John feels tired. Irritable. Even, at times, a little confused.
It’s nothing that a good night’s sleep and a long walk in the woods couldn’t cure, of course. But here’s the thing: John sleeps for three months at a time. And the nearest woods are about 500 million miles away.
John is aboard Odyssey 1, a spacecraft on its way to Saturn’s Titan moon and its rivers of methane. It’ll need a little extra speed to get there, though. So the Odyssey is heading to Jupiter first, where John and his shipmates, Nash and Captain Franks, will use the planet’s own gravity to “slingshot” the craft toward Titan.
But even with that push, the trip is a long one: very long. It’ll take 15 months to get to Jupiter, and almost as long again to reach Titan.
So with the help from some powerful drugs, John and his cohorts hibernate. They slip into a near-death state as the spaceship hurtles toward Jupiter, waking up every 90 days or so to eat, get a little exercise and make sure the Odyssey’s still doing fine.
But those drugs (as Odyssey’s soothing shipboard computer tells them after every hibernation cycle) come with side effects, “including confusion, nausea, dizziness and disorientation.” Perhaps that’s why the folks in Houston remind them all to take their regular psych evaluations between cycles—and to take them seriously.
But if they fail their evaluations, what then? They’re in the middle of space. It’s just the three of them. It’s not like they can bring up a relief pitcher or hire a temp. They must keep it together. The mission depends on it. Their very lives do.
But John can feel his mental and emotional state beginning to fray at the edges. He has a vivid dream of being in bed with his girlfriend. But after his third hibernation cycle, John realizes he doesn’t immediately remember her last name.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nash says, and all three soon bed themselves down for another 90 days.
But when they wake up, they find something far more serious to worry about.
Something apparently smacked into the ship, damaging some piping and denting the hull. An interior panel was knocked off during the blast and smashed right into John’s head, knocking him clean out.
What happened? No one knows. None of the ship’s cameras saw anything. None of its sensors picked up anything. John was the only one awake when it struck. According to the Odyssey, no real damage was done. “It’s like nothing happened,” Captain Franks says.
But Nash isn’t so sure. The Odyssey’s structure might’ve been compromised, he says (his hands beginning to show signs of tremors, his eyes a little wider than they should be). We can’t trust the ship’s instruments. The slingshot around Jupiter will tear us apart. We should turn back now—unless we all want to die.
Turn back? Captain Franks gasps (his jaw set hard, his eyes glinting). No. Everything’s fine. Everything’s got to be fine. The mission is too important to sacrifice on a hunch. The mission is everything.
John listens, and wonders, and worries. Is he losing his mind? Are they all?
And as they argue, the Odyssey 1 hurtles on.
Earth is being threatened by environmental catastrophe, we’re told, and Titan holds the key to putting the planet on a better, more sustainable track. As such, the mission to Titan is important—not just for scientific discovery, but for the future and wellbeing of the planet. As such, the men aboard Odyssey 1 could be classified as not just explorers, but heroes, risking their lives for the lives of others. And while the slingshot is the most dangerous part of the journey, plenty of other potential dangers lurk, both in space and on Titan’s surface. And everyone knows that they might not come back.
Every so often, Captain Franks sings the refrain from an old song from The Animals: “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good/Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” Initially, the intentions aboard the ship are indeed good, with Franks wanting to save the mission and Nash hoping to (understandably) save themselves. But you know what they say about good intentions.
We hear those religiously inflected lyrics a time or two during Slingshot. The only other feint toward religion comes when, in flashback, John plays a videogame. A woman named Zoe asks him what level he’s struggling with, and John says, “Vatican City.”
From that videogame moment on, Zoe becomes a huge focus of John’s remaining months on Earth. Late one night, John stops by Zoe’s house, and the two remove some outer layers before they begin to kiss passionately. Aboard the Odyssey, John regularly remembers intimate moments of the two of them in bed—Zoe showing off either bare shoulders or the straps of a bra or nightgown. Though these flashbacks aren’t typically sexual in nature (and we don’t see any nudity), they certainly suggest that the two were in a sexual relationship.
Later, John sometimes sees Zoe aboard the ship—once in a fairly slinky gown. Nash goads John over his relationship with Zoe, asking him if he’s forgotten how she feels and smells. (Captain Franks also uses John and Zoe’s romance as a psychological lever.)
When the ship is hit by, well, whatever it was, John’s thwacked in the face by a hatch from the ceiling, leaving him temporarily unconscious and a bit bloodied.
The hibernation drugs that John and the others take can cause, it would seem, hallucinations. In one grotesque sequence, John imagines his right forearm is ballooning and mottling from the drugs, turning into a grotesque, misshapen mess. The contorted flesh eventually bursts in a spot, sending a spray of blood outward.
Captain Frank takes to carrying around a pistol—insurance, it would seem, to make sure his orders are followed. We hear different versions of an ill-fated mission in Antarctica, where at least a dozen people died. One froze to death, while the others died by gunshot wounds. (Whether they were killed by their own hands or by the hand of another is up for debate.)
In a dream or hallucination, John imagines that the damage to the hull becomes critical, and he’s sucked out into space. We hear that John’s father died when he was 11 years old. We hear about saliva burning on the tongue in outer space.
[Spoiler Warning] Characters aboard the Odyssey attack each other. All of them are severely bloodied in the confrontations, and one or two of them are thought to have been perhaps killed. One scene is particularly jarring: A man gets attacked from behind and repeatedly bludgeoned, his face mashed against a window that’s increasingly spattered in blood. Another fight features a great deal of pistol whipping; characters bleed from the mouth and suffer gashes on their faces, and one gets hit in the groin.
We hear 10 uses of the f-word and nearly as many of the s-word. We also hear single uses of “d–n,” “h—,” “g-dd–n” and one abuse of Jesus’ name.
As mentioned, the hibernation drugs used aboard the Odyssey are strong and can cause a host of side effects, including hallucinations. John sometimes staggers, and at one juncture even falls out of his hibernation capsule. We hear a great deal of speculation—bordering at times on certainty—that the drugs they’ve been given are too strong.
Captain Franks smuggled aboard a flask of homemade “moonshine,” as he calls it. He sometimes shares it with his crewmates, and John asks if its secret ingredient is “Windex.”
In flashback, characters drink wine and champagne.
The Odyssey recycles urine into drinking water—a process that John mentions when talking to ground control in Houston. (Thankfully, he says that the recycling is working “very well.”)
Nash encourages John to join him in mutiny. Captain Franks eavesdrops on private conversations. Lies are told.
The movie’s name might be Slingshot. But for much of the time, the film feels more like a storm cloud, slowly flowing toward town, growing bigger and darker.
And yeah, this film does get dark.
Don’t get me wrong. Slingshot has its merits, from its claustrophobic vibe to some strong performances by those playing its central characters. And it can be quite clever: The film is as much a trippy mystery as a slow-boil sci-fi thriller, and John’s not the only one who begins to question what he sees. We do, too.
But it can be too clever for its own good, and its finale feels curiously deflated. And while Slingshot’s strengths are rooted in its psychological drama, its content weaknesses show up in its violence and language.
In the end, Slingshot misses the mark.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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