Looking Sadly To the Future, Spaceman Suffers from Too Little Past Sandler

A new Adam Sandler movie dropping on Netflix is a blessed event. For a few moments in our godforsaken lives, we get to take a break from stewing upon the apocalyptic toll streaming has had on modern society. Sometimes, out from the darkness, there is light—both a beacon of hope at the end of all things and a sign that maybe there are incredible stories yet to begin. There is still an endless font of exceptionally pleasant mid-budget comedies to look forward to. There is still the promise of a beloved movie star taking chances, quietly growing in his craft but never losing sight of where he came from, giving fans what they want while defying them too. There is still Rob Schneider, unfortunately, but he’s in way fewer movies nowadays, and in the last one he wasn’t in brownface, which is a substantial improvement. There are still new films like Spaceman, somber and full-hearted genre exercises that somehow wrap around Sandler like an air-tight Mylar glove. There is still Netflix’s thriving relationship with Adam Sandler. One can only hope it persists. Forever.

Everything’s going well so far. For nearly nine years, the Sandman’s been cranking out at least one new Happy Madison production per year for the streamer, more if you consider the ones he isn’t in. This is more impressive if you consider his non-Netflix roles, like Howard in Uncut Gems. As the industry’s shifted around him, Sandler’s remained remarkably prolific, refining his chops but never straying too far from the foundation of his whole career, namely being Man Who Do Weird Baby Voice. What once may have felt like a gimmick is now a sign of consistency: Sandler was always so much more than Man Who Do Weird Baby Voice, an actor whose total lack of pretension has endeared him to us for decades. 

Childishness and casual cruelty has matured into genuineness; a lack of effort has eventually revealed a certain effortlessness. If greed and thoughtlessness has poisoned the idea of “creative control” into basically just meaning “a series of contentious conversations around a filmmaker not being able to make what they want to make,” Sandler’s persisted in making the movies he wants to make, seemingly working with the people he wants to make them with and getting the budgets he needs. He’s reshaped “creative control” in the most functional and least confrontational terms. In a world where whole, completed films can be scrapped for tax write-offs, where you don’t actually own the digital films you buy, there’s something dependable to that. That weird baby voice, hushed in the back of our heads, is the sound of warm memories with friends and simpler times. 

Speaking of voices hushed in the back of our heads: Spaceman, Sandler’s latest, developed with Netflix but expressly not under the Happy Madison banner. Directed by Johan Renck and based on Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 sci-fi novel Spaceman of Bohemia, the film follows Czech cosmonaut Jakub Procházka (Sandler, sometimes attempting the shallowest hint of an accent) as he travels alone to the outer parts of our solar system. There, just past Jupiter, his mission is to sample the Chopra Cloud, an anomaly that appeared in Earth’s skies four years earlier and is the goal of an international space race. Because Jakub, halfway through a year-long journey, appears to be the leader in that race, he becomes a figure of pride for his country and something of an international celebrity, though he spends most of his artificial day cycle only communicating with Peter (Kunal Nayyar) in mission control, whose sole priority is keeping Jakub sane. His other sole priority is running interference on all of Jakub’s communication with the rest of humanity, directed by Jakub’s commanding officer, Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rosellini, as respectfully subdued as the rest of the cast).

Meanwhile on Earth, Jakub’s very pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan, not doing an accent at all) sends Jakub a message that she’s leaving him, that she can’t handle being alone any longer, especially as she draws closer and closer to giving birth. Ironic, of course, because Jakub is physically alone and so censored from the rest of his life that he never even receives the message—until he meets a giant arachnoid extraterrestrial stowaway with telepathic powers, a vastly intelligent interstellar traveler Jakub comes to call Hanuš (Paul Dano, whose voice never rises above a lovely, reassuring purr). 

Together, the two prepare to make it to the Chopra Cloud, which Hanuš reassures Jakub will be both the beginning and ending of all things. Hanuš is actually more concerned with Jakub’s relationship with Lenka, which he accesses through studying Jakub’s memories, projecting them back at the cosmonaut for further scrutiny.

Led by Sandler’s laconic, haunted performance and breathing with Max Richter’s rainy-day score, Spaceman exists on a wavelength of low-key melancholy. Prominent among its concerns are loneliness and the corresponding silence of vast unbridgeable distances, two qualities not exactly abundant in Happy Madison productions. Which is an even more glaring anomaly than the Chopra Cloud: There’s very little trace of Sandler’s past selves in Spaceman. No one expects the film to be funny, but no one expects Sandler’s character to be so humorless either. Loneliness so defines Jakub that all glimpses of his past, revealing an anguished childhood and a dull and charming courtship with Lenka, show little but trauma. Eventually even Hanuš questions why anyone would want to spend so much time swimming around such miserable memories.

Similarly, the world of Spaceman, draped in retro technology and the sour signs of Czechoslovak communist rule, bears all the allusions of dystopian fiction, though not much menace or any political viewpoint. In this alternate-ish future, the Czech Republic (or is it still Czechoslovakia?) has its own national space agency, technology sophisticated enough to enable faster-than-light communication, and the initiative to beat every other nation on Earth to the Chopra Cloud, but Jakub must forgive himself of the “sins of his father,” which we vaguely learn involves the man serving as an informant for the State, an otherwise haltingly historical occurrence in a film that exhibits no political viewpoint beyond that maybe communist rule wasn’t so bad? Renck and the script by Colby Day offer no real explanation for much; when what they do offer is overwhelming sadness, one wishes for more story, more nuances to character, more humor behind Sandler’s yearning silences.

Renck and cinematographer Jacob Ihre discover some arresting images, and Sandler’s chemistry with Dano sincerely supersedes the mostly believable CGI, but the relationship at the core of the film—representing a love that transcends time and space—is barely a whisper compared to the devastating father-daughter bond that covers similar distances in Interstellar. That’s a funny idea, after all, that the infinite reach of the cosmos is given purpose and shape by love. Despite Sandler’s powerful sincerity, Spaceman misses the joke.

Director: Johan Renck
Writer: Colby Day
Starring: Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Isabella Rosselini, Paul Dano, Kunal Nayyar 
Release Date: March 1, 2024 (Netflix)

Dom Sinacola is a Portland-based writer and editor. He has a blog on Werner Herzog movies, The Werner Herzblog, and he’s also on Letterboxd.