Spaceman (2024)

Johan Renck's Spaceman deposits Adam Sandler, solemn and unshaven, into a solo mission past Jupiter and hands him a telepathic spider for company. The spider, voiced by Paul Dano, wishes to understand humanity. It would have had an easier time of it in a film with more going on. The Chopra cloud waits at the edge of the solar system, the marriage waits back on Earth, and the picture drifts between the two with the patience of a man who has already read the ending.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is unusually quiet for its moment. The cast is cheerfully polyglot (a Czech lead, an Indian-British technician, a Swedish mother-in-law, an Italian-American commissioner) and the film never once announces the fact, which reads as either confidence or indifference. Carey Mulligan's Lenka receives the sharpest grievance in the script: a miscarriage endured alone, a husband who chose orbit. That grievance lands. It also serves, by the final act, as raw material for the man's redemption, so the ledger stays lopsided.

The remainder of the inventory comes up bare. The cloud is metaphysics, not a climate parable. Nobody eats the rich, or mentions them at all. There is no body politics, no neurodivergence, no queer subtext, no racial argument, and the communist-era informant backstory of Jakub's father is period detail lifted from the novel, not a reframing of history. What stays is a soft philosophical hum, Hanuš wondering aloud about human cruelty while Jakub weeps in a spaceship corridor. It is lyrical, unhurried, and about as preachy as a lava lamp. A sommelier would call it a thin vintage, competently cellared.