Ziggy Sandler and the Spider From Jupiter ‘Spaceman,’ Adam Sandler’s sad-astronaut Netflix movie, is pathetic and baffling There will likely be no middle ground between the divergent audiences for Spaceman, Netflix’s new sci-fi drama starring Adam Sandler. There will be those who view it as a weepy, visually dazzling, and profound meditation on love and memory. The rest of us, who will see it as a poor streamer’s attempt at Solaris or Gravity, will laugh it off as a killer asteroid-sized piece of cosmic junk. Not to tip readers toward one camp or another, but did I mention one of the main characters is a wise, five-foot tall ageless space spider? The oddball project is based on a 2017 Jaroslav Kalfar novel and, perhaps unwisely given the casting, keeps the novel’s setting. Jakub (Sandler) is a Czech Republic astronaut who – sometime in an alternate 1980s – investigates a purple particle cloud near Jupiter to figure out what’s been lighting up the night skies. Jakub, who’s been on his solo mission for 189 days when the movie starts, has problems. Not only does his space toilet scream when he poops (and not in a funny way), but he has to film dumb ads for mission sponsors and, oh yeah, the marriage to his pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan, too good for this movie) is falling apart. Lenka and Jakub can communicate whenever they want thanks to a video link called CzechConnect that in this imagined 1980s delivers better reception across 500 million miles than any local AT&T phone call in 2024. Despite this FaceTime precursor, the couple barely speaks and Lenka is abandoning her literally and metaphorically distant husband to go have her baby in a giant mansion with other ostensibly single moms. Isabella Rossellini and Lena Olin try to help Lenka, but are unable to avoid spouting pseudoprofundities like, “The silence is the point.” With Jakub falling into a deep depression and Lenka staring deep into the middle ground of dramatic life evaluation while the camera captures gorgeous European scenery around her, you’d think you were in for an awards-baity character study. Then along comes a spider. No, seriously, there’s a big-ass spider. Voiced by Paul Dano, the spider suddenly appears on Jakub’s ship, speaking in soothing tones about being a fellow explorer and wanting to study Jakub’s thoughts and emotions. He calls Jakub “Skinny human” about 1,000 times. Jakub’s experiences a strangely muted freakout over the webspinner; before long, he comes to accept his new shipmate, who mission control can’t see because of conveniently malfunctioning ship cameras and also the fact that it’s probably imaginary. Jakub names the spider Hanuš, after a famous Czech clock maker, and learns that the spider is the sole survivor of an attack from a species called Gorompeds, who apparently hate spiders as much as most humans do. Hanuš is less clockmaker than psychotherapist. The daddy-figure longlegs demands that Jakub share his memories to figure out what went wrong with Lenka and to delve into a childhood trauma around Jakub’s father that led to Jakub’s near drowning. When the film reveals that the Czechronaut’s own neglect of Lenka and his abandonment of her is what led to the relationship’s deterioration, Januš gets very judgmental, as you would imagine a giant galactic spider could get, and he says, “My interest in you is expiring.” The third act, of course, is Jakub realizing he doesn’t want to lose his magical space spider friend or his wife (in that order, really) and that he must tearfully, regretfully turn into a whole other person, which he does, in about five minutes. He wins back the friendship of the cosmic arachnid and tells Lenka over the phone, “You were right in front of me and I didn’t see you,” which would be a howler of a line in any movie, let alone one in which a human-sized insect is nodding approvingly nearby. Januš reveals that despite being as old as the universe itself, he’ll be expiring soon, for reasons. The two engage in a giant bro hug with Januš wrapping eight hairy legs around Jakub in what would be a hilarious bit of physical comedy if Spaceman had one purple space particle of levity in its 109-minute running time. The movie’s fatal flaw, despite some lovely cinematography, isn’t the spider, but that it’s impossible as a viewer to separate Sandler the movie star from Jakub. Even if Sandler is giving a committed, very somber performance, it’s hard not to think that such an inert role wastes his typically clever, manic energy. Mulligan, meanwhile, finds herself trapped in a whole separate movie on Earth full of fish-eye-lens memories and sideways and upside-down shots reminiscent of a Blumhouse horror film. She makes the best of her thankless role as Lonely Space Wife Who Decides to Forgive Her Distant Husband Because He Said Some Things That Were Nice, Finally. By the time Jakub reaches the Chopra Cloud, which looks like a really nice 4K screensaver on display at Best Buy, you may not care that this is the place containing “every vibration of all time” where “everything is permanent, yet nothing ever is,” according to the humongous spider. Then the spider dissolves into space dust, which is very sad unless you hate spiders, in which case it’s a very happy ending where all is right with the universe.
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