Spaceman (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – Half a year into his solo mission on the edge of the solar system, an astronaut concerned with the state of his life back on Earth is helped by an ancient creature he discovers in the bowels of his ship.

My Take – Despite his preference to star in goofy and loud comedies, as evident by his roles in films like Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Reign Over Me (2007), The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), and most recently, Uncut Gems (2019) and Hustle (2022), Adam Sandler has proven himself to be quite the solid dramatic actor when given the opportunity.

His latest with Netflix gives him that opportunity, which arrived last week with its own set of hype.

Understandably as it marks the return of Swedish director Johan Renck to feature film-making, following 2019’s Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries that gained universal acclaim for being visually well-designed as well as narratively unassailable, who helms a screenplay adapted by Colby Day, that is based on the 2017 novel ‘Spaceman of Bohemia’ by Jaroslav Kalfař.

But while the film benefits from Sandler‘s nuanced performance, and captures the weariness and occasional humor of a man isolated in space well, it struggles to work under the weight of its own ambitions.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a very well made film with some beautiful cinematography and an interesting premise about loneliness, loss and mental illness. However, the script and the pacing simply kills any momentum it tries to have.

Indeed, it’s an admirably introspective film, attempting to tackle profound themes such as love, personal growth, and existential musings, but it also inadvertently reveals itself as an under-baked character study by often alluding to a depth that doesn’t exist beneath its story, instead feeling heavy-handed in its delivery.

Simply told, it earns points for its unique visual style and Sandler‘s performance, but falls short in its narrative execution and thematic exploration.

Mostly importantly, we have seen this kind of film before: writer-director James Gray’s underrated Ad Astra (2019) starring Brad Pitt, which captured the vast isolation of space with much subtlety and nuance.

Set aboard a Czech space mission, the story follows Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler), a cosmonaut on a solitary journey, 500 million kilometers from Earth, as he investigates the Chopra, a curious interstellar purple cloud, hovering near Jupiter. Six months into his voyage Jakub is suffering from existential despair.

Back on Earth, his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) is going through her own trauma, pregnant, so close to term she feels abandoned and unbeknownst to him, has decided to end their marriage.

And as his Earth-based superiors, led by a technician named Peter (Kunal Nayyar) and a high-level executive known only as Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini), try to keep Lenka’s decision from reaching him, to keep his already delicate mental condition intact.

Jakub begins hearing a disembodied voice (voiced by Paul Dano), which eventually takes the form of a giant alien spider aboard his craft and has the ability to peek inside Jakub’s spiraling mind. Instantly attuned to the sadness within him, and endlessly curious about why he’s feeling this way, the creature initiates a conversation. Before long, the creature forms a sort of bond with Jakub, and is christened Hanuš.

The resulting 107 minutes is a lifeless space oddity about a commercially sponsored Czech mission to the stars, whose astronaut has to repeat the ad slogans in his radio contact with Earth, always a labored type of satire. At first, each new development is intriguing to look at. The way director Renck shoots Sandler on his space voyage has a disorienting quality.

The camera never stops floating and spinning, even subtly, adding to Jakub’s inability to tell up from down. And whenever Jakub gets lost in daydreams and memories, these flashes are presented through a distorted lens, as though a nearly-360 degree image had been compressed into a rectangular frame or distorted by gravity.

This fisheye perspective depicts a hazy past and begins to illuminate feelings of remorse, as Jakub reflects on leaving his wife half a year ago, and growing distant from her well before that. These shifting visual modes are the film’s most powerful trick.

Unfortunately, it’s the only gimmick the film really has. This is a strange film, though at times it doesn’t realize how strange it is. As visually mesmerizing as it sounds and looks, the film can’t escape the shortcomings of its script and story.

The film uses its space setting to underline the emotional distance between Lenka and Jakub, but their Earth-set romance is never developed enough to truly ground the film. Neither Lenka nor Jakub is explored much beyond their relationship, thus rendering both as one-note figures without any identifiable personalities.

Since, Hanuš and Jakub’s conversations are the spine of writer Colby Day’s screenplay and the only things that come close to giving it a clear structure. The rest of the film is filled up from moments on Jakub’s ship to distorted memories from his past and a few present-day scenes in which Lenka contemplates the state of their marriage.

Hanuš has a past, as well as an ostensibly specific origin, but he functions more like an intergalactic shrink, delving into Jakub’s memories and neuroses, though the fact that he can read minds means that Hanuš also does most of the talking.

The latter half of the film mostly feels like an extended, awkward monologue in which the alien gives voice to all of Jakub’s problems, and it gets repetitive. And ends up too scattered, and too literal, to make its tale of a lonely astronaut feel remotely important. It travels to the edge of existence and finds nothing worth reflecting on, even though expository dialogue from a Paul Dano-voiced spider alien keeps insisting otherwise.

As expected, Adam Sandler succeeds at bringing the same deeply human gravitas to his performance as Jakub, never going over the top or trying too hard and never getting too sentimental either. Both he and Carey Mulligan initially feel miscast as a pair of Czech lovers, but their shared star power forces you to look past that detail.

The two actors make watching the film easier than it should be, in fact, given how little they’re allowed to do throughout the film. Paul Dano‘s subtly alien vocal performance starts off well, until it reaches a point of exasperation.

In supporting roles, Kunal Nayyar, Lena Olin and Isabella Rossellini do whatever they can with the limited stuff given to them. On the whole, ‘Spaceman’ is a banal sci-fi drama which despite a stellar dramatic performance from Adam Sandler ends up being a misfire.