There’s a clear fascination that comes with the stories of being lost and alone. Be it Daniel Defoe’s fantastical adventures of Robinson Crusoe, or the real-life Antarctic tales of Admiral Byrd, as recounted in his memoir, Alone, we have an age-old fascination with the idea of a man adrift in a strange and hostile place. This is territory that has been plundered for cinematic fascination for years, and it’s into this area that Netflix’s Spaceman has landed.
Based on the 2017 novel, Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfař, the film finds Czech cosmonaut Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) on the 189th day into his one-man mission to investigate the Chopra cloud, a strange purple energy ribbon, floating off the shoulder of Jupiter. He’s a weary and exhausted man, constantly kept awake by a rumbling toilet machine, and bored by the need to do sponsor reads before using equipment, and doing PR-based video calls to Earth.
To compound his loneliness, his heavily pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) isn’t accepting his calls, and is on the verge of leaving him. With stress and nightmares compounding his insomniatic bouts, he is surprised to find he’s sharing the space capsule with a talking alien spider, Hanuš, voiced by Paul Dano.
With that in mind, you’d be forgiven for conjuring in your mind a zany offbeat comedy film that’s one part The Martian, one part Silent Running, and one part Dark Star. However Spaceman isn’t that movie. Its pretensions lie closer to the epic, mind-expanding epics of cosmic cinema, such as Nolan’s Interstellar, or Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The problem being that those films were deep, soulful, and resonant. Spaceman is instead tedious, blunt, and ultimately unsatisfying.
Technically speaking, Director Johan Renck has squeezed every drop of worth out of the $40m budget. Reuniting with cinematographer Jakob Ihre, (with whom he previously collaborated on the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl) the pair have crafted a film with a uniquely retro-cinematic look and colour palette. The CGI work on the space-ship and its surrounding cosmos, and the fully rendered alien entity all look brilliant, and the production and sound designs are all top tier. Max Richter lends his hand to a pleasing enough score as well.
The problem comes from both a lacklustre and languid script, which never compels in the way it should. Jakub’s plight, and interactions with Hanuš never really manage to deliver on the promise of the setup. Similarly, the B-plot about Lenka leaving Jakub, with the work from the Space commission to prevent her ‘Dear John’ letter from getting through and to force a reconciliation for the sake of the mission, falls flat. This despite the presence of heavy hitters like Mulligan, Lena Olin and Isabella Rosselini, all of whom have little or nothing to work with.
The other great baffling decision here is the casting of Sandler, who despite a creditable performance as a depressed, broken and exhausted man, just isn’t right for this material. He lacks the facial malleability to portray the nuanced micro-expressivity needed for the character, and some of his line deliveries are simply flat and lifeless, when they ought to be heartfelt or horrified. What’s more the script never delves into the questions that the audience will have, such as why Hanuš resembles a tarantula, or whether he exists at all outside Jakub’s mind. Partly this is because Jakub is so taciturn and distracted that it feels like most of the important scenes of character development are missing.
It is however not a complete loss. Dano’s warm tones as the kindly alien arachnid never fail to elicit a chuckle or a smile, and the concept behind the story is good enough to warrant considering popping down to the local library to seek out the book. But in terms of a film with pretentions toward sublime questions of connection and the human experience, it’s one that sadly fails to make much of a impact in either regard.
Available on Netflix now