‘Spaceman’ Review: Adam Sandler Shows Off More Dramatic Chops in Netflix’s Existentialist Drama
SPACEMAN. Adam Sandler as Jakub in Spaceman. Cr. Larry Horricks/Netflix © 2023.
“No, I’m not the loneliest man in the world,” Adam Sandler’s Jakub tells six-year-old Anna at the beginning of Johan Renck’s Spaceman. He was zooming in from the outskirts of Jupiter, on a solo mission inside a spaceship as he tries to collect new data from outer space to investigate the beginnings of time. That line was the key to the whole video conference scene it was dropped in, and it immediately felt like the haunting thought that would come back again and again inside Jakub’s head.
It is also the core emotional conflict of the film. Soon after, Jakub finds a mysterious giant spider who can talk English as perfectly as Paul Dano, has boarded the ship. Hanuš, as Sandler’s Jakub soon names it, claims to be millions of years old and to have witnessed eons of time in this universe. Now, its latest case study is humanity — and the best example of that was a lone astronaut, hundreds of millions of kilometers away from home, as he questions his own life choices.
It’s been roughly six months since Sandler’s character left Earth, and if his marriage was already on muddy waters then, with his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) upset over Jakub’s many broken promises over the years, after having to handle a pregnancy by herself without even knowing if Jakub will be back, Lenka has decided she’s had enough. She decides to dump him with a recording that the mission’s command prevents from being sent, to avoid breaking him.
SPACEMAN. Adam Sandler as Jakub in Spaceman. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2023.
Written by Colby Day and beautifully directed by Johan Renck, Spaceman managed to walk a fine line between keeping in check the quirkiness of its concept and actually pulling off the underlying themes of existentialism and self-reflection. There are obvious similarities with Interstellar throughout the movie, to the point that it will be hard to avoid shot-by-shot comparisons once the movie is out — but the main thematic strokes of the film, as well as some of its visual flavor, have a lot more in common with Andrei Tarkovsky films than with Nolan’s space opera.
Renck’s camera work and sense of space are quite remarkable, and his directorial skills make up for the slower-paced story that definitely feels too long for its own good. The story is split into two locations, with Adam Sandler carrying the bulk of the movie from outer space, and Carey Mulligan providing the half of the story he doesn’t get to witness back on Earth. And though Mulligan is rarely by herself, the writing on her scenes is much weaker, making for a less interesting characterization. The actress doesn’t do much with the paper-thin material she’s given either.
Meanwhile, Jakub’s conversations with the alien spider Hanuš are a lot more captivating, in part because both performers were up to the task. Sandler continues to show that he has a lot of dramatic chops that he hasn’t fully shown yet, and Spaceman is a direct continuation to Uncut Gems in his efforts to prove as much. However, it’s Paul Dano’s soothing, yet slightly unsettling voice role that takes over the movie. Hanuš is as friendly as it gets to Sandler’s character, yet Dano fully understands the uneasiness of having an alien spider aboard the ship and uses that feeling to propel his voice work to the next level.
SPACEMAN. (L to R) Adam Sandler as Jakub and Carey Mulligan as Lenka in Spaceman. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2023.
And though the relationship that is best explored in the movie is the one between the alien creature and the spaceman, it’s Jakub and Lenka’s marriage that needs to hold the movie together. At the end of the day, it’s unclear how much of Hanuš was a figment of Jakub’s imagination and how much it really was true. The astronaut claims not to be lonely out there, but the truth is that, while looking directly into the Great Vacuum, one will inevitably start asking questions about our place in the cosmos, and most importantly, the irrelevance of our minor issues within the vastness of time.
That’s when Spaceman truly shines, when it asks us to look in the mirror and wonder how many of our daily disputes are really worth the trouble. Sandler asks himself that very question after his companion starts digging into the very nature of humanity and ponders about the ridiculousness that is the level of importance we give to such minor grievances on the large scale of the cosmos. Where Spaceman fails, though, is in trying to sell us the emotional core of the failing marriage, and also selling us on why Carey Mulligan’s character ultimately believes Adam Sandler’s change of mind.
Spaceman starts streaming on Netflix on March 1.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
