Review: Slingshot (2024)

Four characters trapped together; some imaginary

Laurence Fishburne (l.), Casey Affleck, and Tomer Capone in “Slingshot”

Slingshot (2024)
Directed by Mikael Håfström

Excuse the blurry quality of the pictures in this review. Ordinarily I download pictures from IMDB, or from another publication’s review of a film. But there are cases when the IMDB page for the movie has only one or two stills, and where almost no one else has reviewed the movie yet. In the latter case, that’s either because a movie is so obscure or so independent that critics didn’t see it in a live screening or didn’t receive a screener DVD. The other reason the distributors of a film don’t want critics to see and review it is that it’s being dumped on the market — and given the August 30 release date, that’s probably the case here.

Here’s the story. Three men, played by Casey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne, and the unknown Tomer Capone, are on a spaceflight to Saturn’s moon Titan. Their mission is to investigate whether Titan, which is covered in icy methane, also holds enough oxygen to make the methane flammable. This is supposed to have something to do with supplying the climate-sick Earth with a steady supply of clean energy. To get to Titan, the crew has to slingshot their craft around Jupiter.

The slingshot or gravity-assist maneuver, by which a craft navigates into the gravitational field of another body in space to allow itself to be flung away with greater velocity, is one of the oldest tricks in space exploration. According to Wikipedia, it was first used in 1959, and it continues to be the method we use to accelerate deep-space crafts, like Voyager I and II, fast enough for them to escape the solar system. The practice is so well known that it was taken for granted by the series “The Expanse” — see S3E07¹ — and is easy to understand. In “Slingshot,” it’s treated like a fascinatingly new and dangerous plan at the end of the 21st century. Unfortunately, the slingshot sequence for which the film is named occurs halfway through the film and has nothing to do with the main conflict.

Once the sequence is done, we get on to the main thing, which we’ve already seen start: after over a year in space, the crew is cracking up. Capone’s character Nash insists they’re doomed and must turn back. Affleck’s character John keeps having flashbacks, and eventually hallucinations, starring Zoe, the redhead he left behind.

Played with a sure touch by Emily Beecham, Zoe is a NASA engineer who has an affair with John before the mission. At first she appears in gauzy, dreamlike scenes that seem right for a character who only appears in John’s memory; later, the flashbacks become too much. Oh, they broke up before the flight because John, who pretty much lives only for this one mission, didn’t want to commit? And it was raining? So sad. The writers evidently believed their relationship needed a whole arc by itself. That Beecham plays all her scenes subtly and successfully shows her to be one of the best actors in the movie.

The other? It isn’t Affleck, to be sure, though he has a moment displaying the confusion and unsteadiness that the script calls for when I actually believed him. The actor who outshines both the co-stars is Tomer Capone. His character Nash falls apart even faster than Affleck’s. This proves to be a good strategy by the writers, since it shows Affleck’s character to be stronger by contrast; it inspires the viewer to trust him as a steadying influence, to the movie’s benefit. Capone falls apart in a number of different ways, almost all of them believable. (At first I was sure that this was the actor Elias Toufexis from “The Expanse,” but I guess the slingshot maneuver had me thinking of that series by the time I noticed Capone.)

Once the movie has established that the characters are all having some kind of breakdown, it raises the paranoia by suggesting that one or more of the characters themselves are mere figments of John’s collapsing psyche. The problem with that narrative strategy is that it cancels out whatever stakes the audience has imagined are important to the narrative. If the captain (Fishburne) is a hallucination, then what difference does it make that both of the others fight with him? This creates a crack in the whole enterprise that the film rides all the way to the end. Far from making things more tense, it had me checking out. Why am I watching this seemingly climactic scene if it proves to be just another hallucination?

There are many plot holes, starting with the premise that methane on Titan can somehow be made to solve earth’s energy needs — this notion is never explained or justified, not even with mumbo-jumbo. And Nash’s insistence that they abort the mission and head back to earth can’t be believed by the audience, simply because it’s well known that to physically turn back a craft has to expend a tremendous amount of fuel, much more than they have. In fact, an orbital slingshot maneuver is the only way to accomplish this — the Apollo 8, 9, and 10 missions all used it, orbiting the moon and then breaking orbit at the right moment. But the film has Nash wanting to turn back even after they’ve performed the gravity-assist maneuver around Jupiter.

This production, made by a hack director from, let’s see, Sweden, with B-list stars Affleck the Lesser and Fishburne, and shot in Hungary, has little to recommend it. Not the plot, not the acting (despite the supporting cast’s efforts), not the direction, not the premise. It is good for nothing but fleeing to while you’re dropping the kids off to see The Inflatables 3 or whatever they’re thrilling to. You can’t go to a bar, and you can’t sit in a hot car for two hours, so see this. It’s very mediocre, but not insultingly so. You could do worse — well, maybe not this weekend.

1. The segment of The Expanse S3E07 in this YouTube excerpt shows a lone “slingshot racer” (Zach Villa) using the gravity-assist technique, quite entertainingly.