Here’s my guess: in a few years the performance Adam Sandler (Bulletproof) gives in Spaceman (on Netflix this weekend) will be mentioned when a person starts rattling off the best Sandler performances, as people like myself are wont to do. The problem with Johan Renck’s Spaceman today is it’s just a little too bizarre, to the point it’s going to take awhile for people to figure out what to make of it. And not in some deep, philosophical way – the movie is pretty upfront about what it is and what it’s trying to do; almost to a fault – but at its core this is just a bizarre movie disguised as poignant and mysterious. This is a movie that features a giant, but kind of cute talking spider-looking alien, voiced by Paul Dano (Cowboys & Aliens), who constantly refers to Sandler’s Jakub Procházka as “skinny human.”
Based on the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, Sandler plays Czech Republic cosmonaut Jakub Procházka (yes, Sandler is doing an accent, but it seems purposefully light and fleeting) who is on a solo mission to an area of space near Jupiter to examine a strange cloud of light that can be seen from Earth. Jakub is a broken man who, possibly, accepted this mission as a way to further punish himself for the crimes of his father, who was an enforcer in the Communist party. He talks to his wife, Lenka, played by Carey Mulligan (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), on video chat – but she is pregnant, lonely, and disillusioned with Jakub and his mission.
When we first see the alien, we are not sure if this is a figment of Jakub’s imagination, a straight-up hallucination, or real. Jakub isn’t quite sure either, but decides to kill it anyway even though it speaks English and seems friendly enough. When Jakub fails to kill the alien, they start a communication that starts out pleasant enough – the alien says his kind do not have names, so Jakub names him Hanuš after the inventor of the Prague astronomical clock (as noted in the film, historians now think this is false) – but even the alien gets pretty tired of Jakub’s selfishness and winds up berating him for being a bad person. Hearing some hard truths, Jakub decides to make some changes in his lie, but considering his current situation out in space, headed toward a mysterious energy cloud that Hanuš explains to us the beginning and end of the universe, Jakub’s new life lessons might be moot.
There were a couple of times that I, as a viewer, as the story goes on, questioned if Hanuš was real. But then I finally made a mental decision that he was real. The movie certainly presents him as real. And I don’t think a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve so transparently like Spaceman really gets to pull the whole, “this fantastical alien that shouldn’t be real wasn’t real,” trick.
When Spaceman was originally announced I assumed, at first, it was a comedy. The title is kind of funny. And the descriptions, along the lines of, “Adam Sandler plays an astronaut who meets an alien names Hanus,” … I’m sorry, that sounds like a comedy. With all due respect to the historical figure Hanuš and the clock he apparently did not make, I was not entirely familiar with his work. By the time I saw the film I had a fairly good sense this was not a Sandler comedy, but it’s striking how there’s absolutely no humor whatsoever in Spaceman. I found the whole movie incredibly sad. And I do appreciate Sandler when he takes on grief. There seems to have been a re-evaluation of his 2007 role in Reign Over Me, playing a broken man who lost his family during the events of 9/11. I was on board with Sandler in Reign Over Me from the start, but I get why it’s tough. Sandler is so distant in Reign Over Me, we don’t really know him at all outside of what Don Cheadle’s character tells us. But in Spaceman, we work through his pain together. We feel a part of it. We feel this character letting us in and we get to know him and Sandler is really good at this.
But, again, this is a very weird movie for also being so emotionally forlorn. And I’m truly not sure what its place is in the current movie landscape of 2024. It will be on Netflix this weekend, but I do wonder what people settling in to watch Adam Sandler and a not-at-all-wacky alien converse about the meaning of life will think about all this. It’s strange this movie exists at all outside of, possibly, an awards vehicle for Sandler that, considering when it’s being released – which would be now – most definitely isn’t happening. (Spaceman did premiere at the Berlin Film Festival recently. A prestigious festival, but not really one where Oscar campaigns are often launched.) But I kind of wish that were happening. And I think Spaceman itself is maybe just a couple tweaks away from being something truly special. But, as is, it’s kind of this oddball movie that I’m glad exists and I truly think Sandler is really terrific.
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