Odyssey 1 is a deep space mission that will use the gravitational pull of Jupiter to slingshot itself onto Titan, one of the moons of Saturn.  The three-man crew – Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne), communications specialist John (Casey Affleck), and navigation specialist Nash (Tomer Capone) – come in and out of stasis at nine-month intervals to ensure the ship is still on course and the mission is viable.  As they near Jupiter, they fall out of range of being able to communicate back to Houston, and the empty immensity of space begins to weigh heavily on the crew.  Not only has the ship sustained some damage, but John begins to hallucinate seeing Zoe (Emily Beecham) – his girlfriend back home and part of the design team – aboard the ship with them.  The crew must decide do they take their last opportunity to turn the ship around and guarantee their return to earth or continue with the mission and risk the structural failure of the ship and their consequential death. 

Mikael Håfström directs Slingshot, a sci-fi thriller penned by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker.  The 109-minute psychological drama was given a late summer theatrical release from Bleeker Street Media.  While the synopsis sounds contained, the narrative is split between the awake sessions on the ship and memories from back home as John and Zoe turn their innocent enough flirtatious into something more.  The taut production was designed by Barry Chusid who created a sterile, blue-and-white galactic abode for the Odyssey crew that allowed Pär M. Ekberg‘s cinematography to really lean into the more golden terrestrial color tones of the flashbacks without feeling cynically rote. 

Though Fishburne is the captain of the ship, Slingshot is Affleck’s story to lead; a role he does quite well in even if he is pulling deep from his bag full of his many typical sad-boy tricks.  The script does not let him spend the whole time wallowing, however, and instills a sense of real danger across the action of the film without flashy effects or monsters. It achieves this because Slingshot is more of a paranoia thriller that just so happens to be set in space before it is a work of more traditional science fiction.   After waking from deep sleep, John is very delirious from the sedatives and when Madge begins to show some doubts about the viability of their return, the fear of never seeing Zoe again becomes an itch that John cannot scratch. The two men have to work in secret though as Frank will not let the mission be abandoned due to unfounded conspiracy.  

The interesting thing about the script is that it manages to never let us as the audiences feel lulled into knowing who to trust.  Both Madge and Franks make compelling arguments, and while we will always be more sympathetic towards John’s position, he is hardly a reliable narrator.  Emotionally he is very distressed and not thinking straight in addition to seeing Zoe on the ship with them and convincing himself that he is hearing correspondence across the radio system when in reality they are too far from Earth to be picking up anything. Further, when it is revealed that he and Zoe had formed a relationship, even her allegiance to the mission is brought under scrutiny as it is clear John left on not-so-great terms with her.  Filling a prominent role on the design team and the ship having suffered a structural failure, not only does it seem that John is unwilling to admit to the severity of the damage, but the film is not shy about hinting that Zoe may have purposefully allowed for these design flaws after their relationship began to sour.  Ultimately, Slingshot is not looking at being that nefarious in its storytelling, but it was certainly written with those impish sensibilities. 

The difficult part about the film, though, is its pacing.  As it cuts back and forth through time, and the scenes in the present are limited by the crew’s brief time out of stasis, the characters struggle to really grow much beyond their introductions and job titles.  Because of this, it is hard to stay invested in the wider crew, and since they are inhibiting a lot of the same arcs we are used to in these stories without any of the tiny details that make them feel more than a stock character, the film never shakes the sense that we have seen this before.  This shortcut on the page betrays all the other creativity that went into the film and the story which is a real shame.  The mystery is engaging and it is refreshing to see such a thriller examine its simple yet grave stakes under a microscope and not fall back on some need to rely on extraterrestrial beasts.  It is a true man against himself and man against nature story ripped from the terrestrial jungle and set in the final frontier.  

Slingshot may not present anything new, but it is a well-calibrated compilation of some of the lesser-explored facets of science fiction that really focuses on the infinite and eternal nature of outer space against the mortality and hubris of man.  It may seem lofty to pull titles such as Interstellar (2014) or Solaris (1972) into the conversation, here, but their influence on the narrative is undeniable and the screenwriting team really distills out the themes they are most attracted to and find most valuable allowing Slingshot to hit well above its weight class.  Unlikely to stand the test of time as those two have given its sub-1000 screen count on its opening across the Labor Day frame, the film feels destined for streaming where hopefully it will capture a second life and not just go hurdling off into the blank nothingness of the streaming landscape as Håfström delivers a taught thriller that stretched every meager cent of his budget.  With any luck, however, it will be remembered and championed fondly by those who have seen it in the same way that Moon (2009) and Aniara (2018) have become destinations in their own right for audiences branching out and exploring the further reaches of the genre.