Stream It or Skip It: ‘Spaceman’ on Netflix, an Adam Sandler meets a space spider adventure (2024)

In Spaceman (now on Netflix), astronaut Adam Sandler hangs out in a spaceship with a psychic space spider, a premise that sounds intriguing on paper. In execution, though? Jury’s out on that one, at least until we get to the bottom of this review. Now, the words “Adam Sandler” and “psychic space spider” imply that this is a comedy, but don’t be deceived: This is a heady alt-universe sci-fi drama that sure seems to want to be taken dead-seriously, since it’s about a deeply depressed man who’s rethinking his fractious marriage while halfway through a voyage to the other side of the solar system – rethinking his fractious marriage by engaging in psychotherapy with a Paul Dano-voiced CGI creepy-crawly. Whether or not this works at all is almost – almost, I stress – beside the point, considering the Sandman continues to push the boundaries of his actorly range and goofball persona. But whether it’s actually watchable is the question.

SPACEMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jakub (Sandler) looks like eight, maybe nine miles of bad road. You might too, if you were 189 days into a one-man excursion to the other side of Jupiter, leaving behind your pregnant wife and watching the already considerable emotional gulf between you grow deeper and wider with every million miles of empty space you traverse. Permafrown. Big dark bags under the eyes. Slumpy posture – well, about as slumpy as you can get in zero-gravity. Joy? What’s that? You know what it’s like, kind of. Jakub shoves aside his deep feeling of isolation and summons a thimbleful of enthusiasm to video chat with his boss, Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini), back on Earth, and answer questions from children. Of course, a kid asks him what it’s like being “the loneliest man in the world,” making this thing he’s gutting out even guttier. And then he plugs his sponsor, a prominent motion-sickness medication. I think that’s satire? Either way, life is pain.

Why is he taking this trip, you might ask? A purplish-pink conglomeration of particles dubbed the Chopra Cloud appeared in the solar system four years ago, and it’s big enough to be a visible smear in the sky back on Earth. This is potentially monumental stuff, stuff that might explain some of the big things about the universe – or at least that’s the implication, anyway. So the Czech Republic sent Jakub out to investigate, with competing Koreans not too far behind. Yes, this is an alternate reality setting where the Czechs are apparently a space-exploration superpower, and things like touchscreens haven’t been invented, so Jakub’s spacecraft is full of clickity switches and clackity knobs and communicators that crackle and whine like he’s hauling chatting on the CB radio with Smokey and/or the Bandit. He talks with his primary mission-control contact, Peter (Kunal Nayyar), but not with his wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), who won’t return his calls, which requires her to sit in a giant hunk of machinery that looks like a circa-’83 Pole Position arcade-style sit-down quarter-eater that’s been dropped in her living room. In fact, Lenka has recorded an anguished video message in which she breaks up with him, but Jakub doesn’t know it exists because Luma is trying to keep him focused on his mission. That’s a problem.

Another problem is, Jakub’s zero-grav toilet is acting up. It randomly makes really loud whooshy sucking noises and keeps him from getting a decent night’s sleep, during which he dreams about a spider crawling beneath his skin and trying to get out through his nostril. Not long after, Jakub floats into the can to relieve himself and lives out the Annie Hall scene in macro: A spider the size of a pitbull is hanging out in there, speaking in unsettlingly smooth Paul Dano tones. He can’t smush it with a shoe and he can’t stop it from somehow peering into his brain and watching his memories – of better times with Lenka, natch – so he might as well make friends, right? Sure. He names the spider Hanus, and shares his Space Nutella with him. Hanus really likes Space Nutella. He grabs a spoonful with his tentacles – he’s not quite a spider, since spiders have no tentacles, but he’s basically a spider – and blissfully slurps away. I mean, if a space spider is going to keep Dr. Melfi-ing you about your busted marriage, you might as well keep it happy with a sweet treat, you know?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Imagine Gravity, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar, Contact and/or Ad Astra crossed with, um, Arachnophobia? Eight Legged Freaks? Big Ass Spider!? Sure. One of those.

Performance Worth Watching: Big thumbs to the Sandman for pushing his thespian boundaries a little for this moody excursion. We love it when the Sandman gets serious. Too bad it’s hard to take this space-spider sh*t seriously – and that the movie squashes his charisma like something you might find in the bathroom and compulsively moosh inside three squares of Cottonelle and unceremoniously flush down the loo.

Memorable Dialogue: Hanus might’ve touched on the core of Jakub’s problem: “You have many boundaries, skinny human. Perhaps they are the cause of your loneliness.”

Sex and Skin: None. TBPTMVOPSSTF: Too Busy Pondering The Metaphorical Value Of Psychoanalytical Space Spiders To F—.

Our Take: Spaceman has all the components of a totally bananas movie except the bananas. Shouldn’t we be WTFing our way through this thing, laughing – unintentionally or otherwise – and wondering what they were thinking? Or at least being fascinated by the off-the-wall originality of the premise? In a world where we’ve seen so many of the same things before, the idea of watching a movie about an astronaut and his space-spider analyst stirs some intrigue. But director Johan Renck, adapting Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel Spaceman of Bohemia, renders the movie an interminably turgid, maudlin slog with no sense of pacing or dramatic tension. It looks terrific, with a retro-futurist aesthetic and convincing CG creature effects, and Sandler gives it the ol’ college try as a sad sack who’s both physically and mentally adrift, but it’s otherwise a miserable bore.

Thematically, we can see that Renck and scripter Colby Day are aiming to stir ideas about people who do great things for the greater good at the expense of their relationships and psychological health and humanity’s place in the universe, and contrast the micro of human emotions with the macro of the vastness of outer space. In that context, it’s hard to give a single crap about a guy’s pending divorce and the syrupy onslaught of sentimental drippery surrounding it when he’s about to encounter a cosmic phenomenon that might give humanity some insight into, oh, you know, just the origins of the universe.

Amidst scenes on Earth at the command center, and snoozy bits where Lenka – a non-character and waste of Mulligan’s talent – visits her mother (Lena Olin), we get Jakub and Hanus yimmer-yammering about his tiresome daddy issues, and a bevy of bleary flashbacks shot with distorted, psychedelic effects. It plods along an existential path directly into Jakub’s linty navel. And what exactly is Hanus, anyway? I don’t think he’s a legit space spider. He’s too goofy to be real. Is he a manifestation of Jakub’s inner self-critic? A Kafka-inspired hallucination, perhaps? A frustratingly opaque metaphor? Spaceman isn’t inspiring enough to prompt a ponder on it. It may just be the world’s dullest case of space… madness.

Our Call: Raid: Kills. Bugs. Dead. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.