Movie Review: Slingshot

The new movie "Slingshot" is about a spaceship - with technology at least 50-75 years into the future trying to use the gravity of Jupiter to "slingshot" around Jupiter, using its extreme gravity to travel to Saturn's moon Titan, much faster.

This film stars Casey Affleck as John, Laurence Fishburne as Captain Franks, and Tomer Capone as Nash as 3 astronauts traveling to Jupiter for years with a mission to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, with a mission that includes the hope of finding a new source of renewable energy that will save planet Earth.  The new movie "Slingshot" is about a spaceship - with technology at least 50-75 years into the future trying to use the gravity of Jupiter to "slingshot" around Jupiter, using its extreme gravity to travel to Saturn's moon Titan, much faster.

Fundamentally this entire story is about the need to put astronauts to sleep for months at a time for long-term space travel using drugs that cause nausea, and hallucinations. The many hallucinations in this story with all 3 of the main characters are too many, with several of them over the top insane with an absurd ending that does not have any logic given the story. There are many flashbacks in this story, with John dating and eventually falling in love with Zoe, played by Emily Beecham. Some of these flashbacks seem like they are real incidents that happened in the past, but too many are once again, hallucinations that John experiences because of the drugs that put the astronauts to sleep. The constant confusion about what is real and fake during this entire film gets old after about 40 minutes, making the entire premise of this film of nonstop fooling the audience more annoying than entertaining.

The other problem with this movie is that the technology to get humanity to Jupiter and Saturn is probably 50 years into the future at least, but the cell phones and laptops used in this story are all present-day. Obviously, this does not make any sense, but was probably necessary because there was not enough budget to create futuristic phones and computers.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews are a correctly low 47% and I agree with this rating and do not recommend this film.