Slingshot (2024)

Slingshot-(2024)
Slingshot (2024)

Slingshot

In outer space, yawning or sleeping goes unnoticed lofty thoughts indeed, somewhere in the cosmos. I would extremely prefer not to draw comparison between any filmmakers’ works and Mikael Håfström’s disastrous “Slingshot”, for it would be rather disturbing to associate oneself with this wreck. Achieving banality in an almost obstinately mundane way, “Slingshot” mostly functions as a superficial metaphor for a COVID lockdown, then loses any trace of control and decency. It seems as if the film hates its characters; and more than that, it hates its audience.

Casey Affleck claims to be John, who is an astronaut on the ship Odyssey 1. This ship was designed to perform a slingshot maneuver around Jupiter in order to go to Titan, which is one of Saturn’s moons. The ship has only three human pilots John, Captain Franks (played by Laurence Fishburne), and Nash (a Tomer Capone from ‘The Boys’). The members of the crew go into a deep sleep mode intermittently and reconstitute once every quarter to ascertain the timely progress of the mission. Such a scenario, of course, creates an entire existence disorientation both alternate time and spatially.

The mental trauma that John has been through starts to develop into delusions and distrust. He imagines Zoe (Emily Beecham), his girlfriend, is on the ship and we gradually learn about her through every vaguely interesting flashback mashup comprised of their entirely dull relationship that can barely be qualified as such other than Casey’s handlebar. (This film’s tendency towards sheer sloth is explained in a flashback, wherein stable John has a mustache, but present, unhinged John doesn’t have one.) The two endured the courtship, their inevitable quarrel on the brink of such adventurous endeavours, nonetheless once John’s heroics crossed a line.

On the Odyssey, John and Nash are starting to snap as they both believe the surface of the ship will be destroyed when performing a slingshot maneuver. The man fight over the most suitable algorithm for approaches, whether to turn around better, and John’s doubts about the soundness of his own mind raise. Affleck is bewilderingly, shockingly, dull in this respect as an astronaut, as a character designed to be breaking point, in fact even as an actor who just managed to appear on set but not know what he is meant to do. It is amazing that someone who is so competent in movies like “Gone Baby Gone” or “Manchester by the Sea”, suddenly applies such low standards in what in actually appears in the picture. You can even blame it on his boredom.

Conversely, Fishburne still is a charming and an interesting actor onscreen. He comes in and out of this picture with just the right amount of sloppiness before he bails out on the rest of the chaos. Whatever the circumstances, I always hit the target, so I have been valuable for filmmakers throughout the past.

But the same cannot be said about other people. For example, screenplay writers R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker have no guts to believe their narrative, taking the story of paranoia and isolation and wrapping it in absolutely ridiculous and irrelevant twists in the last act. And then they follow it with another twist, this time, gratuitous enough to invite ‘YouTube’ analysis and controversies. Looking at it from that angle, one realizes this is a film that was put together without any story to drive it. It is not concerned about the characters or their fates. So why should you?

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