Mission Titan

The script lacks in the science and engineering department, and the characters seem incompetent.

Within the first 20 minutes, we already know the main protagonist is an unreliable narrator who exudes whatever the opposite of confidence and leadership is. His crewmate is similarly unreliable, talking behind the captains back. The captain calls the spaceship an 'aircraft' and handwave-explains 'fatigue and buckling' despite there being no explanation for what would cause cyclic stresses on the structure. We also got in the first 30 minutes that their mission is to reach Titan's methane, to make fuel, to somehow solve climate change. It all just sounds like mumbo-jumbo written by an arts student.

You need something like Andy Weir's 'The Martian' or the upcoming Project Hail Mary adaption; i.e. The best-of-the-best astronauts being actually believable world-class highly trained and skilled experts and problem-solvers. The physics doesn't have to be 100% in a sci-fi (Interstellar worked pretty well throughout bar that one line about love transcending space and time), but for any deviations the characters have to 100% support the narrative for it to be believed by the audience. These astronauts are immediately whispering to each other about mutiny from the start... and keep forgetting that there's audiovideo recording in each room allowing the captain to hear the sceme. I can't believe that these characters are actually astronauts.

Please please please stop with this artificially induced drama hinging on main characters being incompetent, keeping secrets from each other, or scheming against each other for no good reaon. Stop with the secrets which the 3rd party witnesses... It's like where movies have 2 people talk or kiss, for the 3rd jealous person to spot it or to get the wrong impression. It's a frustrating cliche. If the drama would be resolved by one character speaking one sentence to another character, it's weak writing.

With Insterstellar, I felt awe that made my arm hairs stand on end. With Slingshot I just feel frustrated and claustrophobic. Slingshot is weak writing.

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.

First off, I have to say that the film managed to surprise me because I was expecting a pretty bad production... Because 2024 continues to be a year where major studios market bad films with big actors and big directors...

"An astronaut on a potentially doomed mission to Saturn's moon Titan struggles to maintain his grip on reality."

The film, with its back-and-forth narrative reminiscent of "Solaris" (not the 1972 version, but more like the 2002 one), is directed by Mikael Håfström, who had already shown his inclination towards this style of storytelling in his earlier film "1408" (2007), an adaptation of Stephen King's short story of the same name, which brought him recognition from a wider audience.

Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburne have given their best, and I think they've delivered a performance that's adequate for this middling film and doesn't deserve the harsh criticism it has received.

One wishes to see more of space in this film, which was entirely shot in a studio...

The film's score is composed by Lorne Balfe, and to give credit where it's due, the music is even better than the film itself.

At the end of the day, we, as fans of science fiction and horror cinema, are certain that as of 2024, we won't be getting any more masterpieces, but at least we want films that are decent. In this context, "Slingshot" is a film that "does the job."

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.