SLINGSHOT

Here's the decision in full. This is a gripping, intelligent science fiction thriller that puts you inside one man's unraveling mind. The isolation of deep space frays the crew, and the film keeps you as uncertain as its hero about what's real and what isn't. That's a hard trick to pull off, and this movie pulls it off — with a strong moral, pro-life heart underneath.

But it earns its R. Twelve "f" words and two strong profanities run through the dialogue. And the violence, restrained at first, grows unnecessarily bloody as the story climaxes — brutal fights, a gun used as a bludgeon, blood splattered across the walls.

So: if you're an adult who loves a smart thriller and can watch hard scenes without harm to your conscience, this one rewards you. If you're choosing for children or younger teens, choose something else — this one was never for them.

John wakes aboard the Odyssey-1, an astronaut on a years-long mission to Titan, one of Saturn's moons, to bring precious materials home. The crew sleeps in ninety-day hibernation cycles, waking only to check the ship and evaluate their own minds — because the drugs that put them under are known to unsettle them.

Nine months in, all is well. The next time John wakes, the ship is damaged, the crew is divided over whether to press on, and John is hearing the voice of a girlfriend who isn't there. And that is all we'll give away.

Three stars, and here's what they mean. This is a well-executed thriller that does something genuinely difficult: it places you in its hero's shoes and refuses to tell you what's real. As John's hallucinations deepen and the crew's trust collapses, the film keeps two competing realities equally plausible right up to the end.

The final twenty minutes are the payoff, and they're powerful — you're left as disoriented as John, weighing which version of events could possibly be true until the answer arrives. It's a tightly built piece of psychological suspense that trusts its audience to sit in the confusion. What holds it back from higher marks is less the craft than the excess: the language and the blood strain against an otherwise disciplined story.

For a movie about a man alone in the dark, SLINGSHOT lands somewhere surprisingly warm. Its central conviction is that people need each other — that isolation is a kind of unmaking. That's an old truth, and a biblical one.

The film also asks a sharp moral question: is scientific progress worth more than a human life? Its answer is clear. It affirms, above everything, the value of human life — a genuinely pro-life stance woven into the fabric of a genre that often forgets it. There's a light environmentalist thread too, since the mission exists to harvest resources for renewable energy back on Earth, but that never overtakes the film's real concern, which is the human soul under pressure.

What the movie can name but not fully answer is the ache at its core: we were not made to be alone. Scripture put words to that longing at the very beginning — "Then the LORD God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone'" (Genesis 2:18). The film reaches for the same truth from the far side of the solar system.

SLINGSHOT is a smart, unsettling thriller with a real moral spine — a story that argues we were never meant to be alone and that human life outweighs human progress. It's also a hard R, with a dozen "f" words and violence that spills over into the gratuitous. So here's our answer, the same one we opened with: worth the trip — adults only. Planning family movie night instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.