{"id":3920,"date":"2024-03-27T20:12:50","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T20:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3920"},"modified":"2024-04-23T20:17:41","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T20:17:41","slug":"boo-hoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3920","title":{"rendered":"Boo-hoo"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Watching Johan Renck’s <\/span>Spaceman for new Scientist, 27 March 2024<\/a><\/p>\n

Czech astronaut Jakub Proch\u00e1zka (Adam Sandler) is dying of loneliness, six months into a solo space mission to visit a mysterious purple cloud. His wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) is pregnant and, being already a lot lonelier than Jakub (who\u2019s been a wholly unsupportive husband), she decides to leave him. The mission controllers keep the news from Jakub, but he knows what\u2019s going on, and it\u2019s his sense of despair that, quite early in the film, draws in help from beyond — a telepathic spider who can pass through walls but is otherwise as real and solid as anything on Jakub\u2019s spaceship (a sort of inside-out junkyard full of believably outdated but serviceable machinery, ducts, keyboards, lights, and a toilet pump that won\u2019t stop screaming).<\/p>\n

Spaceman is directed by former singer-songwriter and video maker Johan Renck, better known these days for his Emmy-winning direction of the 2019 docudrama Chernobyl. It\u2019s an assured, wholly deliberate experiment in pacing that will frustrate many. This is a film delivered at a single, unvarying, trancelike pace — and entirely right for a story that\u2019s not at all about a man losing his grip on reality, but rather the very reverse: Adam Sandler\u2019s astronaut Jakub must come to grips with what reality turns out to be, after all — extraterrestrial clouds, telepathic spiders and all. \u201cThe universe,\u201d his strange companion assures him, even as they both face extinction, \u201cis as it should be\u201d. And here\u2019s the kicker: the alien spider is right.<\/p>\n

Spaceman is monotonous only in the sense that time itself is monotonous, and the film\u2019s transcendental aspirations are very well served by Hans Zimmer\u2019s shimmering, shuddering score; it\u2019s more sound art than music, and easily as powerful as anything he wrote for Villeneuve\u2019s Dune films — which is saying a lot.<\/p>\n

Since his lead turn in the Safdi Brothers\u2019 2019 crime movie Uncut Gems, Sandler the serious actor has little left to prove. Here, he embodies and expresses Jakub\u2019s terror, melancholy, anger and self-hatred with absolute commitment and truthfulness — five years ago, who would have bet money that the words \u201cegoless\u201d and \u201cAdam Sandler\u201d would ever appear in the same sentence? Paul Dano voices Jakub\u2019s arachnid companion, with a poetic pathos that would be cloying in a more regular movie, but works superbly well here — almost as if his every word were a prayer.<\/p>\n

In its effort to be a spiritual experience — more church mass than movie — Spaceman simplifies the already fairly simple plot of its source material, Jaroslav Kalfa\u0159\u2019s novel The Spaceman of Bohemia. This was a mistake.<\/p>\n

Jakub is lonely. So is his wife. She leaves him. Counselled by his extraterrestrial friend, Jakub makes up with her (a neat trick, involving a wonderfully goofy faster-than-light phone called CzechConnect and a glowing purple fragment from the universe\u2019s beginning). They reconcile, and Jakub begins his long return.<\/p>\n

At which point, I must report I woke from my aesthetic trance and thought to myself: hang on, why does the story of a man reconciling with his wife six-months into a work assignment require a space mission, a mysterious cloud, quantum telephony and a telepathic spider?<\/p>\n

Spaceman has many virtues but it is, when you come down to it, a film about someone trying to fix their work-life balance, and doing so in the most expensive, baroque, and portentous manner imaginable. He\u2019s lonely? Boo hoo. She\u2019s leaving him half way through his solo flight? What a lousy, selfish thing for her to do. Bang their heads together, I say, and to hell with the limitations of spacetime!<\/p>\n

And this, just to spoil it for you, is pretty much what happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching Johan Renck’s Spaceman for new Scientist, 27 March 2024 Czech astronaut Jakub Proch\u00e1zka (Adam Sandler) is dying of loneliness, six months into a solo space mission to visit a mysterious purple cloud. His wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) is pregnant … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[858,86,597],"class_list":["post-3920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-adaptation","tag-science-fiction","tag-space-exploration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3922,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3920\/revisions\/3922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}