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This film about a man on a solo mission to Jupiter whose loneliness and anguish is lessened by the arrival of a giant, molecular phasing, mind reading, talking space spider is captured perfectly by the different international posters.

It wants to be this movie:

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It often drifts dangerously close to being this movie:

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In the end though, it turns out to be this movie:

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There are a series of excellent ideas here but they don’t all quite land as successfully as they could. Spaceman aims to be a contemplative sci-fi parable that explores the nature of humanity and notions of love and connection existing across time and space, and it mostly succeeds, but it does occasionally look like a corny monster movie or a big kid befriends talking animal film.

There are just too many elements that mean the distance between Adam Sandler’s cosmonaut and his wife back on Earth is roughly comparable to that which exists between the audience and the material. It’s all good but I didn’t feel it like I should have.

For me, the spider was a problem. It’s never quite clear if said creature is actually on the spacecraft or if it is all in the protagonist’s mind. At least this is the case at the start, the story seems to lose grip of the ambiguity toward the end. We’ve had metaphysical arachnids before though, in movies like Possum and Enemy. Admittedly these weren’t widely seen films but still, I’m not sure making the extraterrestrial visitor be one of our eight legged friends works. For me something else with a more alien morphology would have been better, as was the case in The Cloverfield Paradox, Underwater and Life. Part of the issue is we are too familiar with this particular creepy crawly, both on screen and in our bathrooms, and the design is not quite right. In the pantheon of great movie spiders, this one is less close to Aragog and Shelob than it is to the one that is selling Scrooge’s silk curtains in The Muppet Christmas Carol. There’s a scene toward the close of the film where Sandler and his new animalistic crew mate are floating, hand in hand, through the air and it put me more in mind of The Snowman than Avatar.

I’m not sure casting Adam Sandler was right either. It’s not that he isn’t good in the part. He’s actually excellent, showing the superb acting we saw in Uncut Gems and Punch Drunk Love and the like. He is a distraction though and this film did not get past that as those others did. The spider didn’t help with this either as it is a little comedy in places, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. I can’t help but think the whole thing would have worked better without any Hollywood actors. Carey Mulligan is brilliant too but she and Sandler are playing Lenka and Jakub, a Czech couple, and they are so obviously not middle European. It is just another thing that brings you out of the story. If this had been a foreign language film, with its Bohemia setting and Johan Renck, it’s Swedish director, it would have felt more authentic.

I do applaud Spaceman for its ambition, and it really has some because it clearly wants to be 2001 (there are too many similar plot points between the two films for this to be a coincidence) but in the end it was too often way more reminiscent of Charlotte’s Web instead.

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The Ripley Factor:

I don’t really know why Carey Mulligan did this film. I can only assume the original script had more for her to do and that no one showed her the computer mock ups of the big eyed Beanie Babies spider that she’d end up sharing billing with. Her skill does shine through but it is an underwritten part that deserved more development. Three years ago she was leading Promising Young Woman and last year she was the crusading journalist who exposed Harvey Weinstein in She Said. Now she is just coming off the back of playing to guys’ wives. She might steal both this and Maestro but she shouldn’t have to.