Casey Affleck leads a small but impressive cast who end up terribly short-changed.
A psychological thriller with few thrills and a weak grasp of psychology, Mikael Håfström’s Slingshot sees three capable actors monologuing in space about nothing in particular. The sci-fi drama has logical start and end points, but meanders aimlessly along the way, desperately searching for anything resembling plot or thematic meaning.
Credit: Bleecker Street
As a trio of astronauts embarks on an interplanetary mission, they find themselves gripped by paranoia — at least in theory — and are unable to trust each other, or their own faculties. The problem, however, is that little-to-none of this conflict is rooted in discernible human drama.
The appearance of drama certainly exists, both aboard the space vessel and in numerous flashbacks. However, Slingshot‘s images feel entirely disconnected from one another, since the film is less concerned with emotional impact, and more focused on indiscriminately tossing out twists and turns. By the end, the film is unable to sustain the weight of its attempted surprises, yielding a head-scratching experience.
What is Slingshot about?
Aboard the confines of a pristine spaceship, the Apple Store-like Odyssey One, astronaut John (Casey Affleck) wakes up from his fourth 90-day nap, a drug-induced hibernation that saves on energy and keeps the mission participants young. He’s been gone from Earth for more than a year, and for the few days he’s spent awake tinkering and taking measurements, his only company has been his comrade Nash (Tomer Capone) and their leader, Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne). The trio only spends a day or two walking around at any given time, but these precious moments of consciousness are spent in a groggy haze, at least at first.
Their mission, in the short run, is to fly past Jupiter and use the planet’s gravity to slingshot their way to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. They hope to scout the surface and eventually establish a human colony there, but despite the movie laying out these broad strokes, it never really features a sense of a wider objective or wider danger, be it images of a ravaged world left behind or any other existential threats. It’s Interstellar without the blight or the sense of cosmic mystery, but it does feature a red-headed woman back home, who our protagonist constantly thinks of.
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Emily Beecham plays John’s lover, Zoe, a design technician whose work on the space project remains unspecified, but who we meet through the familiar, mawkish framing of a fleeting memory of her under a bedsheet, staring lovingly at John. There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing what dozens of movies have done before — “If it ain’t broke,” and all that — but Zoe seldom exists as a real, complete person outside of her adoration for the protagonist, despite appearing in numerous flashbacks.
What is it that actually threatens the Titan mission? Well, that’s not exactly clear. The camera whirls around the ship’s halls a few times, as if to embody some invisible creature threatening our characters, but those are the only indications of any noticeable aesthetic flourish — one that isn’t just aping 2001: A Space Odyssey, that is. (For instance, the scene in Kubrick’s film in which two astronauts speak in secret to avoid a super-computer’s prying ears is re-created here, but without the certainty that anyone else is listening.) This thread of some kind of lurking presence aboard the ship unfortunately doesn’t last, so it doesn’t really come to represent anything for the characters as they lumber through the movie’s plot (or lack thereof), making observations and relaying those observations back to one another.
John finds parts of the ship damaged, possibly due to external impact, which theoretically endangers their upcoming gravitational slingshot, but the captain disagrees. John sees (or imagines) things going wrong all around him, but the crew can find no evidence of something overtly wrong. This disconnect is a central wedge aimed at creating tension and mystery, but it thrusts the film into a strange narrative limbo where it’s hard to know if there are any stakes at all.
Slingshot‘s stellar performances can’t save the movie.
Upon emerging from his drug-induced sleep, John gradually loses his grip on reality, seeing people on the ship who clearly aren’t there. Zoe is among these hallucinations, though curiously, her phantom appearance is rarely used as fuel for the movie’s flashbacks. When the trio loses communication with Earth, their sense of uncertainty turns toward one another. John suggests there may be a problem with the vessel; Nash is more certain of this, albeit without any evidence; and Captain Franks dismisses their concerns. This leads to the closest thing the movie has to an interesting theme: a dynamic between the three characters that forces John to mediate between two extremes.
As John, Affleck harbors a weary exhaustion in every scene, selling the fact that he can’t be trusted to make rational decisions, since he has trouble remembering basic details about his life on Earth. His first time trying to recall these details is the only time the movie’s many flashbacks feel motivated. The rest appear at random, presenting a patchwork story of a man driven to pilot a space mission (for unspecified reasons) at the cost of his relationship.
Amid his delirium, John is shouldered with the burden of being the most calm, logical, and centered character, while his coworkers gradually drift toward opposing extremes. Affleck does his level best to connect the dots between these past and present narratives, putting on a stern front in either case and gradually letting cracks appear in his stoic armor. But the film is fatally flawed: Its structure seldom allows for any causality between these timelines — any ripple effects or regrets, even though John’s decision to join the three-man crew is a sticking point for his relationship with Zoe. Their fate as a couple seems to become clearer as the film goes on, though it’s eventually muddied in service of unearned surprises that, at the end of the day, do little more than obscure its actors’ stellar dramatic work. What they draw on emotionally seems to shift at a moment’s notice, making it hard to latch on to the leading trio.
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Capone, like Affleck, captures his character’s unraveling with aplomb, as Nash steps further toward madness and away from reality. He threatens to turn the film truly intense, though his ravings about what might go wrong are short-lived. The film keeps brushing past any sense of immediate danger the moment it arises, and in the process, doesn’t allow Capone to access the full extent of Nash’s unhinged trajectory, despite the actor hinting toward a mental snap of some kind.
Captain Franks, on the other hand, has a much icier demeanor, and Fishburne is granted the movie’s most complete (and really, only) marriage between story and performance. As John and Nash lose their grip on reality and question their own eyes, Franks is much more certain of what he sees, which makes him all the more terrifying. With dialogue that borders on Shakespearean, Fishburne taps into a sense of misguided human ambition, and gestures toward a thematic layer to the movie that, while ever-present, goes mostly unexplored.
No, really, what is Slingshot actually about?
The three men aboard the ship take wildly different approaches to the scenario at hand, and in the process, they come to represent the three prongs of human personality through a Freudian lens. Nash, with his erratic moments and instinct-driven concerns, embodies the id. Captain Franks, who places constraints on his comrades and claims a rational high ground, is the superego. And John, who’s forced to mediate between them and make moral compromises, is the ego in this scenario.
The problem, however, is that despite the movie employing this particular framework (one it harps on quite overtly by the end), it doesn’t use it to explore the fraught dynamics between the characters in any meaningful way. What they each represent feels set in stone, with little sense of dilemma or evolution. How they behave in any moment is dictated by their respective “types” rather than by the unfolding plot, or even by one another’s words or actions. One could, in theory, map out exactly what each of them might do in practically any scenario, which robs the movie of tension at every turn.
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To make matters worse, there aren’t even enough interesting scenarios that arise during the film, which might in theory pose dramatic challenges. As Slingshot goes on, any sense of psychological or dramatic framing is superseded by an insistence on surprise at any cost, though these attempted zigzags are mostly delivered in the form of dialogue, rather than anything visual (and thus, emotionally lasting). The film takes full advantage of the characters’ unreliable perspectives, perhaps to a baffling degree. Each moment of realization, each discovery that things may not be exactly as they seem, is followed by another, and another, and yet another, with no room for any revelations to breathe or sink in, let alone alter the characters’ sense of self.
Beyond a point, shifting reality becomes Slingshot‘s status quo, even though it largely presents these shifts in the form of dialogue. Characters simply explain to each other what may or may not be their version of the truth, until every other line hints at some new twist or surprise with no impact whatsoever, eliciting no more than a shrug.
With little by way of character psychology to latch onto, and even less by way of actual stakes, the movie’s thrills and science-fiction elements are practically null, rendering Slingshot an entirely meaningless sci-fi thriller. Its basic premise would be hard to explain to a friend, because it doesn’t even feel like it has one.
Slingshot opens exclusively in theaters Aug. 30.
