SLINGSHOT Plots a Familiar Course

SLINGSHOT (Blu-ray)

2024 / 108 min

FROM DECAL RELEASING

Review by Princess Pepper😼

Here’s another sci-fi thriller that makes space look like an awful place, where losing your marbles is the biggest obstacle impeding a successful mission. As such, Slingshot ain’t bad, though it does evoke an increasing sense of deja vu.

John (Casey Affleck) is on a lengthy mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, with two crewmates, Nash (Tomer Capone) and Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne). Being increasingly put in and out of hypersleep begins to take a psychological toll. At first, Nash becomes increasingly unhinged, exacerbated when the ship suffers damage. Meanwhile, John has hallucinations of the girl he left behind, Zoe (Emily Beecham), and peppered throughout the narrative are numerous flashbacks of their relationship.

As Nash repeatedly undermines Frank’s authority by trying to convince John they should turn back and return to Earth, the Captain himself displays behavior that threatens them both. Presented from John’s point-of-view, Slingshot does a decent job depicting its characters’ struggles with sanity and whether or not John's experiences are real or an illusion, which sets up a few pretty good narrative curveballs during the second half. 

Casey politely endures another Event Horizon anecdote.

However, the mental impact of extended time in space has been explored in plenty of other movies, sometimes more authentically (Ad Astra), more sensationally (Pandorum) or more cerebrally (Solaris)...to the point where Slingshot’s inevitable twist ending is more of an expectation than a surprise. And while I understand their importance in terms of character development, the numerous flashback sequences grow intrusive and stall the momentum at times.

Other than that, Slingshot is a decent sci-fi thriller with some interesting bits of foreshadowing that become obvious with hindsight, perhaps making it worth watching a second time just to see how they contribute to the denouement. At no point does the film reinvent the wheel - or really even try - but it’s entertaining in the moment.