SLINGSHOT - Mark Reviews Movies

Slingshot, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 29, 2024

The premise of Slingshot makes little sense at the start and somehow makes even less sense as it progresses forward. The only saving grace of narrative logic here is that R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker's screenplay twists itself around in so many circles that it eventually arrives at a place where it simply goes back to making little sense.

This isn't really a game being played on the audience, because games at least have some rules. Here, the rules are made up and changed so many times that we eventually realize there's no reason to even attempt to determine what's happening in its story and with its characters. The movie is determined to trick us over and over again, so it just becomes an act of waiting for whichever answer the filmmakers finally decide to be the correct one.

The setup is some science-fiction nonsense that tries to be relevant, even if it's set in an unspecified but presumably faraway future. Climate change is still an issue in need of resolving in this future, which a very optimistic viewpoint on the filmmakers' part, but we'll leave that aside. Requiring a plentiful fuel source that doesn't pollute the air, humanity has set its eyes on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, which is the only celestial body in our solar system with liquid on its surface—apart from Earth, natch. It's not water but a liquid form of methane, which could be used as fuel.

Let's ignore that methane is a greenhouse gas that will produce greenhouse emissions when consumed (If the characters actually say ethane, which is also on Titan, it doesn't matter for the exact same reasons, by the way). The plan imagined by the smartest minds on the planet is to send a team of three astronauts to Saturn's moon and, presumably, harvest enough methane (or ethane, which, again, doesn't matter) to stop the climate crisis. They're going to do this, by the way, without any spacesuits aboard their massive spaceship, and even if they do accomplish this task, it takes more than a year for the ship to get within hundreds of millions of miles of Titan.

That's with the help of the eponymous maneuver, in which the ship will use the gravitational pull of Jupiter's rotation to accelerate the ship and get it to Tian faster than normal. Here's a question: If it takes more than a year with this shortcut of physics to get to Titan, how long will it take for the ship to return to Earth without the benefit of planetary acceleration? Oh, the ship's return trip also requires oxygen, the vessel's fuel source, and there's no guarantee that the astronauts will even find oxygen on Titan—after they drill into the moon's surface.

This is a tremendous amount of work for three men, and it depends on everything going exactly to plan, even though it is a terrible and improbable plan. Also, the three astronauts—maybe engineer John (Casey Affleck), commanding officer Franks (Laurence Fishburne), numbers guy Nash (Tomer Capone)—must go into a state of hibernation for three-month stretches. The drugs that induce that deep sleep have side effects that include memory-loss, hallucinations, and other things that let the screenwriters' play with the idea that nothing may be as it seems on the ship.

With all of this—and, yes, it's a lot—out of the way, director Mikael Håfström's movie isn't quite as terrible as that dissection makes it sound. It does focus on the characters, as they begin to suspect each other of working against the mission or endangering all of their lives on a fool's errand. The second opinion belongs to Nash, making him the most sympathetic character by a long shot, although one wonders why neither he nor either of the two other men had any basic questions about the likelihood of this mission being successful.

John's our main character, who refuses to take sides and remembers a tepid love affair he had with fellow space program employee Zoe (Emily Beecham) before heading to space. Affleck's fine as the quiet and averse-to-conflict loner, while Fishburne is an imposing presence as the captain, who points out that deluded people don't realize the extent of their delusions before becoming paranoid about his crew and determined to get to Titan, despite a bunch of complications that arise.

It's a reminder that good actors can do a lot, and in the case of Slingshot, this cast manages to distract us from the movie's dumb science/logic, as well as some of the early suggestions that we can't trust a single thing we hear or see in this narrative. Once we comprehend that we shouldn't trust anything in the story, no one can give a reason to care about anything in it.

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