stop looking at me swan
Netflix's 'Spaceman' Reviews: Adam Sandler Can't Quite Save This One
Adam Sandler's always been a stellar comedian and stepped up to the plate as an effective dramatic actor whenever he's felt compelled to star in something serious. "Punch-Drunk Love," "The Meyerowitz Stories" and "Uncut Gems" were all great.
But his latest "Spaceman," which goes down the similar non-comedic path, might be the first misstep in the Sandman's storied career.
"Spaceman" is out on Netflix right now, stars Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano, Kunal Nayyar, Isabella Rossellini and Lena Olin, and is directed by Johan Renck. Here's what critics had to say about the film.
The premise
Drifting alone through space in a cramped craft, headed toward Jupiter and a strange anomaly known as the Chopra cloud, cosmonaut Jakub Prochazka (Adam Sandler) conducts a satellite interview with schoolchildren back on Earth. A little girl asks: "I read that you're the loneliest man in the world... does it make you sad to be so far away?" Thus the mood is set for "Spaceman," Johan Renck's melancholy sci-fi story about loneliness, love, and a giant talking space spider. This is a strange film, and perhaps the strangest aspect of all is that it stars Adam Sandler.
... And then a giant talking spider shows up.
Despite the dud film, some say it's the best performance of Sandler's life
Every few years, Adam Sandler emerges from the haze of man-child comedies to prove that he is actually an incredibly talented dramatic actor. For every "Big Daddy," there was "Punch-Drunk Love," for every "Grown Ups," there was "The Meyerowitz Stories." But since 2019's "Uncut Gems" gave Sandler his closest brush with Oscar love, the actor seems to have gained a renewed interest in stretching his dramatic chops. Following his turn as a down-on-his-luck NBA scout in 2022's "Hustle," Sandler delivers his most somber and emotionally resonant performance yet in Spaceman, an eerie, moody chamber piece whose success rests squarely on the actor's hunched shoulders. As a performance vehicle for Sandler, "Spaceman" is terrific. As a profound, thought-provoking exploration of loneliness, love, and the unbearable weight of existence, it's a little less successful.
[Inverse]
Led by Sandler's laconic, haunted performance and breathing with Max Richter's rainy-day score, "Spaceman" exists on a wavelength of low-key melancholy. Prominent among its concerns are loneliness and the corresponding silence of vast unbridgeable distances, two qualities not exactly abundant in Happy Madison productions. Which is an even more glaring anomaly than the Chopra Cloud: There's very little trace of Sandler's past selves in "Spaceman." No one expects the film to be funny, but no one expects Sandler's character to be so humorless either. Loneliness so defines Jakub that all glimpses of his past, revealing an anguished childhood and a dull and charming courtship with Lenka, show little but trauma. Eventually even Hanuš questions why anyone would want to spend so much time swimming around such miserable memories.
[Paste]
Like many comics before and after him, Sandler has had to prove his skills outside of comedy. Time and time again, audiences and critics alike walk away from these few dramatic shifts with a mixture of awe and shock. "Uncut Gems" was a peak moment for Sandler, as his performance and the film generated intense awards hype, something not experienced since "Punch Drunk Love." "Spaceman" is the closest Sandler gets to those heights. The actor is considerably subdued here, offering a quiet, reflective performance that starkly contrasts his bravado and chaotic energy in "Uncut Gems." His chemistry with Carey Mulligan, who plays his wife, is questionable, but Mulligan makes up for it with her professionalism. Sandler has more chemistry with Paul Dano, who voices the massive spider that is more well-suited to a horror film.
But seriously, what the heck is this movie really about?
"Spaceman" exists in an alternate reality in which the space race is led by the Czech Republic and South Korea (whose emissaries are hot on Jakub's tail), and its scant contextual details are mostly puzzling, such as Lenka's eventual relocation to a rural convent for single mothers. Instead, the primary emphasis is on Jakub's visage, which segues from forlorn to scared when, one morning, he awakens to discover that his ship has a surprise second inhabitant: a giant extraterrestrial spider that speaks in the calmly curious and wise voice of Paul Dano. Beset by nightmares about his father as well as wistful dreams about Lenka, Jakub assumes that this creature is an additional figment of his imagination, especially since it doesn't register on any of Peter's sensors. However, once he gets over his initial alarm (exacerbated by a recent reverie about a spider crawling under his skin), Jakub slowly befriends the beast, and even gives him a name: Hanus.
The first half of "Spaceman," however, is a chore. We are mostly confined to the cramped surroundings of the spacecraft; the only time we leave its restrictive interior is whenever Hanus probes Jakub's memories to discover why this "skinny human," as he lovingly calls him, is so depressed. These flashback sequences are shot by DP Jakob Ihre from the perspective of a spider, oblique and reflective, but nauseatingly limited in their capacity for composing informative frames to give us more than the equally narrow dialogue is providing. The images of space, no matter what the ethereal score is trying to sell, are also quite flat, looking more like purple sludge clouds than awe inspiring remnants of the galaxy's beginning. The script's dialogue, adapted from Jaroslav Kalfař’s sci-fi novel Spaceman of Bohemia is rendered repetitively: For a while it sounds like Mulligan's only lines will be "Where you go, I go."
At once too cerebral and yet awash in sentimentality, "Spaceman" never quite manages to bring its various elements together into a tonally cohesive whole. Mulligan's scenes on Earth abstract and deify her character to the point where she's little else than a figure we can all admit is worth coming back to Earth for. Try as the "Maestro" actress might, she can't ever make Lenka anything more than a plot device to advance Jakub's own interior world which, even in the film's own odd cosmology, takes up the entire galaxy. Similarly, while Sandler is committed to playing Jakub's sadness in capital letters, one wonders why Renck felt the need to hand such a beguilingly depressed Eastern European role to an American actor so obviously associated with broad comedy and East Coast angst.
[AV Club]
TL;DR
The gloomiest, most humorless Sandler picture yet, and I'm including the one about 9/11.
Dreary, sluggish sci-fi which will have most viewers banging on the doors for an escape pod.
"Spaceman" is neither particularly astute about human nature nor discernibly interested in the politics embedded in it, and it is not even meme-ably bad, which is a shame. So much wasted potential.
There are moments of levity in "Spaceman," but it's a deeply melancholy film, more "Ad Astra" than "Spaceballs."
It's a bizarre sci-fi film in which Sandler is giving a dramatic performance that's so dialed-back that he barely shows any personality at all.
