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Movie Review: Slingshot

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The new movie “Slingshot” is about a spaceship – with technology at least 50-75 years into the future trying to use the gravity of Jupiter to “slingshot” around Jupiter, using its extreme gravity to travel to Saturn’s moon Titan, much faster.

This film stars Casey Affleck as John, Laurence Fishburne as Captain Franks, and Tomer Capone as Nash as 3 astronauts traveling to Jupiter for years with a mission to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, with a mission that includes the hope of finding a new source of renewable energy that will save planet Earth. 

Fundamentally this entire story is about the need to put astronauts to sleep for months at a time for long-term space travel using drugs that cause nausea, and hallucinations. The many hallucinations in this story with all 3 of the main characters are too many, with several of them over the top insane with an absurd ending that does not have any logic given the story. There are many flashbacks in this story, with John dating and eventually falling in love with Zoe, played by Emily Beecham. Some of these flashbacks seem like they are real incidents that happened in the past, but too many are once again, hallucinations that John experiences because of the drugs that put the astronauts to sleep. The constant confusion about what is real and fake during this entire film gets old after about 40 minutes, making the entire premise of this film of nonstop fooling the audience more annoying than entertaining.

The other problem with this movie is that the technology to get humanity to Jupiter and Saturn is probably 50 years into the future at least, but the cell phones and laptops used in this story are all present-day. Obviously, this does not make any sense, but was probably necessary because there was not enough budget to create futuristic phones and computers.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews are a correctly low 47% and I agree with this rating and do not recommend this film.

Movie Review: Blink Twice

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So how does a bad movie get greenlighted for production? Considering the money involved, the number of people, and the great risk of losing money, anyone would think that there are checks and balances to avoid a highly probable financial disaster. In the case of the new and bad “Blink Twice”, this film was made most likely because of the clout of the director and co-writer Zoe Kravitz, who has been in the movie industry for well over 10 years, and her finance Channing Tatum, who is the lead character in this film. When you have contacts and clout, you can get funding, and call in favors to get other famous actors in your movie, even if the entire concept is as horrendous as this one is.

The logline for this film reads like a legal excerpt from the Cosby rape and sexual abuse trial from a few years ago. “A billionaire who owns an island tricks several women into joining him and a group of his friends for a weekend retreat where the women are drugged, sexually assaulted, and then given other drugs so they forget what happened”. How an idea this bad, years in the making, could ever have been made into a movie is at a minimum outrageous, especially considering news stories concerning Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, R. Kelly, and most recently, P. Diddy.

This film stars Channing Tatum as Slater, the billionaire, most likely inspired by the late Jeffrey Epstein who tricks women into traveling to his island. Haley Joel Osment, plays Tom, one of the friends of Slater on the island. Naomi Ackie plays Frida, one of the many female victims, and Adria Arjona as Sarah – another victim. Christian Slater has a small part in this movie, as one of the friends of Slater who live on the island, and Geena Davis as Stacy, another victim of sexual assault in a rare appearance in a movie in recent years – as I wondered why she would pick this train wreck to make any attempt at a movie comeback. This entire movie is violent and in many areas disgusting, with most of the characters wandering around drunk either from alcohol or drugs. Why Zoe Kravitz would choose this terrible idea to write and then direct her first movie makes no sense.

Most amazing about this film is that the Rotten Tomatoes rating is a way too high 79%, that makes zero sense. This movie is 10% at best, only for some of the acting, and should be missed by everyone and never should have been made. A better title for this two hour mess should have been “Blink and close your eyes” so you never see a second of this very bad movie.

Movie Review: Alien: Romulus

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Somewhere in the world, there are companies that warehouse and store movie sets and equipment used in past films. From the opening scenes of the new movie “Alien: Romulus” it was like revisiting the sets of the original Alien (1979) or the sequel Aliens (1986), including the old computer monitors and related equipment. Regarding science fiction movies and arguably the greatest Alien creature ever created, these first two Alien films are the all-time standards and the beginning of the almost 50-year franchise of Alien movies.

The latest Alien movie “Alien: Romulus” has many reminders of the first two Alien movies and a character from the original movie named Ash, who is an android played by the late Ian Holm, using AI. From my memory of the original Alien from 1979, I remembered that the spaceship that Ash was on blew up. Given this fact, how could he now appear in this movie – with a timeline some 20 years after the original story?

This story is about a group of younger astronauts on a ship some 67 light years from Earth. Their mission is about trying to retrieve a valuable specimen on their space station called Romulus. Soon after they dock with another space station, where they encounter deadly alien creatures known as deadly Xenomorphs and face-huggers, that attach themselves to the face of a human host where they implant an alien that grows rapidly and explodes from the chest of the victim – one of the most impressive ideas in the history of horror movies.

That cast for this latest Alien installment includes Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny – who has an impressive start to her young acting career – having appeared in several major movie releases in the last 2 years. The android character of Andy is played very well by David Jonsson, who is close friends with Rain. The other characters have relatively small roles including Kay, played by Isabela Merced. Because Kay is pregnant, the new idea introduced in this story is that when a human is implanted with an Alien while pregnant, a new combination of Alien/Human creatures is created – something never seen before in all the many Alien movies. This idea is the only original one within this entire film.

Towards the end of this story, the climax includes too many ideas from the second Aliens movie, that I thought were contrived and lacked any attempt at originality.

Overall I thought this latest Alien movie was just OK, and I was surprised at the high 82% rating for this movie, with my rating about 70% and a very marginal recommendation only for fans of the Alien franchise.