Slingshot, by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker

Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburn are the stars of this simple movie. Basically they are on a ship that’s on its way to Saturn’s Titan moon, but in order to get there they have to use the enormous gravity of Jupiter to hurl them 2 or 3 times as fast, otherwise it would take far more than 2 years.

The problem seems to be that the drug which they’ve developed to keep these guys in hibernation for 3 months at a time is so powerful it causes hallucinations and paranoia.

It got lousy reviews from the critics and only slightly better reviews from the amateur users, but I thought it was quite good up until the end.

The reason is that about halfway through the movie I knew what the rest of the story was and my only concern was that they were going to leave the story unfinished — the hanging ending or the ambiguous ending that so many writers like to use when they don’t know which side to pick.

It can be a choice, but almost always, you can go back through the story and see the arc of the characters and where the story was meant to go. Sometimes the authors tack on an ending which can be a shock, but if you follow the story backward, that’s not where it was going. And this, I feel the ending was actually tacked on. People are saying that it was dull and not developed but I didn’t find it dull at all.

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