3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Slingshot

2024,  Mikael Håfström (Outside the Wire) -- download

I'm in an extended bad mood (see my last post, whose publish date plays with space & time, on purpose) and I am still annoyed that this long term space travel movie turned out to follow all the beats and notes of a song I hate.

There is a kind of space travel, spaceship, scifi movie that I really like. Its where the design of the interior of the ship is as much a character of the movie as the humans. Is it NASA-punk, with wires and boxes and cramped corridors traversed by floaty gymnastics? Or is it wide industrial corridors, lots of metal grates, hissing pipes and rattling chains? Or is it padded curved walls, white everything, glass touch screens and understated design choices? A lot of my favourite examples use the last. And sometimes I can enjoy a movie even if it does the last thing I want to see --- explore the mental breakdowns that long term space travel can cause. I think of movies like Voyagers which tried to be about other things, but I ended up only remembering it being about people being shitty to each other.

This movie is about a long term (years) journey to Jupiter followed by a slingshot maneuver to Titan, the moon of Saturn, where they can retrieve the natural resource Methane in such vast quantities they can Solve All of Earth's Problems. The movie is not about the retrieval of said resources, nor is it really about the slingshot maneuver despite the title and the deceptive trailers. What it is about is Space ... Madness !! And you should say that in your best Ren & Stimpy impression. You see, long term space travel requires hibernation sleep, in this case, drug induced. The drugs have issues.

The ship is crewed by three: John (Casey Affleck, A Ghost Story), Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne, Event Horizon) and Nash (Tomer Capone, The Boys). They sleep, wake up, confirm the ship is OK, go back to sleep... years at a time. But one time the ship is not OK; something has bumped into causing all sorts of anomalies that Nash is freaking out about, Captain Franks wants to ignore and John is "meh" about --- you see John is focused on pining for Zoe (Emily Beecham, Outside the Wire), the woman he left behind, a woman he occasionally sees wandering the corridors, as a side effect of the drugs is ... cough ... space madness?

I did not want to watch a fucking movie about people never sure if what they are seeing is real. I definitely did not want to watch a movie where the MOVIE wants us to be always unsure of what we are watching. What is real? What is madness? What is hallucinated? Is any of this movie real? What is "real" anyway? 

The movie uses some techniques to further its obfuscation goal, such as skipping right past all the other tropes of proper space travel movies, like long lovely exterior shots of the exquisitely crafted ship, or beauty shots of Jupiter as the ship rounds its orbit. Instead, this is a chamber piece movie, taking place almost entirely within the minimal 3 or 4 rooms of the ship, with liberal use of flashbacks to help us establish John's pining.

Should I torture you and not spoil the truth? No, let's not do that.

Its all real. They are going mad. The possibility that its all a simulation, supported by the lack of anything seen outside the ship, even for dramatic effect, is just misdirection, even the detailed "walk out of the simulator" scene, turns out to be the "last few seconds of a dying man's brain". If there was any satisfaction in learning this, it was in the acceptance that all three were going fucking mad in one way or another: John missing the woman he didn't know he loved, Captain Franks unable to admit he is losing control so he waves a gun around, and Nash unable to admit he's just fucking terrified he's doom- scrolling his own end.

I need a proper space movie.