Director: Johan Renck | Writer: Colby Day
Starring: Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano, Isabella Rossellini
Spaceman is like if Enemy was bad. Or like if Ad Astra was bad. Or maybe Eternal Sunshine. Or even Interstellar. Basically, take some good movies, mash them together, make them awful, and release it on Netflix starring Adam Sandler. And I have nothing against Adam Sandler, not at all, or Mulligan, or Dano, or this story, or this book. I’m just here to judge the result, not the goal, and the result really sucked. It’s a pity too, because we wanted to like this movie, we really did, it just doesn’t deserve it.
Czech cosmonaut Jakub is on a solo mission to reach an odd space cloud formation that has the entire Earth watching in fear of the unknown. The risks are high, the mission is a crap shoot, and there’s no guarantee he comes back from his year-long round trip, but Jakub is determined to make his country proud. Leaving a pregnant wife at home and battling his own inner demons, this spaceman sits alone for far too long and begins to lose himself, only to find that there’s an alien creature on board, and that it’s this surprise companion who will help him find his way home once again.
Spaceman is a failure on so many levels. First, it takes too much from too much, and is in no way its own film. It’s based on a book, sure, and I haven’t read that, but cinematically this is a hundred better movies, and that’s really strike one, two, and three. But what’s more, every attempt to copy fails to capture whatever magic this movie was trying to commandeer. The script is awful, the dialogue is just so bad, and every event is a huge non-surprise. Mulligan is throwaway, Dano’s creature is dumb, and Sandler himself is in way over his head. Not that he can’t act, he sure can, but he doesn’t do it well here. Unfortunately, this film is constant “no don’t do that”, “no don’t say that”, and “gosh, really?” A veteran would have known better, this inexperienced director didn’t, and Netflix now has another clunker on their hands.
My rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆