SPACEMAN (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Spaceman, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 29, 2024

Colby Day's screenplay for Spaceman bluntly tells us what it's about right up front. Via a video feed, a girl asks cosmonaut Jakub (Adam Sandler) if he is, as she has heard from others, the loneliest man in the world. The man may say he doesn't see it that way, but Jakub is about halfway—189 days, to be more precise—into a solo mission farther away from Earth than any human has ever traveled.

Here's a movie that presents that idea and, by way of Sandler's restrained and internalized performance, makes us feel it. Jakub's spaceship is cramped and troublesome thing, with its cameras regularly on the fritz, its communications systems not entirely reliable, and the workings of its plumbing making a mechanical whirring sound whenever he's trying to sleep (The retro-futurist production design, putting this in or defining it by some alternate past/present, is a nice touch).

The cosmonaut from the Czech Republic might have a couple of lifelines to his home, but it's not as if Peter (Kunal Nayyar), the man at mission control whose sole job is to make sure Jakub is doing as well as someone in his situation can be doing, really understands what he's experiencing. Jakub's wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) definitely doesn't understand, in part because of his unwillingness to talk to her. It's mostly, though, on account of Jakub's inability to listen to what his wife is actually saying. She doesn't want to understand her husband's drive to leave Earth, his home, and her any longer, because she, pregnant and on the verge of giving birth to the couple's first child, just wants him to stop leaving.

That becomes the central conflict of Day and director Johan Renck's adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfar's novel, and it's an idea that's both underwhelming and not communicated in a particularly compelling manner in the face of this story, which revolves around Jakub's mission to discover the nature and origin of a strange cloud that appeared in the solar system four years prior. This is a story that puts us into the isolation of this mission and directly confronting the mysteries of the cosmos, and the best it can muster on a thematic level is that love might be the only thing that really matters. Sure, that's true to a certain extent, but here, it feels like a pat answer against questions far deeper than the material is willing or able to explore.

There are also the means of the narrative getting at that answer that don't quite add up in the context of the mood and scope of this setup. For one thing, Lenka is more an idea than a character, appearing in mostly happy flashbacks to Jakub as he deals with the possibility of losing her and wandering around back home to repeatedly state how untenable her relationship with Jakub has become. That's almost to be expected, of course, but then, there's the other, much more noticeable method of this story to plainly tell us exactly what we're supposed to take from it.

It's an alien, a spider-like creature, that appears inside Jakub's vessel and, in a serene but reverberating voice (provided by Paul Dano), tells the cosmonaut he doesn't need to fear this unexpected presence. The alien, whom Jakub later dubs Hanus, has been exploring the solar system and found Jakub's loneliness to be curious, so here the alien is, wanting to find out more about why Jakub has put himself in such a dangerous and isolated situation.

Is the alien real or simply a figment of Jakub's imagination? That might seem an important question, but the filmmakers' credit, it's less so than the questions of how Jakub reacts to the alien and how Hanus views the human within the context of the vastness of the universe.

The notion is broadly fascinating, especially as Jakub and Hanus begin to talk about the alien's past (which might have begun with the beginning of the universe itself), the human's guilt over the sins of his father, and how peculiar the alien finds the human's contradictory existence of loving his wife and wanting a mission that makes him so alone. No, the visual effects that bring Hanus to life aren't entirely convincing, but the effects artists have ensured that the creature's quintet of eyes convey some sense of understanding and even, when it contemplates just how lonely Jakub must be, sadness.

For all of the possibilities of these conversations, though, the movie has decidedly limited its own potential, simply by making the story into one that's ultimately about the relationship between Jakub and Lenka. It gives us an entity whose comprehension of the universe is as close to limitless as could be possible, and instead of probing that understanding (Jakub's innate curiosity, apparently, is restricted by the fact that he's a bit of a narcissist) or asking some of the big questions, all of this essentially becomes a therapy session for Jakub.

It's simplistic—and beyond the basic idea of it, too, in how rudimentary and sentimental the core relationships become. Spaceman, with its intimate perspective and intergalactic canvas for ideas, probably shouldn't feel so trivial.

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