Director – Johan Renck, Screenplay – Colby Day, Based on the Novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, Producers – Lia Buman, Reid Carolin, Tim Headington, Peter Kiernan, Michael Parets, Max Silva & Channing Tatum, Photography – Jakob Ihre, Music – Max Richter, Visual Effects Supervisor – Matt Sloan, Visual Effects – MPC Film (Supervisors – Craig Calvert & Brian Litson), Special Effects Supervisor – J.D. Schwalm, Production Design – Jan Houllevigue. Production Company – Tango/Free Association/Sinestra.
Cast
Adam Sandler (Jakub Prochazka), Paul Dano (Voice of Hanus), Carey Mulligan (Linka Prochazka), Kunal Nayyar (Peter), Isabella Rossellini (Commissioner Tuma), Lena Olin (Zdena), Petr Papanek (Young Jakub), Marian Roden (Ladisav Prochazka)
Plot
Jakub Prochazka has been sent on a space mission by the Czechian Space Agency out beyond Jupiter to investigate the Chopra Cloud. His wife Linka abruptly records a message saying that she wants to leave Jakub but mission controller Commissioner Tuma refuses to send it. Jakub becomes upset at being unable to contact Linka as mission control keep making excuses as to why not. Jakub then discovers a spider-like alien inside the ship that talks to him. It survives his attempts to decontaminate the ship. They strike up a cautious friendship and Jakub names the alien Hanus. It reveals an ability to probe Jakub’s memories as he tries to reconcile his feelings at the loss of Linka and loneliness. At the same time, Hanus tells how it has been around since the beginning of the universe and promises that entering into the cloud offers the secrets of creation.
Since his appearance in the late 1990s, Adam Sandler has established a certain niche in comedy and found a popularity that I find inexplicable. Sandler’s films include the likes of Happy Gilmore (1996), The Waterboy (1998), Big Daddy (1999), Little Nicky (2000), Mr Deeds (2002), Anger Management (2003), Click (2006), I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007), Bedtime Stories (2008), You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (2008), Grown Ups (2010), Jack and Jill (2011), Pixels (2015), The Ridiculous 6 (2015) and Hubie Halloween (2020), as well as the voice of Dracula in Hotel Transylvania (2012) and sequel. There has been the odd exception where he has given serious performances as in Punch Drunk Love (2002) and Uncut Gems (2019), but mostly the Adam Sandler film makes a pitch for the lowest common denominator through which Sandler plays with an infuriatingly smug superiority.
In recent years, Gravity (2013) proved a major box-office and critical success. It brought a newfound fascination with realistic and scientifically grounded portrayals of NASA and the Space Program. To follow would be the equal hit of The Martian (2015) and other works such as Life (2017), The Space Between Us (2017), Ad Astra (2019), The Midnight Sky (2020) and I.S.S. (2023), as well as real-life based films such as Salyut 7 (2017) and First Man (2018).
The film is adapted from Spaceman of Bohemia (2017) by Czech author Jaroslav Kalfar. Despite being a Czech production, much of the film was shot at a studio in California and is co-produced by Channing Tatum’s production company Free Association. The film is directed by Swedish director Johan Renck, who is celebrated as a director of commercials and music video, as well as episodes of US tv series, most recently the standout mini-series Chernobyl (2019), which won him several awards.
As I began watching Spaceman, I kept thinking of the Andy Weir novel Project Hail Mary (2021), which is slated as an upcoming film to be directed by Peter Lord and Christopher Miller. The book concerns a sole astronaut on a mission into deep space and the friendship he strikes up with a very different-looking alien he encounters there. Spaceman has a very similar plot, although differs from Weir’s story that has the two solving problems together, while this becomes more about the alien helping Adam Sandler reconcile with the past.
Astronaut Jakub Prochazka (Adam Sandler) and Hanus the alien (voiced by Paul Dano)
You could also draw connections between Spaceman and E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) wherein an alien comes to stand in for a missing friend for young Henry Thomas. There is a not dissimilar plot here where Hanus becomes the lonely Adam Sandler’s best friend. That is if you can imagine an E.T. where E.T. acts as psycho-therapist and guides the human companion back through his memories and to reconcile with aspects of his past.
In this regard, Spaceman resembles films such as Solaris (1972), Altered States (1980) and Interstellar (2014), which take us on journey to the far reaches of space (or to cosmic beginnings in the case of Altered States) only to bring the astronauts or travellers all the way in a big circle to find that no matter how far they travel they cannot leave behind attachments to home and family, or the realisation that love is the glue that holds everything together.
Spaceman does impressively in many regards. The production design does quite a good job of building the interior of the spaceship, resembling the recent I.S.S., both of which seem to have closely modelled the real-life International Space Station. Johan Renck is reasonably scrupulous about things like showing Adam Sandler moving about in micro-gravity. And it is unusual seeing Adam Sander in a dramatic role, one where he seems to be appearing unglamorously at around his real age (57, which would have been 55 at the time the film was shooting), with Renck offering a number of closeups on Sandler’s pasty lined face, greying unkempt beard and flabby body floating through the ship.
However, Spaceman emerges as a mixed bag. I wanted it to be another 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or an Interstellar. It is an interesting effort but not quite. The relationship between Adam Sandler and Hanus eventually develops some emotional strength but this is not an E.T.-like tearjerker. Sandler and Hanus go on a transcendental journey into the cloud at the end in some okay if not exactly wow-inducing visual effects, but the realisations made are fairly banal. All of it comes back to the fact that Sandler misses and needs to reconnect to wife Carey Mulligan. There is probably more time than needs to be spent on flashbacks shot through a fisheye lens to Sandler and Mulligan together and Sandler’s childhood. All it eventually arrives at is an interstellar phonecall “I miss you,” which is far more underwhelming than the film I wanted Spaceman to be.
