As we’ve learned from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Planet of the Apes” (both 1968 releases), the “Alien” franchise, “Interstellar” (2014) and “Passengers” (2016) and all the way back to a 1964 episode of “The Twilight Zone” titled “The Long Morrow,” whenever space travelers are placed in cryostasis, aka suspended animation aka cryo-sleep pods, so they can hibernate for extended periods of time, well, things rarely go according to plan, to put it mildly.
So it goes with Casey Affleck’s John in the tense and trippy outer space thriller “Slingshot.” John is part of a three-man crew, along with a fellow astronaut named Nash (Tomer Capone) and the commanding officer Capt. Franks (Laurence Fishburne) aboard the Odyssey-1 spacecraft, which has embarked on a mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, in the hopes of finding a rich and plentiful new source of renewable energy that will save the dying planet Earth. (Isn’t that always the way?)
In order to reach their destination, they’ll have to pull of a “slingshot” maneuver utilizing Jupiter’s gravitational pull — and along the way, they’ll periodically enter hyper-sleep pods for three months at a time, in order to conserve resources.
Each time John wakes up, the obligatory Automated Female Voice says, “Hello John, you are emerging from deep hibernation. … Please be careful. The drugs used to induce hibernation can produce mild side effects, including confusion, nausea, dizziness and disorientation.”
Uh-oh.
At first, all seems well aboard the Odyssey-1, but after an unknown object strikes the spacecraft and causes potentially catastrophic damage, everything goes sideways. Nash spirals out of control, demanding that the ship return home, while John begins to hear voices and experience hallucinations. Capt. Franks is the only one who seems to have it together, as he insists they continue on the mission and exudes an air of calm that seems almost sinister as he sips homemade moonshine and sings along with the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”
The Swedish director Mikael Håfström, whose best-known American film is the chilling 2007 Stephen King adaptation “1408,” employs jump scares and quick cuts to capture the looming sense of danger (or is it paranoia?) aboard the ship, while the screenplay by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker takes the story back and forth between the present-day unraveling on Odyssey-1 and flashbacks on Earth.
We learn that John was the perfect candidate for this mission because he’s alone in the world by design and won’t regret leaving anyone back home — but matters are complicated when John meets and begins to fall for Zoe (Emily Beecham), who is on the design team for the spacecraft. Affleck and Beecham have a quiet and lovely chemistry together in the courtship scenes, which couldn’t be in starker contrast to the chaos aboard the ship, where it becomes increasingly difficult for John (and thus the viewer) to determine what’s real and what’s in John’s mind. We’re kept guessing all the way until the final scene, when John —
Come on. You knew I wasn’t going to give it away. That ending is now yours to experience, should you choose to accept this mission.