Slingshot

by Mike McGranaghan

Watching Slingshot, you have to wonder if the people who made it were all on the same page. The movie starts off promisingly. Three astronauts – John (Casey Affleck), Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne), and Nash (Tomer Capone) – are making the first mission to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Flashbacks reveal how John left behind Zoe (Emily Beecham), the NASA engineer he fell in love with, to accept this job. During the trip, their ship is hit by something large enough to badly shake it up, although the computer system detects no signs of damage. It’s almost as if nothing happened. Nash wants to be safe and turn back, Franks insists on going forward, and John is stuck in the middle.

A decent amount of sci-fi suspense is built from wondering what hit the ship and whether it’s been fatally compromised. The crew members engage in compelling back-and-forth dialogue as they debate what the best course of action is. There’s also a personal drama, as we wait to learn what happened between John and Zoe. John clearly is in pain, so whatever it was had a devastating impact on him.

The film’s second hour is the problem. It goes haywire, introducing a series of increasingly bizarre plot twists that get away from the human core of the story. We get a couple bloody scenes, a gross visual effects sequence, and a whole lot of stuff designed to make us wonder if what we’re seeing is real or not. The final details of the romantic breakup are the worst part. They completely wreck the carefully constructed relationship that has been built up for a cheap gimmick.

It's quite possible that the script was rewritten or that nobody had sufficient faith in the basic concept, leading them to add on to it. Either way, the pieces of Slingshot don’t fit together. Overall, the story seems intended to be a character study of John. Following Nash’s lead could take him home and therefore potentially back into Zoe’s arms. Siding with Franks would indicate an acceptance of possible death. That, in turn, could mean one of two things – that he doesn’t care enough to live without her, or that he is willing to sacrifice his own personal desires in the name of exploration and discovery. As in Solaris and Ad Astra, the use of sci-fi to investigate human emotions is present.

Present until it’s squandered, that is. The intrusion of extraneous material significantly dulls Slingshot’s impact. Looking back, I’m not sure the movie ever even definitively answers the question of what hit the ship. Or maybe it does, and the film’s final shot merely renders it obsolete. The only certain thing is that the story ideas that initially draw us in recede into the background in favor of thriller elements that belong in a different movie.

Good performances are wasted as a result. We’ve seen Casey Affleck as a mopey guy and Laurence Fishburne as a hard-nosed commander before, yet they excel in such parts. Scenes between them have tension. Slingshot undeniably has a few things working in its favor, but the detours of the second half are more irritating than satisfying.

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