Review: Spaceman

Spaceman

Trailer

No Bowie please.

Astronaut Jakub (Adam Sandler) nears the fulfilment of a solo deep space mission, to investigate a mysterious particle cloud that has appeared beyond Jupiter. Afflicted by loneliness and obsessing over the lack of contact with his pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) – who, unknown to him, has ended their marriage – Jakub is stunned when a sentient spider-like creature that he dubs “Hanuš” (Paul Dano) boards his ship, claiming that he wishes to help Jakub with his issues.

Adam Sandler has long since established that he can go. In-between those dreadful Netflix comedy films that seem tailor-made to get you to underestimate him again each and every time another one comes out, a release headlined by him wows you, with Uncut Gems and Hustle just some of the examples from his later career. Spaceman, adapted from the novel Spaceman Of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař, seems like another one of those moments, if for no other reason than a very large part of the movie is just Sandler on-screen alone (notwithstanding the giant spider: we’ll get to it). This seems very much like an actors showcase, and while Sandler brings the goods, it’s the larger production that drags Spaceman down.

This is, first and foremost, a story about loneliness: how it can be a self-inflicted thing, how we deal with it, and how it can tear you apart inside in ways that you don’t even realise are happening. It is through this aspect of itself that Spaceman is really at its finest, not exactly treading new ground – both Interstellar and Ad Astra coveted similar ground relatively recently, albeit with a more “hard” realism, and the inspiration of 2001 is never far away – but really engaging with the audience in the manner in which Sandler’s Jakub explores the manner in which he found himself as far away from his wife – literally and emotionally – as he has found himself. It’s a 110 minute therapy session in that way, as Jakub is forced to contemplate the trauma of his childhood years (his father was an informer for the Czech Communist Party), the way that he pushes people away when they get too close and the misery of an existence where being the loneliest human in the universe is preferable to opening up to the people that he loves. Sandler anchors this portion of the experience, really making you feel the buried grief and pain that Jakub is dealing with, getting across artistically what is a very common masculine experience really.

Jakub’s mission to find a way to reconnect with Lenka, despite the distance, is a far more engaging thing than the more practical objective of getting to the space cloud. Not unlike many women left behind by travellers and explores down the years, Lenka is no longer satisfied being Jakub’s second priority in everything, despite all that she has given, and if Jakub is a man alone, than Lenka is very much a woman alone as well, even if she is back on Earth. Spaceman teases out the romantic history between Jakub and Lenka in a series of flashbacks that Jakub experiences onboard his ship, and they became the most important throughline of the narrative, a mixture of self-flagellation by Jakub over his perceived failures in the past but also a glimpse of what might be if he is willing to take a chance and reach out properly.

But in the midst of all this, there is, Jon Peters style, the issue of the giant spider (luckily Jakub does not have to fight him in the third act). To introduce this type of plot point/character into your narrative is to take an enormous risk, and for Spaceman I don’t really feel that the payoff was worth it. The question is simple: why does this character have to be a giant spider? “Hanuš”‘ eight-legged nature does not actually have an enormous impact on the plot once Jakub decides that he isn’t actually hallucinating, and it certainly doesn’t seem to have much of an impact in his character role of a erstwhile therapist, an intergalactic refugee who has a compulsion to try and heal Jakub of his mental hurts. I suppose, if one were to reach, you can see the idea of how connection between individuals is something that should transcend notions of humanity and appearance, but honestly that it is a bit of a stretch. In the end, this seems like a weird choice undertaken for the sake of being weird, and there isn’t any amount of elaboration of Hanuš’ home planet and the parasites that destroyed his civilisation that can really fix that problem.

This leads into the problems with the film’s second half, where it can’t really balance the need to include material with the giant talking spider with the emotional journey of Jakub as he tries to reconcile with his wife across the stars. There’s a bunch of dropped threads, most notably with Jakub’s mission commander Tuma (a badly served Isabella Rossellini), that get no satisfactory ending, and the finale itself seems to me to be a classic example of a high-concept plot not really knowing how it can possibly end things, so it just sort of fluffs it. You keep waiting for a revelation, an explanation of Hanuš, something to make all of the set-up worthwhile, even a firmer indication that Hanuš himself is real and not an hallucination (or vice versa), but it doesn’t come. This is a film that is all about its opening hour, and after that the wheels are off the track. Reading around, this seems like a problem that the book had too (the ending of the film deviates significantly, but not satisfactorily) so I guess I have to chalk it down to the premise.

Sandler is great, which should not really be a surprise: he’s firmly in that stage of his career now where he has nothing left to really prove, and can wow you with these slightly left-field offerings. Acting alone, for the most part, he really makes you feel the quiet desperation of Jakub, and his more outward show of arrogance and disdain, a man who wants healing, catharsis, whatever you want to call it, but also finds himself resisting it at every turn because of his own trauma and neurosis. Mulligan doesn’t get anywhere near as much time but is still decent as Lenka, with both actors able to get across sheer emotional exhaustion with their lot in life very well. Less impressive is Dano as Hanuš, a voice acting role where he seems to almost be deliberately flat with every utterance, which doesn’t really do much to endear the giant talking spider to the audience in the way that the film presumably wants you to think of him.

The film looks OK. I’m not sure how to put it, other than to say that at times its cinematography seems unambitious. I suppose in that respect Interstellar and Ad Astra might have ruined things with me through their masterful cinematography: what director Johan Renck serves up in Spaceman is comparatively limited, even when things start getting slightly out there (and for that director, whose last feature film was the extremely controversial Downloading Nancy, this whole thing seems almost tame). Jakub’s recollections of his past come in the form of blurry projections on the walls of his spaceship, which don’t really make the right kind of impression really, and other visual effects, even the giant spider, seem competent and little else. Scenes shot on Earth are spare to the point of it being an intentional effect, though it might well have just been a budget thing: many of the sets look rather ramshackle and lacking in extras. So much of the effort, I imagine, went into Hanuš and making sure the framing of this effect worked: it’s a misguided effort in a way, that saps some of the verve from the rest of the production. There’s a communist-style sparseness to Spaceman is what I am trying to get across, which may well be the point, but the end product is a bit too ugly and uninspiring for its own good. That follows through in its vague score that consists mostly of ambient noise.

Spaceman goes down as something of a miscue for me then. On paper there is a lot here that should work, even if it is just in terms of “That sounds weird, let’s check it out”. In practise, there is a lot that does work, like Sandler getting the chance to show off his acting chops in a drama once again, free from the drudgery of his comedic responsibilities. But that’s where the good largely stops, and the mediocre creeps in. The premise can’t sustain itself, the idea of therapy-via-giant spider working only to a point, before it become needlessly distracting. The film’s look could be a lot better. And the third act is a mess of differing ideas, concepts and plot points, that Renck can’t draw together into a worthwhile resolution. It’s a weird premise turned into a weird movie, and where sometimes that might result in success, here it results only in a humdrum space adventure that is aiming for 2001 but ends up closer to 0. Not recommended.

(All images are copyright of Netflix).