Movie Review: SLINGSHOT

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: August 30th, 2024 / 06:03 AM

SLINGSHOT movie poster | ©2024 Bleecker Street

Rating: R
Stars: Casey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne, Emily Beecham, Tomer Capone, David Morrissey, Nikolett Barabas (voice)
Writers: R. Scott Adams and Nathan C. Parker, story by R. Scott Adams
Director: Mikael Håfström
Distributor: Bleecker Street
Release Date: August 30, 2024

The title of SLINGSHOT does not refer to a physical object. Rather, it describes a maneuver that the manned spacecraft Odyssey 1 is intended to perform. The ship is meant to circle Jupiter to gain enough energy to reach its ultimate destination, Saturn’s moon Titan.

SLINGSHOT has a brief opening in which a woman – we’ll learn this is Zoe (Emily Beecham) – extends her hands into the sunlight, then looks lovingly into the camera.

Cut to astronaut John (Casey Affleck) waking up in his sleeping pod in Odyssey 1. Because the three-man crew spends so much of their time in hibernation, and because they wake up disoriented, a helpful computer voice (Nikolett Barabas) reminds them where they are, where they’re going, and that the drugs used to put them into hibernation may have side effects. This is a clever expository device that easily gives us needed information while also serving the plot.

We then move back and forth between the action on Odyssey 1 and flashbacks to John’s days before the mission.

When John is one of the astronaut candidates, he meets Zoe, who is on the mission’s design team. They embark on a romance, even though a) this fraternization could end their careers, and b) if John succeeds in being selected for the mission, even if he survives, he’ll be gone for years.

John’s fellow crew members are Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne) and Nash (Tomer Capone). When an incident occurs, Nash thinks the ship may have lethal structural problems and wants to abort the mission; Franks wants to proceed.

John isn’t sure what to think, especially because he’s hearing voices and seeing things – and he suspects this is happening to Franks and Nash as well.

Director Mikael Håfström sets us in a recognizable world when we’re on Earth, and goes for 2001 pristine white and well-lit corridors aboard the Odyssey 1.

Oddly, the area containing at least some of the ship’s operational apparatus is darker, even though it seems like it should have even more light.

This is a minor gripe. The larger matters, to paraphrase William Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR, are not in the stars, but in the characters themselves.

As directed by Håfström and scripted by R. Scott Adams and Nathan C. Parker from Adams’s story, SLINGSHOT invests heavily in the love story between John and Zoe. Unfortunately, while the actors do their best to sell it, we don’t get a feeling of true connection in either the writing or the playing of the relationship.

There’s a lot of time spent with John just trying to cope. While it’s dramatically valid, it’s not particularly engaging.

Presumably because the filmmakers don’t want to tip their hand as to what’s real and what isn’t, they don’t give us the kind of details that might really flesh out the characters (although we do get to hear Fishburne sing a little). They do keep us guessing right up until the end, but we don’t wind up rooting for anything specific.

In the end, SLINGSHOT is well-made, but for all its success in making us wonder what’s really happening, we’re never made to care.

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