Laurence Fishburne is aboard a creepy spaceship again. This time the destination is Titan, not Neptune, and instead of an all-out horror flick, we get something much more psychological. Today’s feature: the 2024 movie Slingshot.
Slingshot came out on August 30. I saw it on August 31, and I’m writing this just three hours after viewing. That may seem out of character for a blog where I schedule things about a month in advance, remaining steadfastly oblivious to the vicissitudes of pop culture and the news cycle, but for once, we will strike while the iron is hot. I knew I had to do a post about this one as soon as I watched the trailer; it’s the kind of cerebral interplanetary voyage that is all too rare on the big screen.
Our principal characters are a trio of astronauts: John (Casey Affleck), Nash (Tomer Capone), and Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne). Casey Affleck had small but memorable roles in Interstellar and Oppenheimer, and here gets the chance to headline an entire movie. Laurence Fishburne, as alluded to above, was one of the leads in Event Horizon, though most people probably know him from The Matrix. Tomer Capone is an Israeli actor, the only one of the three I wasn’t already familiar with. Emily Beecham plays Zoe Morgan, an official in the space program—and John’s lover—whose shadow hangs over the whole movie. Mikael Håfström directed; he is best known for 1408, a particularly chilling adaptation of a Stephen King short story.
We begin about six months into the astronauts’ mission into deep space. Their ship, Odyssey 11, is outbound to Saturn’s moon Titan, where they will lay the groundwork for a methane-mining operation that will hopefully resolve Earth’s energy crisis. The problem is, Titan is very far away. Odyssey 1‘s voyage will take two years, and the crew must undergo cycles of drug-induced hibernation, awakening every ninety days to check in on the ship and communicate with mission control. They must also perform a “slingshot” around Jupiter, exploiting the giant planet’s gravity as a boost in order to reach Saturn. This maneuver is by far the most dangerous part of the trip, and it’s fast approaching—just two hibernation cycles out.
Will Odyssey 1 be ready? That is very much an open question. Early in the film, something seems to impact the ship, putting a dent in the hull and giving John a bad knock on the head, but strangely, all the instrumentation still reads as if nothing happened. Nash doesn’t trust those readings. In his view, it’s suicide to plunge into Jupiter’s gravity well in a compromised spaceship. But Franks, the mission commander, insists that they proceed as planned, and as he and Nash butt heads, escalating towards mutiny, John is caught between them. A failure in the ship’s communications system doesn’t help matters; they’re all alone out here.
Even with all that going on, there are stranger things afoot. John is starting to hear voices. He glimpses a familiar face. You see, when he blasted off for Titan, he left somebody behind—Zoe. Their tender romance, ending in heartbreak, is gradually revealed to us through a series of flashbacks, running in parallel with the increasingly desperate mission of Odyssey 1. She couldn’t possibly be aboard the ship, but nevertheless, John sees her. The hibernation-inducing drugs seem to be distorting his mind and memory. The real world slips further and further from his grasp.
To say too much more about the plot would be to risk spoiling it, and this is one of those movies where you really need to limit what you know going in. For now, let’s just say it portrays a descent into madness amid the crushing isolation of space. This is a film about how much you can trust your own senses when you think they might be compromised. Can an insane man know his own insanity? As its plot hurtles through twist after twist, Slingshot does a breathtaking job of portraying, very viscerally, the experience of psychosis.
Cinematically, there are a lot of interesting things going on here. We see some inventive visual transitions between scenes in space and on Earth, such as when swirling exhaust gases become a close-up of a latte mid-pour, in the coffee shop where John and Zoe have their first date. Dutch angles abound; Håfström loves to tilt the camera, throwing us off our feet a little. He also likes filming very, very close to the actors’ faces. This hits differently in different scenes—in the flashbacks with Zoe, it’s cozy and intimate, while aboard Odyssey 1, the effect is more often to spotlight an increasingly pale, haggard-looking Casey Affleck as he loses his grip on reality.
Slingshot is a reasonable depiction of space travel, too. It’s no Interstellar or Apollo 13, but you get an excellent feel for the isolation imposed by a years-long plunge between planets, and some details—Odyssey 1‘s artificial gravity, the explanation of how gravity assists work, the views we get of Jupiter and Titan—are spot-on. Clearly the writers and director did some research, even if I doubt any of them are native to this genre2.
Appropriately for a psychological thriller, Slingshot really shines in its characters. There’s some superb acting on display. Casey Affleck nails John’s struggle to stay sane, and he has excellent chemistry with Emily Beecham (Zoe). It’s not often that an on-screen romance tugs at my heartstrings, but this one certainly did, not least because of all the glances, touches, and tones of voice that the actors capture so well. Laurence Fishburne, too, deserves a shout-out for the menacing presence he brings to this film. Despite surface-level cheer, singing songs and pouring glasses of moonshine for himself and his crew, he manipulates and intimidates John into following his orders.
Now, a note on the ending. Click the drop-down below only if you’ve already seen the film—trust me, this one’s worth going into unspoiled.
WARNING: SPOILERS!
Part of the big reveal is that Captain Franks does not exist. Neither does Nash. This whole time, the three-man mission to Titan was actually just a one-man mission to Titan, with John—full name John Nash Franks—commanding the ship all by himself. There’s a particularly chilling sequence in which John watches camera footage of conversations from earlier in the film, except there’s nobody else in them. He only hallucinated Franks and Nash as a way to cope with his profound isolation.
Not long afterwards, there’s another reveal—or so we think. John establishes radio contact with Zoe at mission control. It’s only a short-range radio, and there’s none of the expected time delay, so something doesn’t add up. According to Zoe, he never actually left Earth. All this time, he’s been confined to a simulator buried beneath the New Mexico desert, testing his psychological response to conditions of spaceflight and suspended animation. But the test is over now, cut short by an earthquake. He only has to step out the airlock, make his way back to the surface, and she’ll be waiting for him…
It seemed like a lame cop-out when I was sitting there in the theater. Truth be told, I was a little angry. I was already anticipating what I would say in this review: “Slingshot is a terrific movie, right up until lazy, godawful ending. 5/10.” Thankfully, things don’t turn out to be nearly so simple. John is, in fact, on his way to Titan—and his fractured, lonely mind has just deluded him into popping the hatch without a spacesuit on.
A downer, to be sure. But I like downers.
My complaints about Slingshot are minor, in the scheme of things. It surely could have benefited from a larger budget. While I liked the set design aboard Odyssey 1, sleek and futuristic with just a hint of wear and tear, some aspects—the textureless green floor of the reactor room, the weirdly sparse walls in the ship’s cockpit—come off as amateurish. During the slingshot scene the actors wear bulky space helmets, but only the helmets; they’re otherwise dressed in their standard clothes, useless in a vacuum, and in any case the helmets look absurd when they shake around, like something out of a ’90s Star Trek series. Better production values would have elevated this feature, which seems destined for the status of a low-profile cult classic.
Altogether, though, Slingshot is a masterclass in psychological storytelling, delivering some incredible writing and performances within a hard-sci-fi framework. I was on the edge of my seat through the whole thing. Hopefully you will be, too. Don’t let its 49% on Rotten Tomatoes fool you—get to the theater and watch this one!
Rating: 9/10.
- Not exactly the most original name. ↩︎
- See my review from last week, How to Mars by David Ebenbach, for another story that tries admirably at rendering space travel, even if its primary concerns lie elsewhere. ↩︎
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Stopped at the spoiler so couldn’t read the whole thing but makes we want to see something that wasn’t quite on my watch list before. Thanks for the review!
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