Mission Titan

Slingshot is primarily a psychological drama, which happens to be set in a Science Fiction universe. But anyone going to this movie hoping for a space actioner or some space opera will leave very disappointed.

In a twisty turny narrative that could have been shortened by 15 or 20 minutes without losing any impact, the three lead actors give outstanding performances, but there is a lot of repetition, and the middle third of the film really drags.

At the same time, it certainly keeps you thinking, and the ending is extremely gripping and tense.

This is not a film at the same level as Space Odyssey, Or Solaris. But if you have a brain and you want to be provoked into thinking about the nature of love and humanity faced by existential crises this is not a bad movie at all.

Set on board the Odyssey-1 spacecraft, crew John (Casey Affleck), Nash (Tomer Capone), and Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne) are 9 months into a journey to Saturn's moon of Titan where they will use Jupiter's gravity for a slingshot maneuver. As the months wear on and John and the rest of the crew experience mental and physical exhaustion from the hypersleep cycles tensions continue to build upon the crew as John experiences hallucinations of his ex-girlfriend Zoe (Emily beecham).

Slingshot is a psychological sci-fi thriller directed by Mikael Hafstrom and written by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker. Hafstrom had apparently acquired the script for quite some time and was interested in its confined nature and compared it in spirit to 1408 which like Slingshot was also a confined chamber piece but with Slingshot more science-fiction as opposed to 1408's Supernatural thriller. Slingshot is certainly a very handsome and well-acted production, but unfortunately it's also very familiar and goes in a direction that's overly familiar for this kind of story.

In terms of the cast, I felt like Casey Affleck, laurence Fishburne, and Tomer Capone do quite well in their roles as the three crewman who go from a cordial and professional working relationship to a greater buildup of tension, unease, and distrust as the events move forward. Structurally speaking Hafstrom uses flashbacks to flesh out Casey Affleck's character in much the same way he did John Cusack's character in 1408, but where that film used it to effectively analyze that character's unprocessed grief and survivor's guilt, Slingshot uses it to build-up a not very interesting love story where Emily Beecham and Casey Affleck's relationship just isn't that interesting or worth emotional investment. As a chamber piece the movie does give our actors a good chance to create engaging portraits of men eroding under pressure and isolation, but unfortunately the payoff to the journey isn't all that satisfying and it really only served to remind me of how much better this kind of premise was done in something like Alexandre Aja's Oxygen.

If you're a die-hard sci-fi fan there is good stuff to appreciate here especially as it relates to the acting and production design, but the uninvolved love story and underwhelming payoff make it difficult to recommend outside of genre die hards/faithful whose enjoyment of this movie will still be marked with an asterisk.

The best part of this movie is the ending, which will deceive the viewer several times. Laurence Fishburne played his role, as always, perfectly. Casey Affleck did well, but I was never impressed by his performance, although this is just my personal subjective judgment. Yes, it's not easy to watch this movie to the end, and this is its main disadvantage, it was especially hard for me to watch Affleck's caramel flashbacks, but I still watched this movie - the film turned out to be quite good. Given the complexity of the plot and ambiguous characters, it is impossible not to mention the merits of the director. Visual style, musical accompaniment - all this works to create a unique closed atmosphere. The film may not become a cult classic, but it definitely deserves the attention of those who like thoughtful and ambiguous stories.

And by another one, I mean yet another arthouse psychological thriller sci-fi. Again. What ever happened to the good old Sci-fi action survival thriller where nobody is "wrestling with the ghosts of their past", struggling with their sanity, or wondering what is real or not...blah blah. Seems like the vast majority of Sci-fi is that BS, not anything really interesting or entertaining anymore. Some of them had the potential to become great movies, but were ruined by the writing and the direction... and the plot, and the story...etc.

Please.... for the love of GOD, can someone make Sci-fi great again??

This has to be like the fourth or fifth movie featuring astronauts on a distant mission, but being about the psychological state of the lead character, in the last few years. This things are usually giving themselves away immediately: artificial gravity, LED light everywhere, big screens, big spaces, lectures for children about the Solar System given to trained astronauts, things unravelling or not making sense, but always, always someone obsessively thinking about people in their past: lovers, children, parents. Because it makes perfect sense for a person to go through years of rigorous training to perform a specific mission and then, when they get the job, out of a lot of hard working and highly motivated candidates, they spend it regretting things and thinking about the past. And they were the best candidate out of them all!

What's the point?! Who watched these and then said "yes, that's exactly what I needed! A psychological drama, but set in space, although nothing spacy really happens!"? Science fiction folk don't care about the drama of it, they want the action and the science and the gadgets and maybe to feel that there is more to life than just the daily whining of people. And drama people want some sort of highly emotional story involving multiple people, but somehow resembling their life, not some person in a small space having a fit. What a completely useless film!

So, yeah, let's call this small-space-fiction. And the writer is Nathan Parker, of Moon fame! He did one good film about a guy alone on a space station 15 years ago and thought to remake it, but without a story?

Bottom line: the story is so flimsy that I can't talk about it without spoiling it. All I can say is that this is not science fiction, because there is no science, and one can hardly call it fiction, because it doesn't have the coherence of fiction. It's like a nightmare that makes no sense and you barely remember when you wake up from it. The only positive thing is that it was decently acted.