Producers: Richard Saperstein, István Major and Beau Turpin Director: Mikael Håfström Screenplay: R. Scott Adams and Nathan C. Parker Cast: Casey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne, Emily Beecham, Tomer Capone and David Morrissey Distributor: Bleecker Street
Grade: C-
Whether you prefer to consider “Slingshot” a bloated “Twilight Zone” episode or a cheesily downsized version of “2001,” you can surely sympathize with its main character, who complains about being confused by what’s happening to him in it. You will be, too.
Most of Mikael Håfström’s film takes place aboard a spacecraft headed for Jupiter bearing a three-person crew: Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne), John (Casey Affleck) and Nash (Tomer Capone). But they’re not headed there to look for a black monolith. The mission’s purpose is to use the planet’s gravitational pull in the titular slingshot effect to propel the ship rapidly to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, where it will collect methane to take back to earth to help in addressing the climate crisis.
Since the trip to Jupiter is so long, the crew is subjected to intermittent 90-day periods of hibernation; the drugs that induce it can leave crew members drowsy and disoriented upon awakening. Things are especially bad for John, who’s tormented by flashbacks to his romance with Zoe (Emily Beecham), a ship designer he met while being considered for the Slingshot mission. But things deteriorate further when upon being roused from one of his sleep sessions, John experiences a virtual earthquake on the ship—a beam even falls and strikes him—and later finds damage when inspecting its inner shafts. Yet apart from losing communication with earth—we have seen only one dispatch from Napier (David Morrissey), the mission director who also chose the crew (and introduced John to Zoe)—the on-board computer system detects nothing wrong.
That message has very different effects on John’s colleagues. Captain Franks accepts the benign explanation, dismissing the notion that the ship was struck by anything and suggesting John was imagining things. He insists that the mission continue as planned. Nash contends that the on-board system is wrong, that they’re in terrible danger, and that they should turn back at once. He even suggests to John that they take over the vessel. John’s wishy-washy in this dispute, switching between reluctantly agreeing to mutiny with Nash and going along with Franks’s view that Nash is paranoid. Thinking that he sees the captain kill Nash with a gun he’s brought aboard further muddies John’s perspective, since he was being drugged for hibernation when he witnessed the assault—or thought he did. His confusion increases as he begins receiving messages from Zoe indicating that things on board might not be as they seem.
All of this leads John to a series of decisions that eventuate in a denouement many viewers will find confounding, especially since the effects are not of the best and the final tableau might charitably be described as opaque, the result of Pär M. Ekberg’s blurry cinematography and Rickard Krantz’s choppy editing as well as simple narrative incoherence.
“Slingshot” can be read as an amusingly chintzy replay of Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey” beats—two astronauts on an important mission to Jupiter whose safety is endangered by the third member of the crew. In “2001,” however, that third wheel was HAL-9000; here, while the onboard computer might be suspect, the entity that insists on going to any extreme—including homicide—to save the mission is another human, the captain, whom Fishburne plays with a smooth vocal delivery comparable to Douglas Rain’s. And in the end the protagonist, as in “Odyssey,” will go off into the unknown. The movie also bears some similarity to the first “Twilight Zone” episode ever broadcast, “Where Is Everybody?” in which an astronaut cracks under the strain.
But there are differences. Kubrick’s film—and its spaceship—are vast and impressive. This picture is claustrophobic, and in Barry Chusid production design the ship’s interior looks absurdly cramped and plasticky. (The classical cuts in the score of “2001” also endow it with a distinction Steffen Thum’s music lacks.) And, of course, Kubrick didn’t encumber his epic with lots of dull flashbacks, or turn his astronauts into babbling neurotics. As for the “Twilight Zone” episode, its breakdown was portrayed in more conventional outdoorsy form, and the ending was utterly unambiguous.
One aspect definitely in favor of “Slingshot,” though, are the lead performances. Fishburne makes a compellingly driven martinet, and Capone an increasingly volatile would-be mutineer. But it’s Affleck who anchors the piece. The character of John fits his quietly intense style, and Affleck effectively reisters the troubled man’s emotional fragility as his doubts and uncertainties escalate. In a better film his nuanced work would be outstanding; here it seems largely a wasted effort. This puny cinematic David doesn’t best Kubrick’s towering Goliath.