Movies
Adam Sandler. A giant spider. A mission to Jupiter. Should we even try to decipher the new Netflix drama?
Netflix
Many a cinephile has asked themselves the question: What if Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the avant-garde 1972 sci-fi classic about a widowed space explorer forced to grapple with his grief while on a mission to a mysterious planet, starred Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan as a fracturing married couple, alongside Paul Dano as the voice of a giant benevolent space spider? And what if Isabella Rossellini were the leader of Czechoslovakia’s space program, which somehow, in this universe’s alternate version of political and technological history, was the best-equipped in the world to send a manned mission to the outer reaches of Jupiter?
The result of that mashup might be something like Spaceman, an oddball psychological drama from the Swedish director Johan Renck, best known for a long résumé of music videos and lately for helming all five episodes of the acclaimed HBO miniseries Chernobyl. The script, adapted by Colby Day from the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, leaves many questions unanswered. If the mission of Sandler’s character—the depressive, remote, and career-obsessed Jakub—is so significant to humanity’s future, it isn’t clear why he would have been sent into space all alone. Nor is it clear why exactly it is significant to humanity’s future to investigate a purple formation known as the Chopra Cloud, a phenomenon that suddenly appeared four years before the movie begins and seems to have changed little about life on Earth outside of providing conversation fodder for stargazers.
Enjoying what there is to enjoy about Spaceman—and there are parts of this overall-not-great movie that have stayed with me, mostly involving the curious human/alien friendship that makes up its true emotional center—requires letting go of such quibbles and being grateful that Sandler’s lucrative Netflix deal gives him the space to experiment with idiosyncratic projects like this and the recent comedy You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, which also starred the actor’s two tween daughters. Though the book it’s based on was praised for its sense of humor, Spaceman is not a comedy—it’s serious at times to the point of solemnity. But given that Sandler has by now been displaying his dramatic skills on screen for more than 20 years, the scarcity of laughs in itself is no mark against the film. In fact, his performance as the morose astronaut is perhaps the movie’s strongest element. And though the premise of the solo astronaut as God’s Loneliest Man is so familiar as to constitute a primal sci-fi archetype—it’s a trope seen everywhere from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Martian, Ad Astra, and First Man—Spaceman does take the setup in a few unexpected directions, most of them involving Dano’s initially repellent but ultimately endearing mega-arachnid.
That originality does not extend to the movie’s central relationship between two earthlings, Jakub’s crumbling marriage to Lenka (Mulligan). Disappointingly, the all-powerful Mulligan, who just demonstrated her fierce acting chops in Maestro, gets little more to play here than the stock neglected wife, her hand eternally resting on her pregnant belly in the style of all movie moms-to-be; we don’t even learn what, if anything, Lenka does or once did for a living. As the film begins, Lenka is recording a video message to her husband, tearfully informing him that she wants to separate. But Rossellini’s stern Commissioner Tuma, focused on her star astronaut’s mental well-being, refuses to transmit the recording. Jakub is left adrift in space with no idea what has become of his wife and no human voice to anchor him, outside of the occasional check-in from Peter (Kunal Nayyar), the communications technician at Czech mission control. So when Jakub opens the door to the ship’s food storage space and finds himself face-to-face with an eight-eyed spiderlike being the size of a large dog, both the astronaut and the audience assume that the creature must be a hallucination, a product of the spaceman’s anxious and isolated state of mind.
But the nameless alien, whom Jakub eventually christens Hanuš after a legendary Prague clockmaker, soon reveals himself to be not just real but highly intelligent, able to communicate in Jakub’s native language (presumably Czech, though every actor in Spaceman speaks in the accent of their own country of origin) and even a little touchy-feely. Hanuš is forever inquiring as to Jakub’s emotional state, probing his repressed childhood memories and challenging him to reveal more of his inner self. At first this empathic attunement drives the spaceman further away, but gradually he grows more and more dependent on the gentle alien’s companionship. Hanuš’ own backstory remains opaque: He claims to have existed since the beginning of time, yet is also a mortal being; his planet, he says, was destroyed long ago, but we learn little about what it was like or what brought about its demise. Even the mechanism by which he boarded a sealed spaceship floating through the cosmos is never revealed—did he just pry open an air lock with his weird befingered front legs and sneak in?
Still, thanks to Dano’s soothingly hushed voice and some deft if low-budget CGI, Hanuš becomes a specific and memorable character with his own quirks. For one, he loves the hazelnut spread kept in the ship’s food storage locker, saying it reminds him of the tasty larvae he used to consume on his home planet. The interstellar arachnid also invariably refers to Jakub as “skinny human”—a confusing designation given that Sandler is rocking his usual un-buff dad bod as he floats through the gravity-free space of the ship in athletic shorts and tube socks.
When Hanuš and Jakub finally reach the heart of the Chopra Cloud—a place that the alien promises will contain secrets unfathomable to the limited human mind—the revelation is wanly anticlimactic, like a stoner’s rambling description of an especially trippy high. Renck’s intention seems to be to make this voyage into the outer reaches of space-time an allegory for the astronaut’s journey inward. But neither the cosmic climax nor the one back on Earth, as Lenka struggles to accept her impending single motherhood, lands with any real impact. It’s the sheer weirdness of the Jakub/Hanuš friendship that sets Spaceman apart. If you never thought you would tear up at the sight of a space spider clutching a tub of off-brand Nutella, this is likely your one and only chance.
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