I remember last year seeing this film floating on some early Oscar lists. The guy who directed HBO’s excellent Chernobyl series was doing a drama with Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dañó, and Isabella Rossellini. I was pretty hyped, and I had Sandler in my early Top 20. That was, of course, before Netflix pushed this to 2024. That’s OK, plenty of films have shifted before. Just last year, Killers Of The Flower Moon and The Holdovers got Oscar nominations after being shifted from the previous year. Then, March. Netflix decided on March. It’s Ok. So maybe not an Oscar contender. I’m still a fan of Sandler’s underrated performance in Reign Over Me, so maybe this is just for me. Then I should have realized, Netflix rarely seems to give anyone feedback, so if a movie isn’t magically perfect, it likely never will be.
International Digital center is behind the audio description here, with Dakota Green writing. I didn’t catch the narrator. Spaceman is a little bit of a complicated film to describe, as well as explain without spoilers. Basically, Sandler plays an astronaut drifting into space on a mission, and at home we see Mulligan dealing with this pregnancy. Dano kinda plays the spoiler character of the film, that if too much is revealed, it could ruin the experience. So, basically, there’s some left open to interpretation stuff here. I understand it’s based on a book, and like most things based on books, the people who read the book prefer the book. Rarely do we ever hear people say “the book was awful, but the movie is great”.
I enjoyed the performances. Mulligan is underutilized, as is Rossellini. Dano’s performance is interesting, especially considering what he’s being asked to do, and he helps to shape Sandler’s performance. I’m a fan of the fact that Sandler pushes forward into challenging dramatic fare, and continues to look for work that pushes him in new ways. spaceman isn’t his most dynamic or memorable performance, but rather another benchmark akin to Spanglish or another dramatic Sandler performance that helped to warm him up for later greatness.
I already told you green’s audio description is solid. There’s some wild stuff in this film, mostly having to do with Dano, and it is pretty well done. This film isn’t really a horror, a drama, a science-fiction, or any one specific thing, but rather pulls from various elements. It even has intentionally humorous elements, like the love of hazelnut spread, that can play for a laugh.
But for the most part, despite the strength of the audio description,this is just not a really memorable film. Perhaps it should have gotten a theatrical release so some of these sequences could have been seen on the big screen. I do remember when Netflix gave some of their major titles like the Grey Man theatrical releases, and sighted audiences who went weren’t that impressed. Expensive visual effects mostly intended to be seen on the small screen. It seems films translate down much easier than they translate up.
It’s not a bad film, and it asks interesting questions, and makes some fun choices, but at the end of the year I’ll barely remember Spaceman for anything but Paul Dano’s slightly insane participation.
Final grade: C+
