By Petr Navovy | Film | March 4, 2024 |
By Petr Navovy | Film | March 4, 2024 |
I have to hand one thing to Spaceman: They got the jingle sound right. In order to communicate instantly with people back home on Earth, Spaceman’s cosmonaut Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) uses a device called a ‘quantum phone’, which has a dialing sound comprised of a jaunty jingle that’s pretty impressively reminiscent of the sort you hear preceding announcements at Czech train stations throughout the country. I didn’t notice anyone specifically mentioned in the credits as being responsible for the ‘CzechConnect’ phone’s jingle sound in Spaceman, but whoever that individual might be, I commend them—-well done! It’s quite spot on, really. Czechs do love a good jaunty jingle. It’s an impressive little detail in the film.
Directed by Johan Renck, a mostly music video (Bowie’s ‘Lazarus’) and TV (Chernobyl, Bloodline) director, Netflix’s Spaceman is an adaptation of the 2017 sci-fi novel ‘Spaceman of Bohemia’ by Jaroslav Kalfař, which uses elements of political commentary, existential and relationship angst, and trippy space horror to tell its version of the ‘lonely guy in space’ story. I love a good ‘lonely person in space’ story. The unfathomable bottomless pit reflecting and pulling on humanity’s soul—what’s not to love! Throw in some evocative, moody synth, and Bob’s your uncle—there’s so much potential there! Unfortunately, after a relatively promising opening five or ten minutes, Spaceman proceeds to fail to live up to any of that potential, delivering a cosmic voyage that might not be an outright disaster but which is nothing to write home about either—if you had paid for this journey through space, you’d be better off choosing the ‘wake me up when we get there’ option.
Taking place in a vaguely defined time period that looks to my eyes a lot like the late Seventies or early Eighties, the plot in Spaceman is relatively sparse. Following a strange occurrence in which a large portion of the night sky has begun turning purple, the Czech Republic has dispatched a cosmonaut (Sandler) on a year-long mission to the area beyond Jupiter to investigate the nature of the particles that are thought to be behind this phenomenon. For the majority of the film’s runtime, we are sealed inside the spacecraft (named after Jan Hus, an iconic figure in Czech history and theologian from the 14th and 15th century who was burned at the stake for preaching reforms and taking a stance against the Catholic Church) with Jakub, and it has to be said that the vessel itself is probably the star of the show here. The production design (by Jan Houllevigue) throughout Spaceman is strong, with authentic vintage stylings and a lived-in feel present both in the domestic and office scenes on Earth as well as Jakub’s spacecraft.
As should by now be far from a surprise, Adam Sandler is no slouch here, and had he been given a stronger script, Spaceman could have been a worthy addition to his gradually increasing roster of accolade-worthy dramatic roles. As it is, however, Sandler is not given nearly enough to work with here for him to make any sort of impact. I haven’t read the book on which the film is based, but with all the focus on Jakub’s interiority that the story rests on, I would imagine that in this instance it works much better than the film does. The movie simply does not do enough with the tools unique to its medium to generate an emotional investment. It does briefly effectively conjure up an atmosphere of dread and uncertainty at the story’s outset, but then doesn’t do anything to build on this, squandering its potential and letting it float away and evanesce like interstellar dust particles buffeted by cosmic wind.
(The ending of the film also features a radically different ending to that found in Kalfař’s book, and the decision behind this change baffles me no end, as it’s one that—all other things being equal—would have diluted a significant amount of the story’s power and emotional heft.)