Reviewers are often so quick to slag movies that ask them to think, that a film like Adam Sandler’s sci-fi drama Spaceman forces them to reveal their idiocy. Directed by Johan Renk and based on the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman marries American pop-culture consciousness to European political caution. Sandler cannily updates what was once a high-school lit staple, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a novella from 1915 as classic as Sandler’s ’80s pop-music faves.
In this Netflix production, Sandler brings adult gravitas to playing Czech astronaut Jakub Prochazka, who is in the sixth month of his mission toward a “beyond Jupiter” cluster of dust particles. The reference to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is unmistakable, but this is a different space race.
Jakub’s flight bested a Korean space probe, not the usual American/Soviet antagonism because Spaceman isn’t a Cold War movie; it’s more personal. Although filmed in 2021, it premiered after October 7, 2023, at a moment of previously unthinkable, disorienting ethnic, racial hostility. This signals Sandler’s singular ethnic instincts (a subject worth future study). Sandler and Renk investigate the insecurity of the new world order. Jakub’s detachment from his Earth-bound pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) intensifies the Kafkaesque sense of longing and political distrust. Students once learned this alienation as part of a standard curriculum. Now, politicians and journalists don’t even know what “existential” means and misuse the term promiscuously. (The malapropism “existential” is a new version of the old malaprop “draconian.”) Film reviewers similarly broadcast their cultural illiteracy.
Spaceman’s bad reviews are misleading in the same way as the good reviews for Dune: Part 2 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The trend is to lead moviegoers away from films that grapple with the human condition, but that’s what gives Spaceman unexpected impact. Through technical mishaps, lonely Jakub loses contact with pregnant, disenchanted Lenka and, in his distress, imagines his spacecraft invaded by a frightening creature, Hanus, a six-eyed, furry arachnid — a perfectly ugly embodiment of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa–turned-vermin and of Jakub’s anxious self. Hanus scuttles across the spaceship’s interior addressing Jakub as “Skinny Human.”
Their dialogues (Hanus is voiced by Paul Dano) trigger something that rarely happens these days: Jakub becomes self-aware, causing penitent self-examination. Hanus calls it “atonement,” an ethnic key to the film’s ethical mission. Jakub’s miscommunication with Lenka (overseen by Czech space commissioner Isabelle Rossellini and technician Kunal Nayyar, both more sympathetic than officious) puts Spaceman on a higher plane than most space-travel movies.
Faced with a culture that seems lost in chaos, Jakub seeks romantic respite; he imagines marital courtship and communication as a version of Rusalka, Antonin Dvorak’s opera about a water-nymph myth. Its motifs cohere with Renk’s diaphanous images matching Lenka’s pregnancy to the amniotic flow of the star clusters surrounding Jupiter. (Rusalka also provided erotic suspense in Julián Hernández’s love-hunt epic Broken Sky.) Dvorak makes Sandler’s grown-up sorrow palpable, despite Mulligan’s usual smugness. Jakub confesses to his wife, “I didn’t love you the right way. What a f***ing waste.”
That line pins down the career detachment of our current broken marriages, families, communities, and polities. It’s alarming that reviewers could overlook such necessary examination of our contemporary cultural, moral crisis.
These reviewers want to keep their idea of jokey, doofus Sandler — or perhaps just want to perpetuate childishness and banality, from Dune to Spider-Man and the MCU. Nabokov’s lecture on Metamorphosis warned, “There will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled.” He also described how “portrayal and fable are seamless” in Kafka. This is too much for reviewers accustomed to simplistic sci-fi/comic-book formula, overrating the inanity of Damian Chazelle’s First Man and preferring Gravity to the depth and beauty of De Palma’s Mission to Mars. Fact is, Spaceman is the best space movie since De Palma’s. It has none of the banality of Apollo 13. It matches the philosophical seriousness of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but unostentatiously, as when Jakub is reminded that his tribal obligations are what make him human, not a bug.
Out of Millennial necessity, post–October 7 alarm, and in the farthest reaches of outer space, Kafka is transcended. Spaceman expresses our anxiety rather than leaving it at politics.