Spaceman (2024)

Score: 1 / 5

A lonely man on the fringes of the known universe, occupied mentally with memories of loved ones, turns his survival into an epic journey of cosmic comprehension. It's not a new narrative, and this movie turns Adam Sandler into the titular sad boy in space. Most of this type of film -- I'm currently thinking of First Man and Ad Astra, though Interstellar and The Martian and Solaris also fit the bill -- engages with elements of action, science fiction, or horror to remain engaging and relatable to the audience. Not so in Spaceman, in which Johan Renck (of the miniseries Chernobyl and episodes of many other series) focuses instead on his protagonist's state of mind.

Sandler's Czech cosmonaut, named Jakub, has been alone in space for six months already, en route to a cloud of dust near Jupiter. His ship is all but a wreck, and perhaps that's less a critique of the times or funding and more a literal representation of the real driving force in Jakub's life: his marriage. His pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) seems to be giving him the cold shoulder, offering him radio silence in the vast reaches of space. He's still troubled by the death of his father, a Communist informant, when he was young, and seems to be a workaholic to the point of neglecting and abandoning Lenka when she miscarried. The production design and effects feel desperate for purpose, unfortunately, rendering what should be glorious shots of the galaxy inert and cheap, and offering us little to no insight into the character's experience or reality. No wonder he's in the dumps.

So when a giant spider suddenly appears in his vessel, Jakub is rightly terrified. But Hanus, as it calls itself (voiced unnervingly by Paul Dano), has no intention of harming him. Even in these moments, when we should be most concerned for Jakub, Sandler's uninterested and subdued performance reinforce what little we know about him -- namely that he isn't a likable guy -- and completely disconnect us from him. Anyone who knows me knows I hate spiders, but even I wanted Hanus to just eat him and put us all out of our misery. Alas, Hanus tells the truth and only speaks to Jakub in lengthy conversation, plying him to share his memories and experiences in the style of Socratic dialogue.

Flashbacks to dramatize Jakub's past filmed oddly -- I think meant to be what Hanus sees or imagines -- and edited so haphazardly as to confuse purpose and cohesion. Much like the vague, soporific dialogue (the number of times Mulligan intones something like "Where you go, I go" in Terrence Malick-esque voiceovers is annoying at best), these sequences serve mostly to slow down the already plodding film and offer little to no entertainment to the proceedings. It doesn't help that an actress of Mulligan's caliber is utterly wasted in this one-note role as it is written. In fact, the material is such a depressing slog that Hanus resorts to snacking on human treats just to keep its spirits up. The only other characters we get are brief, underwritten scenes with his physician and commissioner (Isabella Rossellini, here for some bizarre reason and woefully underused).

By film's end, we learn the Chopra cloud -- the reason for Jakub's journey -- is material left over from the beginning of the universe in which all time exists simultaneously. As he floats in it and mourns his disintegrating friend in the film's most visually disgusting flourish (as the melancholy music swells, jarringly), Jakub comes to the conclusion that all he wants is to be with his wife. It's a frustrating conclusion because there hasn't been a moment of the film in which that wasn't the case. So, apart from being able to articulate himself better -- maybe that's the point -- Jakub goes through no real development or growth. Despite all the arachnid's efforts at therapy, Jakub succeeds only in ruminating on his bitter childhood and current insecurities before deciding that, just as he pines when we first meet him, love matters to him most in the end, and the Scrooge-like epiphany that he still has time to fix his relationship with her. What an insipid waste.