standout, it’s Fishburne, who dominates every scene in which he appears. Slingshot misses him when he’s not on screen.
Movies being dumped into theaters on Labor Day weekend come with a built-in caveat observator warning. (“Let the watcher beware.”) While there’s always a chance to unearth a non-mainstream gem, most first-weekend-in-September openings earn that release date the hard way: by convincing distributors they are lost causes. Such, unfortunately, is the case with Slingshot. It’s not a complete waste: although the final act relies too heavily on an M. Night Shyamalan-like twist, director Mikael Hafstrom does a good job of generating some late-innings tension and building to a memorable final scene. Alas, it takes too long to get to the point when Slingshot achieves its burst of speed and many viewers may have already checked out (or, if watching while streaming, moved on) by that point.