Movie review: Casey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne make 'Slingshot' a gripping surprise

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 28 (UPI) -- Slingshot , in theaters Friday, is the kind of small-scale but big-idea movie they used to make all the time. It's full of suspense and unpredictable twists until the credits roll.

John (Casey Affleck) is part of a three-man crew on a space mission to Saturn's moon, Titan. John, Nash (Tomer Capone) and Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne) take turns hyper sleeping for months while the awake crew member monitors the ship.

Things start to go wrong before the checkpoint of Jupiter, where the ship is supposed to slingshot around the gas giant to propel it the rest of the way to Titan. Nash tries to enlist John to defy Franks' orders and set a course back to Earth.

The movie takes place on the spaceship, except for flashbacks depicting how John was recruited and fell in love with Zoe (Emily Beecham), who he left behind. That's a good way to keep the film contained, but the ideas are so big it feels epic.

The script by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker builds suspense around the characters. Each has clear motivations for decisions -- motivations that are at odds and must come into conflict.

It is reminiscent of the great submarine movie, Crimson Tide , in which a captain and first officer kept usurping command over a difference of opinion on their orders. Only Crimson Tide had a large crew siding with each captain, and Slingshot was between three people.

Slingshot also conveys the dream logic of hypersleep, which is a convention of science fiction, but Slingshot suggests that sleeping for months at a time will have side effects when awake.

Affleck and Capone convey the expertise of astronauts' qualifications, combined with the unease of adjusting to their bodies and minds' stasis. As the Captain, Fishburne maintains his legendary authority, not revealing whether he's feeling those effects, too.

Sadly, Slingshot is a rarity in the movie climate of 2024, especially at the end of a summer filled with sequels.

The cast itself used to be enough to make audiences want to see them in space dealing with these technical and metaphysical problems. The attraction is the pure creativity and execution of a compelling idea.

Slingshot fits in the genre with The Martian and Interstellar , matching those films' sci-fi and human themes, if not their budgets.

Kudos to the studio Bleecker Street for still supporting theaters with a movie like Slingshot. Hopefully, audiences seize the opportunity to see an original film, well directed by Mikael Hafstrom and performed by actors giving their best.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.