USA/Hungary. 2024.
Crew
Director – Mikael Håfström, Screenplay – R. Scott Adams & Nathan C. Parker, Story – R. Scott Adams, Producers – Istvan Major, Richard Saperstein & Beau Turpin, Photography – Pär M. Ekberg, Music – Steffen Thum, Visual Effects Supervisor – Sebastian Barker, Visual Effects – Automatik VFX, Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Stephenson, Prosthetic Makeup Designer – Ivan Poharnok, Production Design – Barry Chusid. Production Company – Bleeker Street/Bluestone Entertainment/Szechenyi Funds/WME Independent/Filmsquad.
Cast
Casey Affleck (John), Laurence Fishburne (Captain Franks), Tomer Capone (Nash), Emily Beecham (Zoe Morgan), David Morrissey (Sam Napier)
Plot
John is a crew member aboard the Odyssey 1, a three-man expedition to explore the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, is woken from cryogenic sleep. They have been warned that the drugs used in the hypersleep process can have side effects, including creating paranoia and hallucinations. The ship experiences turbulence and shaking. The crewmember Nash believes that something has been damaged, although no evidence of this can be found. Nash becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of turning the ship around before they reach the gravity-assisted slingshot around Jupiter. However, this means conducting a mutiny against the captain Franks who insists they stay on course. John cannot be sure whether to believe Nash’s warnings or this is a side effect of the drugs. At the same time, John begins to reminisce back to before the launch and his relationship with Zoe Morgan, one of the astronaut trainers, and how he misses her. He then begins to think he sees Zoe on board the ship and cannot be sure if he too is hallucinating.
The successes of Gravity (2013) and The Martian (2015) in the mid-2010s created a fad for realistically grounded films about space exploration and the solar system. See also the likes of Approaching the Unknown (2016), Life (2017), The Space Between Us (2017), Ad Astra (2019), The Midnight Sky (2020), and I.S.S. (2023), and on tv screens The Expanse (tv series, 2015-22), The First (2018), Away (2020) and the National Geographic channel docudrama series Mars (2016-8), as well as the real-life based films such as Salyut 7 (2017) and First Man (2018). I have a more detailed overview here at Films About NASA and the Space Program.
Slingshot both is and is not one of these films. It pays reasonable regard to having things happen scientifically, although there is no explanation of how we get any onboard gravity, which is shown as Earth standard rather than having people floating about in zero g. On the other hand, Slingshot is less an external space mission film than it is a psychological one. Unlike these other films, there are no shots of the ship in transit. There are one of two shots of Jupiter and starscapes through the cupola but that is it in terms of effects. This is an economy move ie. one that keeps the film’s budget down in allowing everything to take place with a small cast in a series of limited sets with no need for exterior effects shot. However, this is also something that cleverly allows the film to create an ambiguity about what is happening that become evident later (discussed below).
Slingshot comes from director Mikael Håfström. Håfström had made various films and tv series in his native Sweden, including genre works like the tv mini-series House of Shadows (1996) and the film Drowning Ghost (2004). He made his English-language debut with the thriller Derailed (2005) and went onto the Stephen King-adapted ghost story 1408 (2007), the historical drama Shanghai (2010), the exorcism film The Rite (2011), the Sylvester Stallone-Arnold Schwarzenegger prison break film Escape Plan (2013) and the action film Outside the Wire (2021) with Anthony Mackie as a rogue military android. The script comes from Nathan C. Parker who previously wrote such genre films as Moon (2009), Equals (2015), 2:22 (2017) and Our House (2018).
Mikael Håfström is a director who is capable of putting out some very good films – 1407 and the fairly good The Rite – along with utter junk – his previous SF film Outside the Wire. So there was the initial question of which way Slingshot would fall. Happily, as soon as he starts to get into possibly hallucinatory and drug-influenced states of mind, Håfström does fairly well. The film sits on a careful line of The Ambiguously Fantastic right the entire way though – as to whether Casey Affleck or Tomer Capone are experiencing drug-induced paranoia and whether the ship is falling apart, whether Casey is having hallucinations and seeing girlfriend Emily Beecham on board, or what is going on.
These hallucinations become increasingly more extreme to the point of a shocking sequence where we cannot be sure if we saw Laurence Fishburne bludgeoning Tomer Capone to death outside the capsule just before Casey Affleck is put to sleep. There is the considerable jolt partway through where [PLOT SPOILERS] Casey Affleck finally receives handheld communication from Emily Beecham who reveals that what he is in is not a ship but a training simulation, that they realise the drugs have been too powerful. Moreover, that he is the only person on board and the other crew members are all in his imagination. This turns everything we think we saw on its head with a considerable jolt – but it is also a majorly improbable and contrived twist, not like the one in the film Orbiter 9 (2017). (For instance, any astronaut should be able to tell whether they are back on Earth or whether the gravity is being produced by centrifugal force by dropping a ball and seeing if it falls straight down or rolls). However, the film redeems itself after this point and keeps playing out an ambiguity as to whether this is the real explanation or not until the film arrives at a bleak jolt of a final shot.
Trailer here