Spaceman

Six months into a solo mission to Jupiter, a lonely astronaut confronts the personal issues that plague his life back on Earth, all with a little help from an intelligent giant alien spider who appears on his ship.

Adapted from a 2017 novel by Jaroslav Kalfař called Spaceman of Bohemia, the movie Spaceman is the story of an astronaut named Jakob Prochazka. Alone on a corporate-sponsored Czechoslovakian space mission to investigate a strange cloud hanging off the edges of Jupiter, a cloud that may be made up of pieces of the Big Bang, and thus, possibly containing some of the secrets about the origins of the universe, Jakob is struggling with the loneliness and the isolation of the expedition. Short on sleep, and rattling around in a spacecraft plagued by small annoying malfunctions, his thoughts are constantly straying back on Earth, as his marriage to his pregnant wife Lenka is dissolving. This fracturing relationship is interfering with his daily calls from home, which are his only real lifeline still tethering him to his sanity, as Lenka hasn’t called him for days. He is monitored by a physician back on Earth, the only other person he talks to regularly, and despite this Doctor’s efforts, and also the efforts of the Director in charge of Mission Control, Jakub knows something is wrong.

That’s when a giant spider appears in his spacecraft.

The spider has a very calming telepathic voice (Paul Dano), and it tells Jakub that his homeworld fell to invaders called the Gorompeds, and now, infected with Gorompeds and slowly dying, it is wandering the universe in search of solace. Jakub’s loneliness drew it to him. The spider says that it wants to help ease Jakub’s distress, but there’s something vaguely threatening about its insistence, especially as the spider seems to be angered and offended by Jakub’s narcissism.

Unsure whether or not the spider is real or a hallucination, but lonely for interaction, Jakub lets the spider stay. He names the spider Hanus, and with the spider’s help, he begins to confront his own issues, ultimately facing not just the secrets deep within himself, but the secrets of the universe as well.

Saying much less than it thinks it does, and much less than it very obviously wants to say, Spaceman is a pretty straightforward relationship metaphor, touching on the fear of commitment, and of moving forward, all due to the toxic baggage of the past. It’s basically the cinematic version of the joke about how some men would rather go to space and talk to a giant spider than go to therapy. This is mostly a bottle episode of a film, mostly centered on Sandler, with Dano’s voice as the giant CGI spider, both of them trapped together in the close confines of the little box that is Jakub’s spaceship, and as a result, it often feels a bit too much like a play, and an obvious one at that, with the whole deep space/alien spider thing as frilly window dressing.

In the end, it all felt too “try hard” deep.

Both Sandler and Dano are great, except the idea that we’re supposed to believe that the entire space team, including Sandler, all hail from the Czech Republic is a bit of a stretch, and this somehow turns Dano into the more believable character as a giant alien spider who finds humans kind of gross and dumb.

But other than those two, everyone else in the movie is generally pretty underused/underwritten, and are mostly just vague outlines of characters in the service of Jakub’s story… the sad and angry wife, the worried friend, the boss trying to hold the mission together. Carey Mulligan makes the most of her meagerly drawn character, but still, she’s wasted. We don’t know what she does or wants or where she’s from… well, we do know that she’s a terrible person, because who the fuck breaks up with somebody over the phone… from the other side of the solar system?!?!

I did like the general look and feel of the film, and the giant alien spider was a really great mix (I think) of CGI/practical effects, but still… Spaceman just doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t say anything profound, regardless of what the film may believe. The overall tone is too introspective for such a shallow and obvious film, especially one where very little actually happens, which all adds up to a film that is not only way too slow, even worse, it’s dull.