Adam Sandler is cast intriguingly against type in Spaceman, a slow and melancholic sci-fi from Chernobyl director Johan Renck that, while making a bold use of its lead actor’s singular movie star magnetism, unfortunately fails to be interesting pretty much anywhere else, feeling at all times like a short film that’s been stretched out to feature length. It becomes dull and repetitive quickly, a Netflix-funded experiment in turning a pulpy premise (Eastern European cosmonaut befriends a giant psychic spider whilst orbiting Jupiter) into an extended therapy session that mostly ends up resembling an amateur-hour attempt at imitating Interstellar.
Based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kolfar, Spaceman sees Sandler suit up as Jakub, a Czech astronaut sent on a gruelling year-plus solo mission to the edge of Jupiter to investigate the origins of a glittering purple light that has appeared in the skies back on Earth, a journey that has effectively made him the loneliest man in history. It’s a burden that weighs heavier and heavier on Jakub, and one that has already almost broken his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan, stuck in a role with almost nothing to actually *do*) back on Earth – she has sent him a message of divorce that Czech space command is refusing to let him see, in order to protect his already ailing mental health.
Instead, Jakub ends up finding companionship in the form of an ancient telepathic alien that resembles a giant (and surprisingly adorable) spider that Jakub names Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano). As Hanus probes Jakub’s mind to learn about humanity, he in turn helps Jakub confront his own past and emotional failings, particularly the ones that have left his marriage on the rocks. The real problem is, though, that it’s really hard to actually care about any of this.
Jakub’s mission in space is ill-defined and lacks urgency, whilst the domestic drama is told mostly through dreamy flashbacks that inherently distance you from it. Both Renck’s direction and the script from Colby Day are fatally one-note – there’s no real escalation or notable change across the 100-or-so minute (though it feels a lot longer) runtime, so it feels like a collection of scenes that would be just as impactful (i.e. not very) no matter what order they ended up being put in. Sandler gives a decent performance, though it’s a million miles away from matching his best ‘serious’ work in Punch Drunk Love or Uncut Gems, and while the casting of Dano as a soft-spoken therapist alien is not very imaginative, he does breathe some life into Hanus.
Renck also doesn’t manage to make his vision of near-future space travel particularly visually interesting, though it does at least sound great thanks to a score from the ever-reliable Max Richter. Jakub’s ship lacks the strange lived-in feel of, say, the ship in High Life, and though there is a more showy finale that pretty explicitly riffs on Interstellar’s tesseract sequence, this too is a lot flatter than any of its inspirations. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of people who see Spaceman (and I’d imagine a decent chunk of them won’t bother watching to the end) will do so on a small screen at home, further robbing these flashier moments of their potential impact. It’s not a film that does anything offensively *wrong*, but in its well-meaning blandness, it’s unlikely to go down as anything other than a minor footnote in the careers of all involved.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 