Slingshot ending explained: Slingshot ending explained: John's real name and the red light

Spoiler Alert: This article contains major spoilers for Slingshot (2024). Reader discretion is advised.

A slingshot maneuver isn't everyone's cup of tea; Cooper needs to teach kids how he pulled it off in Interstellar. Three humans are trying exactly that in the Mikael Håfström-directed Slingshot (2024). Other than this scene from Nolan's film, it plays out on a similar theme as Fight Club (1999) too; it's just that all of it is happening in space, or, well, underground, we can't really tell. Let's just say it's all happening in the head.

The film stars Cassey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne, and Tomer Capone as the main characters of the film, who are on a mission to reach Saturn's moon Titan to bring back methane from its surface. Although the mission is important here, it is never at the core of the plot.

As the story moves, viewers will see that something's not right about the crew and eventually lead them to mind-bending truths where they will question everything that they have seen there. And then they'll remember how Ebony Maw died in Avengers: Endgame (2019).

What is John's real name in Slingshot?

To understand this, we need to go through the events of the film a bit. The three crewmates, John (Affleck), Nash (Capone), and Franks (Fishburne), are in charge of the ship called Odyssey 1, and they need to take turns overseeing the ship while the others are hibernating.

However, they need a sleep-inducing drug, which is likely the reason we see all that mental drama in Slingshot, to take that long nap. While it all seems like a thrilling space mission, things start to go south as the ship continues to go north; or east; or west, or whatever, beginning with Nash.

But the real bummer of Slingshot is that Franks, who appears to be the most wise of them all, is the antagonist. There's a moment when John believes that Nash was killed by Franks, but then it turns out that's not true.

There's even a fight between John and Frank, where the latter is clearly the stronger of the two. But John has some serious fighting skills, as we see him disarming the gun Franks is holding.

Finally, after all of it has happened, when John tries to see if Nash is really alive through the computer's data, this is what he finds: this was a one-man mission, and his name is Captain John Nash Franks. So that clears it up—Nash and Franks were never real.

What is that red light at the end of the tunnel?

Most of the film is shown as if it's a hallucination. (Image via Bleecker Street)

John has a love interest in Slingshot, Zoe (Emily Beecham), who is in contact with him throughout the film. She tells him the truth—that he isn't in space but in an underground facility in New Mexico for a trial before they can actually send him to space. Another twist in the story.

It turns out she is right. He exits the simulated ship's airlock and finds a ladder in an underground location. He hears drilling machines, and Zoe explains the situation: an earthquake has cut off the tunnel's access.

An emergency light is flickering there as he talks to the workers trying to reach him. So he examines it as the workers dig. And here's the final twist: he realizes that's not an emergency light for a tunnel; it's part of the ship's emergency alarm in space, alerting him that the airlock is open—and he is being sucked into space.