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Spaceman: The Netflix Sci-fi Drama Is Too Lyrical For Its Own Good

<em>Spaceman</em> isn’t the first movie to conflate outer space with inner space. But the problem is that it’s so taken by its own visual lyricism that there is no real subtext left to explore.

Rahul Desai

Mar 01, 2024

Still from Spaceman. Netflix

JOHAN RENCK’s Spaceman has so much going for it. It stars Adam Sandler in all his dramatic splendour. The sci-fi story revolves around a lonely Czech cosmonaut on a long solo mission to investigate a mysterious purple cloud at the edge of the solar system — while his pregnant wife back on Earth is readying to leave him. It’s a ‘space movie’ about reflection, isolation, existentialism and a bit of grief, and it also features a nosy and chatty spider-like creature. There’s a swelling symphony of a soundtrack. Not to mention the luminous Carey Mulligan, once again lighting up a dysfunctional marital drama as a disgruntled partner of a tortured man. It also has Isabella Rossellini as a controlling commanding officer who refuses to pass on the wife’s break-up messages to her cosmonaut. The palette of the film is very Terrence Mallick-esque — a tone poem of sorts, with lots of whispery and hallucinatory dialogue, introspective memory montages and lens flares, profound ideas about beginnings and the meaning of life and love. You know how it goes.

The thing with such films is: Either you’re all in or you’re bored to ashes. There is no middle ground. Either you love it or you’re yawning through its self-love. Unfortunately, I found myself inching towards the latter here. Spaceman isn’t the first movie to conflate outer space with inner space. But the problem is that it’s so taken by its own visual lyricism that there is no real subtext left to explore — it’s all bold text, on the nose, spelt out by the very helpful ET spider (Paul Dano’s voice of course) that quadruples up as the sleep-deprived man’s therapist, volleyball, work-wife and conscience. There is no room for ambiguity or depth of feel, even though the film is designed to be a vibe. For instance, it addresses him as “skinny human” and wisely delivers nugget clouds like: You long for her only when she leaves. Where did all that love go? Is this how your kind treats loneliness? Stop atoning for the sins of your father; focus on the living. Your loneliness is self-inflicted; my interest in you has expired.

It has multiple eyes and a soothing voice, sure, but the film stops short of offering it a couch and spectacles; that’s how obvious the bearded cosmonaut’s conflict is made. The idea is to make him confront his fears and limitations and traumas so that he realises he was the distant and self-absorbed one in the marriage. So that his epiphanies are, quite literally, cosmic. His exchanges with mission control in Prague are hardly loaded either, despite the fact that they’re ‘protecting’ him from heartbreak. The creature is so all-consuming in its counselling that even Rossellini’s character — who at one point goes to meet the wife and scold her for leaving at the worst possible time — says something like “the silence is the point” when told that all the couple does is face each other in silence on their intergalactic calls.

Even the metaphors are too literal. The purple cloud called Chopra (a misguided ode to ‘spiritual guru’ Deepak Chopra?) — which is a dialled-down version of Interstellar’s black hole with all the answers — has been haunting the earth’s sky for four years, which is more or less the duration of the crumbling marriage. The premise — on paper, at least — raises some interesting questions about the life-cycle of love, marital dynamics, relationship decay and the big-picture-versus-personal-crisis dilemma. The world-building is decent, too, what with sponsorships and scripted content peppering the man’s communication with mission control and the world. He has ‘corporate’ responsibilities, in a not-so-futuristic era where space exploration is very much driven by a consumerist European economy.

Yet, the alleged poignance of a husband finding private catharsis in this highly public quest to decode the great unknown (the blot in his sky), is lost in its lofty narrative aesthetic. It makes the novel it’s based on (Spaceman of Bohemia) look unfilmable — you can see the musings of literature overwhelming the medium of cinema. It’s a pity, because Sandler is suitably brooding, and has such a compelling middle-aged screen face that it’s hard to look away. His interspecies bromance with the enlightened mega-spider (who is named Hanuš) could’ve been a futuristic Cast-Away-ish riff, but heaven forbid a film like this displays the slightest sense of quirk or humour. Loneliness is no laughing matter — at least until it becomes solitude. Which is why Spaceman comes across as an over-produced film that’s too self-serious and, well, spaced out to stick an emotional landing. I like the way it’s shot, that’s the bare minimum, but what’s the point of telling a poem and singing a story? Other than a series of thought melodies, there’s not much to remember.

Stream Spaceman here.