If a certain kind of sci-fi film is anything to go on, what humanity is most likely to discover, as we venture out on our second space race, is some aspect of ourselves. In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey falls into a black hole only to find a multidimensional mirror into his own failures as a father. In James Gray’s Ad Astra, Brad Pitt goes to Jupiter and beyond to find peace with his dad. As far back as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, an alien planet manifests the memories of the astronauts who discover it. Even the cosmic trip of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey stages a return to origins of sorts.
In Johan Renck’s Spaceman, Adam Sandler becomes just the latest lonely spacefarer to have the abyss confront him with an uncanny reflection of himself. This story of an existentialist voyage to the stars, adapted by Colby Day from Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, is itself something of an uncanny reflection. Despite some novel tweaks to a familiar template, it recalls both in broad strokes and in individual moments the trajectories of those earlier explorations of the astronaut self. Some of that repetition may be inevitable, but the film ultimately doesn’t discover very much unexplored thematic space of its own.
Sandler assumes his disaffected, irascible loner mode as Jakub Prochaska, a Czech astronaut in a near future (or alternative recent past, as the timeline is a bit unclear). In this world, the Czech Republic has assumed a position as one of Europe’s economic powerhouses, as well as the continent’s leading space power. The space program headed up by Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini) gets its funding in part from what seems a bevy of Czech commercial brands: toothpastes, disinfectants, quantum telephones, and the like.
On a solo mission planned to last one calendar year, Jakub will be investigating a strange purple nebula that appeared one day in the night sky. But potentially threatening the success of his mission, as we discover partially through flashbacks presented in warped images that look like they were filmed through a Coke bottle, is that he left Earth just as his marriage was entering a crisis. And now his wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), has decided to pull the trigger and leave him while he’s floating in a tin can a million miles from any other humans.
In other words, Jakub is in the perfection situation to have an experience that troubles the boundary between cabin-fever hallucination and extraterrestrial encounter—like, say, meeting a giant, telepathic CGI spider, Hanuš (voiced by Paul Dano, appearing to be doing his best HAL 9000 imitation). This neutral-voiced nonhuman consciousness, though, has a softer touch than 2001’s malicious A.I. When, like HAL, Hanuš offers to discuss Jakub’s issues, there are no ulterior motives, and soon the four-foot spider is providing the man some long-overdue therapy.
Meanwhile, Tuma and her minions at the Czech Space Agency headquarters decide not to forward Lenka’s break-up video message to Jakub, though he knows which way the solar wind is blowing. With the forlorn Jakub surrounded by the frivolous, forced enthusiasm of brand-sponsored explanation, the basic scenario lays fertile ground for sad-sack wryness, and occasionally it hits. In an interview staged for promotional purposes, he has to insist “I’m not the loneliest man alive” to a schoolchild. And a scene where Jakub must fulfill his contractual obligation to recite the slogan of the disinfectant company while ordering an emergency disinfection of the spacecraft cabin is a clever bit of soft-dystopia comedy.
Much of the film, however, is dedicated to lifeless scenes back on Earth, where Lenka blandly packs her bags and discusses her private dissatisfaction with her mother, Zdena (Lena Olin, rounding out a cast of non-Czechs playing presumably Czech characters). Mulligan does what she can in the thankless role as the wife whose chagrin at Jakub’s emotional distance will inevitably be overcome by a teary third-act apology. Often presented in hazy memories and in dimly lit interiors, her character is likewise fuzzy, Mulligan’s dreary delivery not adding anything to a script that defines Lenka primarily by her attitude toward Jakub.
It hardly helps that it’s never made clear, despite the abundant flashbacks, what exactly drew Jakub and Lenka to one another. Clichés and generalities—an episode of skinny dipping early in the relationship, Lenka rhetorically pondering why love is so hard—substitute for character development. Indeed, though the story’s main crisis is precipitated by the decay of the relationship between this husband and wife, the most meaningful and dynamic connection depicted on screen is that between an astronaut and a giant spider.
It’s perhaps a desire to be “universal” that derails the romantic turmoil that should be at the film’s core. Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships—to the point that “Men would rather go to space than get therapy” would be an appropriate tagline for it. But instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.
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