As I approached the finale of Slingshot, a single thought came through my head: “There’s no way they can stick the landing here, right?” As expected, when the credits rolled, I can only say that it didn’t. How’d we get here, though? This Mikael Håfström-directed thriller seemed like it was on a decent trajectory. It sports a strong lead in Casey Affleck and a great supporting cast in Laurence Fishburne and Tomer Capone but squanders it through a generic story and a fatally flawed conclusion.
Slingshot Review
Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburne in Slingshot
We’ve seen this type of space movie dozens of times. A small crew tasked to save a climate change-plagued Earth finds their realities quickly slipping away as their mission spirals into disarray. Chaos ensues. Here, we follow three men: John, Franks, and Nash, played by Affleck, Fishburne, and Capone, respectively. Each man plays a different role in the tried and true story. John is our seemingly sane leading man, Franks is the hard-headed captain of the ship, and Nash is the driving factor leading John to question the survivability of the mission.
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R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker’s script takes us on an all-too-familiar journey. We’re presented with the central problem early: on the years-long trip to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, the trio of astronauts enters frequent periods of hibernation. A voice tells us early on what to expect. The hibernations have unknown side effects, including confusion, dizziness, nausea, and hallucinations. As things go awry for the crew, we’re left with a generic and frustrating conflict – is anything John is seeing real?
Along the way, we also play with another generic conflict. As one of the men seems to go completely insane and tries to stop the mission from happening, John has to decide whether to continue or abort completely. By this point, the rest of the film becomes clear. Somebody’s got to die, somebody’s got to go insane, and we know we won’t be able to trust our main character.
Casey Affleck in a still from Slingshot
It’s all so dull. We keep ping-ponging back and forth between John and a relationship with a woman back on Earth whom he left behind. Every time he enters the hibernation chamber, we learn more about his romance, but none of it is interesting. The film tells us that we’re supposed to care about her, but the big reveal about her ultimately feels undeserved because there’s no real reason we would care. It doesn’t help that John’s romance with the woman, played by Emily Beecham, is unbelievable, with the two sharing no chemistry.
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Hallucinating narrators are terrible tropes for sci-fi/thrillers. The problem here is that it’s blindingly obvious that our main character has gone insane after the first 30 minutes. Håfström tries desperately to get us to wonder whether or not what he’s seeing is true, but there are a few particular hallucinations that are so obviously hallucinations that it’s clear we can’t trust our protagonist.
Stepping away from the weak plot, some solid praise should be given for Affleck’s performance. The Oppenheimer actor manifests his Manchester by the Sea performance as our grief-stricken lead with some fantastically subtle acting. Laurence Fishburne is also excellent. The Matrix, John Wick, and Megalopolis actor doesn’t deliver a career-best performance here but stays in line with his other roles. He’s powerful, forceful, and fun to watch. Capone is really good, too, but his character is awful, so it’s negated.
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Cinematically, this is a pretty-looking film. It’s sleek and straightforward, capitalizing on a tight budget excellently. There isn’t a moment where this looks cheap, relying on an excellent set and solid cinematography to keep us focused the whole way through.
Is Slingshot worth watching?
A pretty-looking set and nice acting can’t save Slingshot from its fundamentally flawed script. It may be thought-provoking to some, but to most, it’ll prove a frustrating watch. It’s unclear why this specific genre of sci-fi/thriller continues to be so popular. Watching people go insane is just not that interesting. Why should I care about what’s happening when the main character has lost it all? I don’t. You probably won’t either.
4/10
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